MrWizard wrote:
50 amp is 230vac Single Phase
Two hot legs one neutral, standard residential service
(technically 120v is split phase, only one leg of the power that is coming to your house)
Industrial / Commercial 3 phase uses three Hot Legs and NO NEUTRAL
There is no such thing as two phase power in the USA
This discussion comes up almost every time somebody mentions 50 service
That's because people use different definitions of the word phase.
To an electrician or power company worker, the 120/240 is a single phase even with the center tap for the neutral because they use the term phase to describe the service that the power provided to the customer is derived from.
To an engineer or a technician, there are two phases on the user's side of the transformer because they use the term phase to describe the timing relationship between the sine waves.
Having fixed phase relationships is critical to a power grid, so the idea of variable timing relationships seldom enters a lineman's world.
Except at generating stations.BTW, on 3-phase Wye circuits, there is a neutral created from the joining of the phases. Often referred to as a virtual neutral, it can do some bizarre things when the load becomes unbalanced. You'd be amazed at the amount of smoke created when a large motor winding fails.
