Yes, that's exactly what I said to my electrician friend. The answer
is that your clock radio is designed to handle faults involving up to
20 Amps. That is, if something goes wrong inside, it is supposed to
hang together without setting your night table on fire until the
breaker blows. Now, nothing's perfect, otherwise all those nice
firemen could take early retirement. But all those normal household
devices are supposed to be designed to handle faults that might
happen until the breaker trips. Now if you were to plug those
devices into a higher amperage circuit, then they would have to
handle fault conditions longer with higher current. Same idea with
the saw. Perhaps if the saw motor shorts out a bunch of smoke comes
out and the 30 amp breaker trips. Or smoke comes out and flames
shoot out the back and the 50 amp breaker trips. Now neither of
these is likely to happen. But that's the way a lot of safety stuff
is. They try to make relatively unlikely bad things be even less
likely to happen.
-Steve
At 11:39 PM 3/30/2011, Arvid Jedlicka wrote:
>Sorry but I need a little education here ...
>
>How then does every lamp, laptop power supply, corded electric power
>tool and every other thing that I have in my house meet code? None
>of them have 12 gauge wire on them yet they all plug into the
>outlets in my house that are rated for 20 amps? Heck, some of the
>devices seem to only have 20 gauge wire on them and are rated to
>draw only half an amp or less.
>
>Just curious? And I suspect your house has many situations that are
>similar to mine. That or you have a much more robust clock radio
>next to your bed than I do.
>
>Arvid
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