Electrical Current for Dummies

Appliance nameplate

Some freelance writers are simply dumbasses and some are borderline dangerous. Today's DotD is an example of the latter, an eHow contributor (you're not surprised, are you) who, for forty years, has specialized in "back-to-basics instructional articles on... electrical equipment." You'd expect someone with that resume to be both an accomplished wordsmith and to have a firm grasp of electrical theory. G. K. Bayne fails the sniff test on both counts, as you can see in her article "How to Calculate Electrical Current Resistance."¹

We here at the Antisocial Network normally let bad grammar slide, especially for non-native English speakers (unless the topic is grammar). In Bayne's case, though, we're more than happy to point out her sentence fragments (e.g., "Especially if that device is constantly tripping the circuit breaker or blowing fuses.") and her apparent unfamiliarity with the semicolon. We also retch at the sight of clumsy construction like "Using the 120 volts with a 1 amperage current we need to manipulate the Ohms Law into the resistance final answer." But what the heck – few people write well in the texting era... so let's look at Bayne's content.

It's difficult to figure out her point, but what she appears to be telling her reader is that you can determine an electric device's resistance using Ohm's Law (V = IR). Because she had to meet eHow's minimum word content, however, she had to pad the answer; and that's where she went off track. She starts the instruction process by telling her readers,

"Locate the nameplate of the electrical device you want to calculate resistance. Every electrical appliance or motor has one, it will show the voltage and amperage while the unit is under operation." Bzzzzzzzt! Wrong! Not all nameplates show this information: most show voltage, but only a few list the current draw (amperage). Especially on household appliances (see image at right), the label is more likely to display the wattage. So Bayne -- "expert" that she is -- begins by misinforming her readers. She could easily have left out some of the padding and informed them that the amperage ("I" in Ohm's Law) is wattage divided by voltage: an 1100-watt microwave running on 120-volt household current is drawing a bit over 9 amps.

Plug the numbers 120 volts and 9 amps into Ohm's Law and it tells us that the overall resistance of the microwave is about 13 ohms; a much better example than Baynes' use of one amp on a 120-volt circuit. Come on, dumbass, nobody uses one unit of anything in an example! For her lousy writing, her poor research and her lousy example problem, G. K. Bayne is today's Dumbass of the Day. As usual, eHow also gets a nod for letting this kind of crap get published.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was ehow.com/how_4499664_calculate-electrical-current-resistance.html

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DD - ELECTRICITY