Why do we use High Voltage for Long Distance Power Lines? 

I never thought to associate this demo with that! You are so right!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In fact I should at some time do a video demonstarting that to warn people. Also a good reason why these days any linesman should probably consider any faulty line as live even if it shouldnt be. I know they often jumper all the wires they are working on to ground - not sure if they always do that - but if not they should probably treat them as live. I know over here if you have grid connected solar installation at home, you are required to have some sort of external disconnect breaker for that reason. As I am writing this, I am wondering what would happed to a home generator if it was connected that way and the AC was resored. It should synchronize after a potential huge transient current and then transfer power in or out depending on its operating speed. I'm sure the better quality ones would do fine like a "real" power station AC machine, but I could see a small home one possibly having a spectacular failure.

Funny - I had initially thought of doing something like that in this video - using very fine magnet/enameled wire to make the point. Decided against it figuring the wire would not show up well in the video. The danger aspect would make it impractical. Over here (Canada), office lighting is often run at 347V (line to neutral of 600V 3 phase) which significantly reduces the amount of copper needed in the wiring. Even that makes accidentally touching a live wire/terminal way more dangerous than 120V. Glad your enjoying my videos. More to come as time permits!

Thanks! Really appreciate that!

50kV! You must have corona discharge and ozone all over the place! Was it a simple step up transformer? Or more like a flyback and/or voltage multiplier which would have common in color TVs at the time? Can you elaborate on how it characterized the textiles unless its too involved or proprietary or course. Interestingly enough, I had an uncle in Germany who was a textile engineer. His dad (my Opa) was a engineering chemist who for part of his career worked on textile dyes.

@@ElectromagneticVideos I had to build it on a budget of less than $ 100 so I used two flyback transformers from discarded color TV sets in series. I even had to prolong the ferrite core by inserting some pieces of ferrite and gluing them with superglue. I also had to fabricate a capacitor myself because there were no high voltage capacitors available. (Given the budget) So we made a pack of aluminum plates separated by pieces of old window panes , experimenting with parameters like creeping distance. When we first tested it we only attained some 15 kV because of corona effect. So we had to dismantle the capacitor and round the edges of the plates. We also switched to copper tubing instead of wires for the same reason. Voltage and current measurement on the contrary were quite easy as one side of the output was grounded. So we measured current by measuring the voltage across a 1 K resistor connected at the grounded side. With these improvements we were having some 30 kV max output. We spent some days thinking about how we could improve things any further and we tried enclosing the apparatus in a transparent acrylic housing and putting a jar filled with silicagel dessicant in it. That did the trick. Being an electronics engineering student at the time I did not have any experience working with such high voltages. It came in handy later working on 10 kV power supplies for laser metal cutting equipment which none of my colleagues dared to touch. Nice memories…

Thanks! Yes - and even better when the lights are on in spite of the 8k wire resistance!

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks! I was happy with how ell it worked other than the hanging voltmeter. I was a bit concerned that current limited ignition transformers would perform poorly as power transformers, but they worked!

Thank you! Glad you liked and I really appreciate your comment!

Thanks! Interesting that they upped it! I wonder if they were able to keep the old insulators which would have made the whole switch so much easier. I'm in the country (but not way out - just outside of Ottawa) and the nearby pole transformer is fed from one phase of a 3 phase 4.8kV line to neutral / 8.3kV line to line power line. I wonder if the voltage will be upped sometime soon due to lots of development in the area. You know, since you mentioned DC, I wonder how close we are to electronic power supply style pole transformers being created - could be so much cheaper due to the reduced amount of metal needed, but also would be an easy way to convert the HV lines to DC at 1.4 times the AC RMS voltage without changing the insulator size, while maintaining 120V/240V 60Hz AC at the output. Might also solve the power factor correction issues.

@@ElectromagneticVideos I believe they were able to keep much of the same hardware, but I don't know all the details of the older equipment upgrades that had to be done to be honest. I am sure it was much more to it than what I saw them out doing. Interesting to think about the DC supplies for sure!

@@ThriftyToolShed I never thought about switching small scale transmission to DC before - its so interesting how comments like yours lead to interesting ideas!

HVDC. It's vaguely mentioned at the end of this video. Do you guys know each other? Strange that I find you both here.

@@RK-kn1ud We got to know each other by watching each others videos - some overlap but enough differences in content to keep things interesting. For anyone who hasn't seen @ThriftyToolShed well work a look at his channel. We are planning to do some sort of joint video(s) next year to somehow appear on both channels (still figuring that out). Stay tuned ....

Yes! I wish I had a 1 foot sample of typical wire from something like the 500kv transmission line I took a video of to put the size of those cables in perspective. Its also hard to imagine how much additional weight was added because of the layer ice that had coated the lines the night before I took the video.

Wikipedia has a really nice article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current The size of the electronics is something I cant wrap my head around. Look at the photo about 40% down the page which has a man at the bottom for scale!

Very good point. If I have time today I will try that (the experiment is still setup) but if not it will have to wait till the first few days of January. Eithee way I will let you know ...

Just tried it - was a good idea but that wasn't it. You got me thinking - when I'm back I will try and surround the multi-meter with aluminum mosquito mesh attached to to the - meter input and see if a Faraday cage type setup fixes it.

@@ElectromagneticVideos Damn. I really thought that might have been the issue. Basically like when you're probing a circuit with a meter but you have crap contact and you just see floating voltage. You could also try a more robust meter, but with the voltages surrounding your demonstration, I could understand why you might not want to use a meter with significant value unless it was rated for that type of voltage.

@@RK-kn1ud Yeah - as I said - it was a good idea! Its really more the size of the meter than cost - the better ones would hang too low. I have high hopes for the Faraday cage idea idea though. The only other thing I can think of is perhaps there are significant harmonics in the current flowing and that could be messing up the cheapo meters measurement. I'll post the results when I'm back!

An unshielded switching power supply caused fluctuations in a spare cheapie DMM I had a few years ago.

Just before I took the video, we had freezing rain + then snow - looked like a winter wonderland as they say. Amazing to think how much heavier the power lines would be from the ice. Luckily not heat heavy enough to down the power lines or trees this time. That was a bit more than a week ago. Yesterday the temperature went up 9C! Most of the snow is gone - crazy weather over here this year!

The same thing in Sweden, we don't get a white Christmas, although we had down to -20C in some places just a couple of weeks ago!@@ElectromagneticVideos

@@emilalmberg1096 It didn't get quite as cold here but I think we were down to -15 or so one night. Strange weather!

You just filled in a few gaps in my knowledge of SWER - had no idea the max resistance just happened to be 8k which fits in so well with this demo. 65,000 km and 3.5% is an amazing amount of SWER but makes sense given the sparse population. Not sure why we don't use it as much here. I don't remember which Australian state your in, but when I visited Australia, to my fascination I saw (and end up getting power from!) a SWER line feeding the campground where I stayed in Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. If anyone is interested in what a SWER line looks like here it is on google streetview www.google.com/maps/@-25.0714775,148.2944888,3a,44.4y,104.31h,93.56t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbVLAQ2d16UrkdCtwSGEFMA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu If you look carefully you can see the single wire crossing the road. By the way, Carnarvon Gorge is one of Australia's best kept secrets for anyone who likes outdoors and nature. And being the geek that I am, I did take photos of the SWER line when I was there - the only one I had ever seen. Funny - after doing this video I was thinking maybe next summer I should do a SWER demo with the same transformers in my back yard (right now its too cold and covered with ice and snow) ....

@@ElectromagneticVideos I'm in Queensland. Different SWER voltages are in use in other states. I think NSW uses 19.1kV. The voltages are where they are as it allows the use of a standard 3 phase 4 wire distribution transformer with the star point heavily earthed. 22kV gives 12.7 to earth and 33kV gives 19.1 to earth. Overall there's about 200,000km of SWER running around the country.

@@retrozmachine1189 How clever to be able to use a standard transformer!

Are you trying to get me zapped with stuff like that?!?!? Actually if I ever come across some larger transformers at surplus prices I will certainly go them. Its too bad - looks like Photonicinduction seems to have gone silent - I used to enjoy those videos. On the near term, Tesla coils, Marx generators and voltage multipliers are in my plans. Yes - power factor stuff - is definitely planned. The top of the AC waveform in my area is flattened - someone (maybe you?) pointed out that it was due to the electronic power supplies. Its staggering to think the huge amount of power that must be consumed though all the electronic power supplies to be able to flatten which should be close to a pure sine wave. So definitely something on that! You too - have a wonderful vacation time with friends and family. I'm heading off in a couple of days so no more videos till next year (seems strange to say that!)

@@ElectromagneticVideos Looking forward to your forthcoming high voltage videos!

@@WhatYouHaventSeen I will probably intersperse them with others. The HV ones take a while to do because of the extra effort to be careful and take various safety precautions.

Well thanks you so much!!!!!!!! I really appreciate it!

These things seems to be dubious at best - little sound scientific basis for what they are supposed to do, and many studies showing little effect if any. If I were to cover those devices I would have to do some testing and thats not really in my plans right now - sorry :(

I just looked a AWG to mm² chart ( www.multicable.com/resources/reference-data/cross-reference-awg-to-mm2/ ) to see what 2.5 mm² is and its #14 . Interestingly, the chart also lists #16 as 1.5 mm² - the chart I looked at last time said it was 1.3mm² - very strange. The only thing I can think of maybe the conversion is different for stranded vs solid. You of course have the huge advantage of twice the voltage so your extension cords only get half the current for a typical load - ours at times can get noticeably worm form the current. 3 phase - yes! I was debating showing a photo of a 3 phase European transformer but decided it could confuse the issue. I'm not sure if you noticed, but in the transformer photos the single transformers are in groups of 3 - one for each phase. Not as efficient as a single transformer the way you would have, but I suspect its easier here since the single phase transformers are produced in vast quantities for the 120/240 V split phase power system. A 3 phase power video planned! Thanks for info about Germany/Europe!

When comparing wire area, one must foremost keep the nominal voltage in mind. This is an immediate consequence of the video presented here. A cable designed for 16 A and 220 V in Europe can deliver 3.5 kW, quite above a typical household appliance. In the U.S., however, 16 A on 120 V can deliver only 1.9 kW, not much above the upper end of home appliances, or about what a medium-sized table saw might draw for a challenging cut.

@@sternmg Exactly!

@@ElectromagneticVideos Interesting. My go to for AWG to metric has always been rapidtables where 2.5mm2 doesn't fall cleanly into an AWG size. Closest by rapidtables is 13AWG = 2.62mm2 while 14AWG is 2.08mm2. Technically solid vs stranded shouldn't make a difference since it's the wire cross section area. 2.5mm2 of stranded can take more volume than solid due to air gaps but once crimped properly, if that's the termination method, the gaps are gone.

@@retrozmachine1189 "solid vs stranded shouldn't make a difference" Thats what I would have thought - but I was wondering if somehow awg measure things a different way. Very strange how the tables from different places seem different. I would hope somewhere there is a definitive standard that gives a defined area for awg.

Well it sounds like that is very well designed power supply. Handling (extended) brownouts well probably means the switching power supply has a particularly low minimum input voltage. That might be partly the result of your low power use and partly power supply design. Japan uses 100V power so maybe the power supply was deigned to be compatible with power over there and can nicely operate down to something like 80V? For short blips in supply, large filter capacitors and low power consumption would also help. I have a bunch of old HP XW8600 workstations that are built like tanks and have huge power supplies. They behave much like you describe - the power really has to go out before anything bad happens. I'm actually near Carlton Place but my office is in the Kanata area. I know what you mean about the glitchy power in both areas. I use a UPS with any critical computer now because the time wasted and potential cost of downed computer due to frequent power issues make it worth the extra cost. At least in the city the power is bit more stable than in the country. I would sure stick the brand of power supplies since it seem to work so well! Nice to hear for a neighbor! Thanks for commenting!

Thank you for the detail. Would you in general think that 50 % extra capacity is worth the added cost? Say you expect an average load of 400 watts so then deploy a 800 watt rated power supply. Thanks@@ElectromagneticVideos

@@purrrfectnarrative5201 Your welcome! In terms of over capacity, that's what I do for a few reasons: I always want a quiet PC so I look for power supplies that have a fan noise profile graph in the specs, and pick one where my power level is at the low end of the graph with the fan hardly or not operating. And by using way less than normal power, it should keep the power supply cooler and last longer (heat dries out the electrolytic capacitors) and since they are bigger for larger power supplies, even when the loose capacity, they can drop quite a bit before it becomes an issue. So yes - I think its worth it. And - as in your case, the bigger capacitors probably make less vulnerable to AC power glitches By the way - you mentioned you had a Ryzen 5 - which one? I got a Ryzen 5700x last year and have been so impressed by the low power consumption vs Intel processors that were available at the time with similar speeds.

@@ElectromagneticVideos A switching power supply is constantly measuring the output voltage so within reason it compencates for lower input voltages. It simply changes the (usually step down) voltage coming out og the small internal transformer. This transformer is usually run on it's frequency limit so that a higher frequency gives lower output voltage and visa versa. It is there fore its input specifications, the voltage are that it covers, that is important for getting a correct output voltage. If say a 12v power supply is specified for an input between say 90 - 260v then you should get 12v and the specified power out at any input voltage between 90 - 260v. The input current will change.

@@leonhardtkristensen4093 Absolutely!

Yes - I was not expecting that. I had originally planned to make an analog hanging voltmeter using a second analog meter identical to the current meter, but decided against it due to the 1mA full scale deflection current which would distort the voltage reading across the 8k resistor string. Using the digital one was supposed to solve that but in the end had this other problem. I might have a go at investigating the issue in January - would be interesting to see if I was right in thinking it was due to corona taking place inside the meter or if it is due to something else.

:) Better be careful or you'll start all sorts of conspiracy theories :)

Yes - figured I would see it makes any difference to the response! And thanks!