Yes, but a picture of a guy yanking on a bunch of cords is funnier. Cecil’s in the ignorance-eradication business, but given the choice, Slug always goes for the laugh.
It has to do with efficient manufacturing of the components.
For example, look at the values available for 5% tolerance resistors in the standard table at http://www.elexp.com/t_eia.htm. A 100 Ohm resistor can range from 95 to 105 Ohms. A 110 resistor (the next available value) can range from 105 to 115. A 120 Ohm resistor, (the next available value) can range from (about) 115 to 125, and so on. There’s a bit of round off that needs to go on. Manufacturers can make a whole batch of resistors whose value may vary quite a bit, and then they measure them and drop them in the right bucket to be 100, 110, 120 and so on.
Again I’m rounding off here, but that’s the general idea. Or at least long ago it was, when perhaps manufacturing was not as exact.
Also note there are a lot more ‘steps’ for 1% tolerance devices, and fewer steps for 10% tolerance devices. I admit I don’t understand how 2% and 5% got lumped together, although someone told me 2% is basically obsolete.
The above is for resistors (typically carbon resistors) and I am guessing something similar applied for at least capacitors and maybe also inductors.
The club I used to be involved in - a ski hill - paid 2 electrical bill amounts - a peak reading and a total Kwatts used. The peak was typically about 1/3 of the bill, so the workers did several tricks to ensure the peak stayed low. Turn off the (electric) furnaces while the lifts were going, and heat the buildings with the fireplace since they are attended anyway. Don’t run the snowmaking machines with the furnace going. Etc. The peak was about 1/3 of the elctricity bill. One time they first fired the snowmakers up a few days before the end of October’s meter-read cycle and cost us an extra $1300 for that month.
So devices that do this management automatically among themselves could have serious quick payback.
Hybrid autos may likely have devices like hydrogen or natural-gas powered feul cells, capable of generating significant kilowatts of power. Eventually, hook up the dead car permanently to your home grid and cut the fuel bills; until the price of hydrogen or natural gas goes up.
Most utilities have a bunch of stand-by generator plants that sit in standby and come on for the peak hours only - usually these are the most expensive or dirtiest ones to operate.
The ultimate in power management is Manitoba Hydro’s system - the entire river system from Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay and the Saskatchewan and Churchill rivers are managed to create a steady flow of electricity from cascaded releases of water from dam to dam. In drought times, a pulse of water makes its way to the bay through a series of dams. The level of Lake Winnipeg is controlled several feet each way as demand and supply warrant. South Indian Lake on the Churchill is diverted to the Nelson for extra power. A dam at the exit regulates the level of the lake to determine the diversion power.
A capacitor in its simplest form is a pair of plates connected to each side of a circuit. They block DC absolutely. With AC, they charge up (plates fill with electrons) as the voltage goes one way, then that side drains and the other side fills up when the voltage reverses - so they effectively "pass’ AC current. As you can imagine from this process, they cause the current to lag or become out of phase.
If the capacitor is attached to a circuit with pulsed DC - like the top half only of an AC current, that went through a rectifier - it will fill as the pulse happens, then leak those electrons back out as the voltage dies - thus smoothing out the current. Supplies that convert AC to DC usually have these smoothing capacitors. Soemtimes they hold their charge a while, so as mentioned, a draining resistor is installed to ensure they lose their charge after a few seconds of no power for safety reasons.
If you have to reboot a PC or such, the rules is to always pull power or turn off switch for at least 10 seconds. Flick the switch off and on, and the power to the unit may not have gone below the threshold needed to “reset” the elctronics; it may freeze, which is also what can happen if the lights blink momentarily due to a power blip. Most chips have a reset line, which is tied to a lead which has an RC (resistor capacitor) to slow the voltage so that everything else has full power before the chip begins its reset/boot routine.
The rolling blackoputs from peak problems are due to another interesting problem - a complex grid of resistances capacitances and inductances is an impossible problem to solve. This is what teh vast grid interconnection of a typical hydro supply system is like. Shut down a major supply like a power plant - the powr is supplied from feeder lines from elsewhere. Imbalance the system in a way that ahsn’t happened before and you may find that too much power tries to flow over one feeder line - tripping the breaker on that line, and diverting even more power through a different link - until that too overloads and goes down. Eventually power plants become isolated from any feeds and have to begin emergency shutdown, which means several hours to bring back up…
This is what caused the major outage on the east coast about 5 years ago. One failure in Ohio(?) tripped lines across the great lakes states and provinces, and then across the coast. Once a line is overlaoded and tripped, you can’t just reset it, it will just pick up the same surge that tripped it to begin. You hav to styart small.
Of course the bill is for energy, the product of power and time. My concern is whether the bills are based on true watts (KW-hours), in which case the power factor correcting devices are being sold on false premises; or if the power company charges are based on volt amps, then they are misrepresenting and overcharging. If the latter, they might claim their lines have to carry more voltage and current than if there the load were not reactive, but then a phase corrector might save both the customer and company costs - if we only knew…
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Re. resistor increments, I am surprised the color codes have not been mentioned, and the mnemonics used to remember codes for the ten digits. Bad Boys … etc. See:
Electronic color code - Wikipedia
For residential customers, the meter on the house/apartment is a watt-hour meter and it means just that. It measures your actual watt-hour usage very precisely, regardless of the power-factor of the load. They are highly-engineered devices; extremely accurate over a wide range of environmental and electrical operating conditions, and they stay in calibration for a very long time.