Welcome back this has to be the best request
I've had right after can a guy with a sausage
hanging from his butt outrun a dog
and it is which one interrupts the circuit faster
a modern circuit breaker or an old-style fuse
so that's what I'm going to try to find out
I have this little setup here
I'm using this toaster 800 watts and a heater which is 1500
watts so that's a combined total of 2300 Watts
about 19.1 amps to replicate a Slow blow situation
and right after that I'm just going to do a complete Short Circuit
just like I did in the previous episode I did about a year ago
for Discovery channel
which is how circuit breakers work in slow motion
one of the reasons I love high speed cameras is not only because
they make almost everything look absolutely amazing
but also because more importantly
they are scientific tools and that is what we're going to use to measure the time it
takes for these devices to interrupt the circuit a high speed camera okay I'm all set up I
got the circuit breaker it's live I'm ready to do the Slow blow test on the circuit breaker
which isn't really going to tell us much but I think it's part of the process so got to
do it let's turn the breaker on toaster all the way up on 7 I know that's just the time
not the intensity this one 1500 w all the way all right let's see what happens
bam that's what I like fast quick done oh the high speed camera
that was the circuit breaker
in the Slow blow situation I disconnected the power removed the circuit breaker put
the fuse in its place I'm going to run to fuse for the same sort of test to see how
the fuse interrupt the circuit differently from the circuit breaker in an over amperage
or Slow blow situation toaster heater
this might take a couple minutes but something's going to happen
oh that's it
that was the fuse and while the circuit breaker was kind of uneventful
the fuse was way cooler than I thought it was going to be very unexpected if you look
at the fuse you can see that the filament started heating up as the amperage increased
to a point where you can see it pulsing in sync with the frequency of the electricity
that was flowing through it super cool now I'm going to move on to the short circuit
situation I'm just going to grab the two wires short them together completely short the circuit
is this something that I do not recommend that anybody tries at home because I am not
at home all right here we go I got my safety gear on and not only is it protection for
my eyes and my hands but it also looks really stylish as well I think I'm going to start
wearing my glasses like this but yeah I got it plugged in we're ready to go the breaker
is reset I'm just going to do a short-circuit condition by putting these wires together
and I know some people are going to say that you don't wear a welding gloves while dealing
with electricity and yeah that's true but in this case my hands are dry the gloves are
dry the resistance is way too high for 120 volts nothing's going to happen to me or my
heartand again I don't recommend anybody do this ever because yeah just don't do it here
it goes 3 2 1 that looked good
okay so that was the circuit breaker under a short-circuit
condition and I thought it looked pretty cool especially looking at the high-speed footage
apart from the speed just you can see how much energy and heat was created just with
that short circuit at the wires because the air around it became like a plasma and just
started burning there was no flammable gas there as far as I can see that was just the
heat and the air that was pretty impressive now I'm going to put the fuse in place of
the circuit breaker do the exact same test then we're going to look at the high-speed
footage of the circuit breaker and the fuse and see which one interrupts the circuit faster
the circuit breaker or the fuse this is the fuse in the same situation as the circuit
breaker same frame rate everything's the same let's see which one trips faster
there you go pretty simple
that wraps up my individual tests now time for a side-by-side comparison to see which
blue faster the fuse or the circuit breaker I'm going to slow these down and go frame
by frame keep in mind that each frame here is equal to 1/3000th of a second so we can
just count the frames to figure out how long the interrupts to took for each
and make our comparison that way
from what I saw it looks like the fuse blew faster I counted about 14 frames with the fuse and
about 18 frames with the circuit breaker tell me what you think and I just kept it simple
here but in my opinion it seems that the fuse blows faster then the circuit breaker all
right so that's about it that's the circuit breaker vs. Fuse they all look pretty amazing
and what I found really interesting is the way that the fuse blew apart internally under
the short-circuit condition I don't know if that's the way it was designed or it's just
like so much amperage at one time it just like blows the whole thing apart in between
the circuit breaker and the fuse which one interrupts the circuit faster? it was really
really close I think the main benefit of a circuit breaker versus a fuse is the fact
that if it does trip you can reset it
versus like the old school fuses were you need more
fuses to replace that fuse that blew so
yeah again this was an awesome viewer request
hopefully you enjoyed it tell me what you think in the comments below let me know if
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thanks for watching hopefully this
helped you in some way see you next time adios
and you can actually see it can you see it
there?
Here you can come close and look look see how it's heating up
that's the actual pulse
of the current oh now I see it there we go
it's crazy so it like overheats that little
tiny element and then it finally gives way
creates too much resistance and then it's
done that was pretty cool this is worth it
so let's move on to the short-circuit condition
which is going to be super easy let's do it.