volts amps watts and ohms
all right so if you are new to the electrical field or electronics and you're trying to figure
out how many like ohms of current flow through the voltage of the resistor through the flux capacitor
like you don't know what any of these things mean and you're trying to get it all straight
this video is for you so very simply uh I'm going to go through each one of the quantities or the
terms that we talk about and try to make it like an easy explanation of how that works in a circuit
so let's start out with voltage when you say volts what does that mean voltage equals pressure so in
an electrical circuit you've got little itty bitty charges inside of a wire and when you
apply a voltage from one side of that wire to the other side of that wire there's a difference of
potential there's like an up and a down or there's a push and a pull more accurately in AC electric
alternating current that push and pull happens simultaneously 60 times a second they change
directions in DC it's just one constant push in One Direction so voltage is the amount of pressure
well another thing we call it is the difference of potential right like the difference of potential
is going to be 120 volts at like a wall outlet here in the U.S you might have an air conditioner
outside that's 240 volts so instead of 120 volts now you're talking 240 volts you might be in an
industrial Factory or something where they've got 480 volts the incoming power a lot of times to the
power pole to the Transformer at your property is at 7200 volts and the little Transformer
transforms it down to 240 volts and sends it safely into your house at that low voltage all
it means is it's a change in pressure now the letter for voltage is V A lot of times you will
see in calculations and things in the electrical world that we represented as e or electromotive
Force when we do calculations we'll have some something like e times I equals P which is voltage
times amperes equals power it's weird that they don't use those units but in physics they use a
lot of these things so they don't want people getting confused anyways so just know voltage
is V or if you're doing calculations and you're taking your electrical test and you're using the
Ohm's Law formula wheel e is also voltage now to test voltage you're going to take a multimeter
you're going to put it to the V setting and you're going to hook up between two leads now what that
is saying when you get a reading say it's 12 volts it means that there's very little pressure that is
pushing current through this multimeter but you always test voltage between two points voltage is
never like you're going to touch one thing and get a voltage reading it's always a a pressure
between two points now when testing for amperage and you're on the amp setting it's not going to
detect the amount of voltage or pressure it's going to detect the amount of current
that's flowing from one of these leads through the multimeter and back to the other one so it's still
testing something that's going on in the circuit but you're just testing the flow or the rate of
flow or the strength of the field more accurately all right the next one is resistance there's it's
really impedance there's three different things there's reactants and there is resistance So
within impedance we have two different types we have reactants and we have resistance impedance
is kind of like an all-encompassing term it just means like opposition so like if you get a whole
bunch of Runners running a race and then all of a sudden you get like a bunch of cows that like
flying and then they're all like banging together they can't get through that's opposition right
same thing with impedance they're being as Runners they're being impeded they can't keep going and
so the same thing is an electrical circuits pretty much all of electrical everything is
finding little things like resistors or diodes or light bulbs or capacitors or inductors or
anything vacuum cleaners TVs radios like this little guy he's pretty he's pretty resistive
nah he's pretty chill man he's like he's like all about the yes he's a Yes Man anyways impedance if
you were to plug a vacuum a vacuum cleaner motor itself is a certain resistor or a certain kind of
impedance it's a little different because it's a motor we'll go into a whole different video later
to talk about the different types but usually when you're talking about a DC circuit like this
battery and coming out of it into the circuit into whatever you're trying to power whatever
load is hooked up to it like a light bulb we're going to say that that light bulb is resisting
it has resistance because we're talking about DC resistance can still be used to talk about
AC just for ease of understanding resistance is just a type of impedance that we're talking about
with a DC battery reactance is something that we talk about with circuits that specifically
have inductors or capacitors in the circuit so most of the time you're not going to be talking
about reactants you're going to be talking about resistance most of the time out in the field we're
talking about resistance we'll be like hey go check the resistance on this saying blah blah
blah we just use resistance there's a lot of hotty totty people that like to get all fancy
with themselves and start being like but that's not resistance it's impedance it's not a peanuts
bro it's reactants shut the [ __ ] up you know what I mean you can call it impedance but then
you sound like you're trying to be fancy still um a lot of times I will say impedance though
because once I came up through the ranks and I realized when I'm talking about resistance that
I was actually talking about reactants I was like [ __ ] I've been saying the wrong thing forever
so I tend to say impedance but if I'm talking to like a helper that I know has no idea either way
I'll just be like resistance bro I don't want to confuse them be like oh [ __ ] there's like
a resistance and there's an impedance now no no impedance is just the total proposition in
all ways reactants plus resistance in a circuit is impedance I think I've probably kicked this
horse enough right you understand it cool when you put a resistance in a circuit what it does
is actually decreases the rate of flow doesn't add more pressure the voltage doesn't rise or
anything like that what it does it slows the current down to a usable level if we don't
have a resistance in a circuit you might have two wires and try to touch them together and they blow
up there's so much current trying to go without any kind of resistance electricity can be really
dangerous so you don't want to have a situation where there's just no resistance we always take
a pressure we apply that pressure to conductors that go to a load so when that resistance is there
a certain amount of current will flow that's useful and not dangerous and that resistance
will do something it'll either make a motor spin or it'll make a light bulb come on or it'll make
a speaker like bump or it can make like heating elements inside of a toaster turn on but that
resistor is there and the amount of resistance that the resistor has is going to dictate how much
current is actually going to flow when we apply pressure to those conductors now with resistance
you're going to see this little Omega sign and what that is is ohms so when we talk about
resistance we say ohms if you're talking about reactants there's some other things XL and XC and
all that don't worry about that in in general when we see the little ohm sign we were talking about
resistance now when you're testing resistance you're not going to test like a battery and try to
get a certain amount of resistance because there isn't resistance these the terminal inside of here
in the terminal and here are not connected it's not a conductor there's an Electro light inside
of here like a chemical that will allow current to flow but they're like really isolated from each
other so you're not going to test anything all right and then the last one that we are going to
cover is wattage or electrical power now there's a thing called VA and there's a thing called watts
and a lot of times you'll see equipment rated like 70 KVA or it'll be rated 70 000 Watts or 70 Watts
so usually you can kind of think as a VA is a volt amp but in a calculation that we use volts
times amps equals Watts so a volt amp is equal to a watt but they're not the same thing when we use
wattage we're talking about how much power is being consumed or how much is being expended so
if we have a light bulb light bulbs are rated 60 watts 100 Watts because they're actually
expending energy out of them they're radiating heat and light out of them they're not storing
any energy they're expelling energy so anything that we talk about that the purpose of it toaster
heating element anything that's like we're trying to get heat off of this thing and we're trying to
get light off of it anything like that is going to be rated in wattage if you're talking about VA or
volt amps or KVA which is thousands of volt amps like a lot of big Transformers that you're going
to see Transformers up on poles they're rated like 50 KVA 50 000 volt amps the reason it's
not 50 000 watts is because that Transformer is not a thing that's just like radiating heat and
consuming power that thing is actually storing power it's creating an electric field because
there's two different parts of a circuit there's a primary circuit and a secondary circuit so it's
actually storing power and when we start talking about things like capacitors we're actually
storing power inside of this thing right so when we store electrical energy we're talking with VA
or volt amps but when we expend it we're talking about wattage now for the wattage to change in
something it depends on how much resistance there is in the thing right so a light bulb with very
little resistance because the current is going to be so high because there's nothing impeding
it the wattage that it produces is going to be really high too because there's just no resistance
there's so much current flowing through it that like it's gonna it's gonna be like a really bright
light wattage can be low though too if you do have like a light bulb filament that's like really long
or like double wound or something like that if you have multiple heating elements really big heating
elements there's so much resistance in that inductor there's so much reactance technically
see what I mean there's so much resistance in that conductor that there's not enough current that can
flow to generate enough wattage or enough heat for that to be expended so the the resistor is
everything in an electrical circuit that's what you need to understand the load the load how
it's designed is the most important part when we have a voltage present at a building that doesn't
matter we're just saying we got like a certain pressure at this building the amount of current
you can't change anything about current current just happens based off of the size of the resistor
or the size of the motor which has resistance in it or the size of whatever you're plugging
in whatever thing there and as a result of you applying pressure over this resistance
current is going to flow and it's going to either expel a whole bunch of energy
which is wattage or it's going to store a bunch of energy which is VA so I hope that helped it
was probably a lot longer than it needed to be I was hoping to do that in like five minutes I
hope you got some value out of it but if you're interested in figuring out like how an actual
circuit works and seeing me draw it on the drawing board there's a really rad video right here I made
it recently you should check that out if you're curious about things like neutrals and grounds
and why we Bond them out at electrical services check this video out here pretty rad video thank
you guys so much for your attention I love you crazy people and I will see you in the next one