Electrical question?

[JERRY2KONE]

Well not for sure of exactly how your 220v power might be supplied, but all USA housing power is supplied by two seperate 120v lines that run to each house. If you open your power panel you will see that there are three lines entering your distribution box. The center line is the ground. The lines on the right and the left are seperate 120v lines that feed each side of your buss. When the elctrician wires your house he tries to balance the loads by deviding your homes amperage equally with less than 100 amps per side. When you require a 220-240v feed they use a breaker that uses one leg from each side of your buss.

In most of Europe the feed is one single line of 220-240v. using transformers is no big deal and quite common for most Americans living and working in Europe so we can continue to use USA elecrical products. Our Embassy probably has at least a couple hundred of them throughout our mission. Finally European versions of the microwave are nowhere near as esthetically pleasing as some of the models sold in the USA. The whole idea and convenience of mounting a microwave above the counter for whatever reason has not really caught on here as well as it has in America. The closest thing they have over here are kitchens that look like one huge flat wall unit where you only see the face of each appliance. SO having one of these appliances will be a huge novelty/draw of interest for our office. Plus the renovation I am doing is to create a 2012 modern looking work station that is inovative and uses the most advanced technologies available today. not some cheap looking junk picked up at the nearest local swap meet. The appliance is already on its way, so I would like to make this work. Not just turn my back in defeat and give up.

[brijar]

To answer the out of phase question, the AC power that comes into your American house (or at least all of the houses in which I have seen the breaker box) has, like you said, two live wires and one neutral/ground wire. The two live wires have 120VAC 60Hz on them relative to the neutral wire. Relative to each other, however, they would measure 240V on a multimeter. 120VAC voltage is always switching between +120V and -120V. The two wires being out of phase means that when one wire is at its positive peak (+120V), the other wire is at its negative peak (-120V). A multimeter connected to each of the live wires would measure the difference between them ((+120) - (-120)) = 240. This picture might help some. The red and yellow lines are what the voltage of each live line looks like over time.



Not sure if the microwave will be expecting two out of phase 120V inputs or just one 240V input.