OK, OK, I know, terrible pun, but it’s the start of my weekend, I’m feeling silly and besides, it’s all Ellen’s fault … I’m innocent, I swear.  Faithful reader Ellen just left this comment:

Already happened to me :). Btw, have you experienced this difference in hz also - like 50 hz and 60 hz? I don’t understand what it is myself, but I think it is 60 hz here and 50 hz there (Canada/US). I was told that even with a transformer, eventually this difference in hz will destroy the equipment. Is this true?

and it occurred to me that I could be facilitating someone else having one of those "Aw Shoot" moments if I weren’t more careful, so it would be wise to spend a few ore minutes on electricity, just so people don’t get the idea it’s always as simple as a 600 peso rewinding job.  This also ties in directly to the next installment about saving and/or producing electric power, so all is certainly not lost by taking a little tangent (ever notice how in English we say someone is off on a tangent if they get "off track" yet on a railroad a "tangent" is a straight track between two curves and thus the absolute shortest distance between two points?  Funny language, in my book.  But, I digress.

There are three important things to consider regarding household appliances and what you plug them into, voltage, amperage and frequency.  There is often a wide tolerance for some of these requirements but in other cases there is no room for error at all, so it pays to think things through before plugging in.

Voltage:  This is often taught in basic electronics classes using the analogy of water flowing through a pipe … or wind blowing past the blades of a windmill.  The higher the voltage the stronger the pressure.  Refer again to this handy site when you are comparing compatibility between countries.  The US almost always uses 110 Volts (dryers, stoves, some water heaters, etc. are exceptions).  Plug a 110 Volt only device into 220 Volts and typically twice as much actual current will flow through it and the Wattage (a measure of the work being done) will go up which produces more and more heat … and you get that expensive burning smell when wires or insulation melts.  The label (that should be near where the power cord goes into the device) or the owner’s manual is the ‘bible’ on this requirement.  Today, many devices sold for world-wide use can take almost any power … the laptop I am writing this on is specced for 100 to 240 volts, so it is happy in any country shown on that list.  One of my desktop computers is also rated for 110 to 240, the other (Japanese branded, interestingly enough) is god only for 100 through 120, so you have to know rather than guess.  My television is 100 through 240 but the DVD player on the shelf underneath it is only good for 100 through 120.  No way to tell just making an assumption, even very similar devices may differ widely.

Voltage differences are easy to fix.  especially here in the Philippines there are a brad assortment of transformers in any well-equipped hardware store that will convert the Philippine-standard 220 Volts to 100 or 110 Volts for equipment that requires that.  Devices like irons, electric blankets (oh, guess we won’t be needing them much here) and the like that are for heating only can be used on a transformer but would be very wasteful, better to spring for a 220 volts replacement.

Amperage or Current:  If voltage is like the pressure in a pipe, current is like the amount of water that flows through the pipe … the more amperage the bigger the pipe, the higher the flow, the more "work" (heat) gets produced.  It’s a lot easier to deal with this factor when moving from one standard to another for Americans, because we catch a break.  A 10 Amp device on 110 Volts (a pretty heavy duty appliance indeed, let’s say a commercial grade shop vacuum or a table saw only draws 5 Amps on 220 Volts, so from the standpoint of current, basically anything you can plug into a wall outlet in your home country you can plug into an outlet in the Philippines (if the voltage is correct or made correct with a transformer).  Mita has a nice wall oven for baking that we bought here in the Philippines that can plug into any outlet in the house, in the US it would draw 22 Amps and need a special power point to work.

Frequency (specified in Hertz or Cycles per Second):   This is the one Ellen asked about specifically and the one with the most complicated answer.  Household power world-wide is AC or alternating current.  This means the electricity changes it’s direction of flow back and forth a certain number of time per second.  In almost all countries this is either 50 times per second (50 hertz), prime examples being the UK, EU, Australia, et al, and 60 times a second (60 hertz) prime examples being the US and the Philippines. The answer to the question "will this destroy the equipment"? is unequivocally yes, no, or maybe.

Things that you can plug into a household power point come in three basic "flavors".  Resistive loads, Inductive loads and devices that depend upon the power line for timing.  This subject is actually much more complex but I’m making a try at simplifying it a bit because you do not have to be an electrical engineer to run your house here, really.

Resistive loads would basically be things that get hot to do their job. An iron.  An incandescent (conventional) light bulb.  A water heater.  An electric hot plate and so on.  For practical purposes these devices do not care a bit about Hertz.  So a toaster from England will run just as many years on Philippine power as it will on British power, it literally could not care less.

Inductive load examples would be things with a motor.  A vacuum sweeper, an electric mixer,  a "Fly-Mo" hovercraft electric lawn mower, a hedge trimmer, a plug-in electric drill and so on.  These devices turn at a speed proportional to the power line cycles per second so technically they do "care" about the Hertz but for practical purposes the"care" can be ignored.  I had a 50Hz British "hovercraft" vacuum cleaner that I used on 60 Hz US power for years .. technically the motor should have turned 20% faster in the US than in the UK (60 divided by 50 is 1.2) but it didn’t seem to know the difference and I’d probably still have it except I gave it to a friend who was moving to the UK.  If you have an expensive, high-power piece of equipment that you are really worried about I’d seek guidance from the manufacturer or a qualified electrical engineer … but again, in practical terms the motor will turn a bit faster but I doubt it will make any difference in the life of the equipment.  Typically electric motors wear most and even burn out when they get loaded down and run very slowly so the slight extra speed from 60 Hertz might even make them last longer … hard to say.

Timing issues.  Now that we have spent a thousand plus words with the simple part, we come to the difficult section.  Devices that need a specific frequency for timing.  This is indeed the hardest art of Ellen’s question to answer because ‘it depends".  Here’s a simple example.  A plug in electric clock.  these are cheap, simple motor power devices that keep very good time because the frequency of the power mains is very consistent.  If you bring a wall clock from say, Australia (a 220 Volt 50 Hertz country) and plug it into 220 Volt 60 hertz Philippine power the life of the clock will not be affected much at all.  It will be electrically as happy as a clam and run for years and years … but it won’t be of much value as a clock .. because that 1.2 times faster cycles per second means each clock hour is going to be only 50 real minutes … so except for a situation when you have dinner guests who you would like to leave sooner rather than later the clock is unlikely to be worth the power it consumes.  Many washing machines use an electric motor to drive the timer that controls the wash cycles as well … it might make wash day go by faster, but unlike a clock,this might or might not be something you can live with …you could set the timer for a longer wash than normal and still get the same amount of washing time.

See what I mean about ‘it depends?  It is possible that connecting a 50 Hz device to 60 hz might actually damage the device, but I expect those would be few and far between.  However, these few examples should show that mixing 50 Hz and 60 Hz is not a ‘cut and dried’ thing.  It varies from impossible, through undesirable to ‘don’t even care’.

I was just going to type "there is no practical way to convert 50 hz to 60 Hz or vice versa" but in today’s’ solid state and alternative power-aware world that may not be a true statement.  You can’t convert with a hardware store transformer, as you can voltage, but maybe, as we work through some of these issues we can find a way.  meanwhile?  read the power label on the appliance and make a rational judgment from what you see there.

Related posts:

1. INPUT: AC 100V- 240V~ 1.0A 50 / 60 Hz
2. More Help On Adapters — Fit Any Plug

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