Thread: Anyone ever been unfortunate enough to have done this?

I was thinking about this earlier,

this summer we were buiding machines for a mattress company. I was wiring the machines that went and cut a certain amount of springs out of a roll. Most of these machines went to the US (220volts) so they needed 220 volt stepped down to 110 volt transformers in the boxes for the power supply. One machine was to go to canada (the canucks run at 600 volts, don't ask me why) and not knowing this i put it in a normal 220 to 110 transformer...now, we test these machines in house before we shp them.....I didn't do the testing so i never caught the mistake. They rigged a 220 to 600 (6?? volts) transformer in the shop, then off that powered the machine.
So at this point we have 600 volts running into a transformer designed to step 220 volts down to 110...i could hear the guys yealling to kill the power from across the shop. Turns out it fried every electrical component in the box (except a few 12 awg wires coming off the transformer). But every other wire had melted coating, every terminal had black marks on it where the electricity arced *sp*. I got to keep my job because i was never told the machine was supposed to run under 600 volts (damn canadiens) and the guys testing it never checked to make sure the transformer was the correct one. The guys still give me crap about it though

I belive that their across the board infastructure runs at 600, i think it's also the industry standard, but as far as power going to houses, the power stations around the cities step it down.

Waldo, look at your signature, that might be the problem...