4 Wire 220 To 3 Wire

The reason for this change is safety.

4 wire 220 to 3 wire. Stray current in a three wire 220 volt circuit can run along the ground neutral wire to the appliance being powered creating the potential for a serious shock. When you say 3 wire 220v line i would assume that you have 2 insulated copper wires and 1 bare copper wire. A 220 volt air compressor does not use a white neutral wire so the white wire of the 4 wire circuit may be capped off with an insulated wire connector. I currently use a dedicated 30 amp 220 volt 4 wire gfci outlet in my unheated garage brew room to power up my rims kettle.

That is why even in the 3 wire cord configuration a return path in the form of the neutral wire was attached to the exposed metal. I d like to use a 220 volt 5000 watt electric heater to keep the brew room warm in cold weather but all the models that i ve looked at come with a 3 wire 240 volt plug end. The neutral and ground can no longer be combined into a single wire. In a four wire circuit the stray power runs safely to ground.

Check to make sure that the white wire of the air compressor is in fact used for one of the line wires. 220 equiptment only requires that it have 2 hot wires and the neutral to function but most of the stuff that you hook up to 220 will have provision for a ground and should be wired up but a lot of times it gets overlooked by the ameture electrician while they are hooking up their welder dryer whatever. A 4 wire 220v line would have 3 insulated copper conductors and 1 bare copper conductor. In the 4 wire cord and plug configuration the equipment grounding conductor now serves to do one of the jobs that the neutral was doing previously in the old 3 wire setup.

It s been in the 20 32f range here and will be for the next several months. These should be coloured black and red.