Elektrik

Personally I prefer building wall with working outlets and light switches over building a circuit in a lab, we do this in my Electric and Alternative Energy class. To me it just makes more sense, and I guess my time in physics is what gives me a good sense of how things like the electrical guts of a wall actually work. It seems like knowing how electrons flow through a system and through a switch is the basics for any circuit, functional or theoretical. However, I like that putting together a wall in this trades class that I take is actually quite challenging to understand still. Every basic wire running through the wall has 3 component wires: a hot, a neutral, and a ground. The hot is where the electrons flow when an appliance is in use, most of the time in AC (alternating current). The neutral is where the electrons flow to leave the circuit, and the ground is essentially like another neutral, but it is like a safety device. If a wire coating were to break, exposing the wire, instead of sending out random shocks starting a fire or electrocuting someone, the electrons will flow to the ground. And the wires are not as simple as connecting things with alligator clips, these are a bit more permanent. Sometimes you need to connect up to four wires at the same time all going to different places, this calls for a pig tail, which is essentially twisting the wires together so they all run to each other and then are capped off. This skill is both technical and requires a knowledge about how electrons will flow, and I really enjoy that.