My sympathies to you, Cube... yah, we all have a tendency to sell our souls to the devil for companionship, what the heck, that's how things work.. i think some men are encouraged by other men that this is cool way of talking.. (maybe to themselves, but they forgot we don't care to hear their editorial comments!)... my ex had a mild form of the same and he was SHOCKED that a colleague had gently ribbed him for being a sexist becuase he didn't think he was.... so if more guys would nudge each other to say "hey, that's NOT cool".. maybe it would happen less.. I get annoyed if I'm talking to a man and his eyes are roaming to every woman who is passing.... message I get is taht they are not listening to me... sometimes I will say something like "is everything ok? you seem distracted"... it's rude behavior.... a small amount of it, ok, i can also be distracted by things passing in the foreground, but it can get really distracting if you are trying to talk to someone who is totally distracted! The way I once handled a situation -- I had been told that if I was as pretty as this particular celebrity, then my guy would have bought me ten of the same type of cute baseball hat as she was wearing... I was shocked... I told him I expected the hat in the mail ASAP.... he never made another such remark again.. (it never worked out between us....and I don't feel bad about it).

I am just borrowing terms from them Please don't; it confuses things when you use nonstandard terms. What you mean by breaker handles tied That means the handles are mechanically joined, so they can't operate separately. If one trips, the other opens. If one is shut off, the other is too. Thus, they work like a double-pole breaker, which may also be used. I have kept his weird labelling scheme for now. What you did was OK except that the ground should be connected to the box (if it's metallic). You also could have fitted a properly sized double pole breaker to the panel, and connected the hots to it. You'd also have needed to pigtail the neutrals so removing one of the recepts wouldn't break it. Am I going to find other surprises in my wiring Probably. Almost every house I've ever lived in has had some (usually unpleasant) wiring surprises. Sometimes it's pros, but I suspect that more often it's DIYs. DIY wiring has been around for a long time, and too many DIYers don't learn code or proper techniques before plowing ahead.

This forum software confuses me, so I'll just reply to everyone at once. "Are there no labels on this compressor?" Yes, it's labeled 15A. I thought I included that but may have forgotten it. Thanks for the info. "If you change the breaker, you need to change the wire." Right, I understand that. What I should've said is install wire capable of carrying 30A and start by installing a 15A breaker, then size up if needed. I'd planned on going a wire size up once I determine what the size I need is anyway, since from what I've gathered there is no reason not to do that, and if I ever need to repurpose the circuit, I can install a larger breaker if needed. As far as the amps question, I think I understand the answers. I guess what I wasn't getting is that measuring the two legs of a 240V circuit independently wouldn't mean anything because without both legs together, it isn't a 240V circuit. What I was asking is akin to if you installed two 20A single pole breakers right above/below one another and connected each to a 120V receptacle, you would have two 20A circuits, so total 40A. If you connected both of those to a 240V receptacle, then you would have a 240V receptacle, but the amperage would still only be 20A since the voltage has changed. I know that wouldn't be safe because 240V circuits breakers need to be tied together so if one trips they both trip, and I'm probably not wording that right, but that's what my original question was about. I just didn't get that the amperage doesn't add when you have two 20A breakers because the voltage also changes. It's my understanding that a 240V breaker is no different than two single pole breakers except for the bar that ties them together so they trip together, so my analogy seemed reasonable to me. As far as your answer regarding wire size being governed by current, I understand that, but what I was saying is that I see multiple different wire sizes for the same voltage, current, distance and conductor material when I look at different charts. When you say a 14A circuit needs 14 gauge wire, I assume that could change depending on if the length of the circuit is 25' vs 250'? Maybe it would be easier if I just tell you exactly what I have. 1) Compressor - labeled 15A on the motor. Wire distance from load center about 35'. 2) Table saw - Delta Unisaw model 36-829. Wire distance to receptacle, approx 45', with a 10' 12 gauge extension cord from receptacle to tool. The manual says "A separate electrical circuit should be used for your machine. This circuit should not be less than #12 wire and should be protected with a 20 Amp time lag fuse" 3) Band saw - Grizzly model # G0513X2. Specifications say it draws 10A at 220V or 20A at 110V. I have mine wired for 220V. The wire distance from the load center is approx 35'. These three items are what I am trying to determine wire size for.

Suppose you're the purchaser for a nationwide chain of cheap tool stores (I'm not naming names partly because I'm speculating wildly). A vendor offers you a deal on breakers for a common panel - one-third of the usual wholesale price. You can price them at 40% less than the regular shelf price and still make more profit. Everybody wins! Uh, maybe not. The vendor got them from a broker for a Chinese sweatshop. The broker shipped over a breaker and asked the Chinese company to copy it. (Happens all the time.) The copies were supposed to sell at one-third the price of the genuine article. Chinese labor's cheap, and since it's a copy, design costs are practically nil. So it should be easy for the sweatshop operator to make a profit on this deal. But the sweatshop's operator was a little greedy. He decided he could make even more profit by cutting corners on the copy's molding. So instead of making a new mold, he had his moldmakers tinker with something similar and get it sort-of-close to the right shape and size. Or maybe he just told them to skip the QA and get on with the next job. To the broker, the vendor, and the store buyer, the breakers look just like the other ones on the shelf. They might even say "Made in USA" on the copied stamping! But they fit just a bit funny. And the guts are definitely different - but again nobody sees that. Until the insurance adjuster figures out what caused the fire. By that time the store's stock is gone and the buyer has left the company. The broker is working under a different name halfway across the country. The sweatshop is now making cheap gas generators and has no record of ever having made breakers. So what can the adjuster do? Did it happen that way? Probably not. As I say, it's all speculation. Still, similar things happen every day, and not just overseas. After all, it was an American automaker that decided it was cheaper to pay off lawsuits over fatal accidents than to fix a defective design. How many people died? We don't know, because they settled most of the cases out of court. The dollar is here and now, and a person's life is an abstract concept sometimes half a world away, all too easy to ignore.