Schneider Solutions

QO Loadcentres and Circuit Breakers

Stab-Lok Loadcentres and Circuit Breakers

Electricity generated by utilities is delivered to your neighborhood through high voltage power lines.  Voltages as high as 13800 volts are reduced with transformers to more usable levels before entering your home or business.  A typical home in Canada requires two 120 circuits with a neutral, that when used separately can be used to power most small appliances and when combined for 240 volts can be used to power larger appliances such as stoves and clothes dryers.

Once the high voltage is reduced to a the more usable 120/240 volt levels, the electricity is brought to your home using wires called service drop conductors.  The service drop conductors connect to your home through a watt-hour meter usually located on an outside wall. This meter is used by the utility to measure the amount of electricity used in the home and of course, bills you accordingly.

The electricity can now enter your house. The wires that leave the meter and enter your house are called service entrance conductors. This makes sense when you find out the area where the wires from the meter enter a house is called the service entrance.

Now that the electricity is in the house, through the service entrance conductors, the conductors are most commonly inserted into a load center.

The load center is the hub of electrical power in your home. Load centers take the electricity from the utility and distributes it throughout your house.  The following definition comes from the Fundamentals of Electricity course at the Schneider Training Institute:

"A load center is an electrical distribution device that is used to divide the incoming electricity into a number of branch circuits that provide electrical power to various rooms, appliances, equipment, etc.
It provides a framework for attaching branch circuit breakers, which provide manual on/off control and automatic protection from overload and short circuit conditions."

How Do I Control all that Electricity?