first of all there is not such thing as 2 phases… 1 phase or 3 phase to your phase comment
2nd like i said a Smart switch that is wifi is a usless unreliable device
3rd if you own a generic generator you already know that it Reads L1 and L2 in case one of them is faulty as you do not want your Generator starting if L1 is powered and L2 isnt then you can report a Fault or you read across the 2 terminals and if you dont get 200v or above then you can tell HA there is a fault
Um not exactly true…It’s just not used anymore in what you are focused on. I blame Canada for the term, but I am fairly certain THIS argument stems from language difference with term 2 Phase
“3-phase” as used here is an American term. The rest of the world uses “two-phase”.
True three-phase would be a delta arrangement, but you would never see a delta circuit in a home. It’s mostly used on ships, aircraft and some heavy industries.
If this can happen then you have a really crappy controller.
What? Did you mean “2-phase as used here is an American term. The rest of the world uses split-phase.”? That sentence would make sense.
Let me give a little (very simplified) primer for everyone:
In a generator, there’s a magnet spinning on an axle. Around it, you can mount any number of windings, each one generates a phase. However, few arrangements make sense, and effectively only a single arrangement is actually used: 3 windings, giving you 3 phases. And because arranging 3 things around a circle places them 120° apart, the phases are also 120° apart in time as the rotor spins around.
Now, 3 windings give you six wires. Easy to imagine, isn’t it? But that’s the nice thing about having 3 phases; you can connect one wire from each winding together and call that “neutral”. And with that, 4 wires are enough to transport 3-phase power. You will find exactly this all over the whole electricity grid.
Next, we want to connect houses to the grid. There are 3 ways to do that:
“3-phase”. The house gets all 4 wires. Easy and direct. Continental Europe often uses this for residential houses, and commercial properties are connected this way all over the world.
“1-phase”. The house gets the neutral and one of the phases. Still easy, but the house only gets 1/3 of the power the line could deliver. Still plenty…usually. UK uses this for residential connections.
“The Murican Way”. You still only connect one phase, but you add a transformer that splits the single phase into two phases that are mirrored and introduces a new, artificial, local neutral. You get 120V (or 110, 115, 125) between each of the phases and neutral, and 240V (or 220, 230, 250) between the two phases. Also known as “2-phase” (which it technically isn’t as the phases are mirrored instead of offset) or “split-phase”.