Hot Water Heater

[Buzz]

I want to hook up an electric hot water heater. Must I wire a disconnect at the heater itself for service purposes or can I hard wire it directly from the breaker?

Could I also use 10/2 w/ground romex for the hook up? The unit is rated at 3800 watts.

[Wgoodrich]

Yes and Yes IF !

Your water heater is required a form of disconnect within sight of that water heater. Now if your panel containing the breaker that will shut off your water heater is within sight of your water heater then you may use that breaker in that panel that is within sight of that water heater as your form of disconnect. If you water heater is not in sight of your panel then a disconnect must be installed within sight of that water heater.

A water heater uses no neutral conductor so yes a 10/2wGrnd may be used reidentifying that white wire with black identification tape showing it is a hot wire connected to that 30 amp double pole 240 volt breaker.

Good luck

Wg

[burnjob]

why is it that a water heater uses no white (neutral) wire ? ... doesn't there have to be a return circuit as after doing the work of heating there may be no voltage but there are still electrons that need to return to from where they came ... or do the two power leads somehow perform the fucntion of providing the return path for each other ?
thanks

[dkerr]

with a device that only uses 220v , and does not require any 110 v usage, then a neutral is not required. the main wires coming in from the power company feed has two hot wires and one neutral wire. the 2 hot wires are 180 deg our of phase, giving you the return path. between the 2 main incoming hots is 220v between any one hot and the neutral is 110v. Think of it like a transformer that has a center tap , you have a output winding, 3 connections , one wire at the output of each end of the winding, and an output wire that is taped to the center (half way between one end of the winding and the other) now the voltage if you connect from one end to the other end of teh output winding will likely if twice the voltage that there would be if you connect at the center tap wire to either of the end wires of the winding. Now when dealing with the power company that transformer is on the street pole or in an electrical box somewhere on your street.

I noticed that your location is in Canada, we are planing on covering and writing articles on the Canadian code, which we will have on the www.homewiringandmore.com site sometime in 2003.

[burnjob]

excellent answer ... thank you very much ... you are obviously very experienced and knowledgeable ... so want to try my other post and see if you can come up with something for that ? ... hope you can help
the post is "mysterious voltage"
thanks