3211: Amperage

Amperage

|< < Prev #3211 (February 23, 2026)

Title text: Oh, and do you have any tips on how to vacuum up copper that's melted into your carpet?

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Explanation

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Cueball explains to Ponytail how he has modified some parts of his house's wiring to avoid having power to his appliances interrupted on account of overcurrent conditions from running too many appliances at once. In many places around the world there is a main breaker limiting the maximum current available to properties with common limits being 60A, 100A or 200A. Individual circuits afterwards will have breakers that limit the maximum current to usually something between 10-32 amperes. 15-20A is a common breaker size for circuits powering outlets in the US, 32A is the common breaker size in the UK, and 10-16A is standard in mainland Europe. Cueball however is somehow managing to draw 10,000 amps from his power company, and has also updated his breaker board to allow his wall sockets to draw 500 amps of power. Both numbers are absurdly high — far more than any consumer appliance could need, and, as Cueball soon admits, enough power to cause fire hazards. This is also emphasized in the title text, which shows that Cueball has actually tried out his new arrangement and it has melted the copper inside the cables and outlets onto the carpet, and he is now looking for ways to clean it up.

Cueball's reasoning for this is equally absurd: he is frustrated by his circuit breakers. Circuit breakers exist to prevent more current from flowing through wires than is expected. A tripped breaker is caused by either a short circuit down the line or by the user trying to draw too much power at once. A tripped circuit breaker is an easy fix, but it means whatever you were trying to power on that circuit has been interrupted, which is apparently too much for Cueball. Preventing a circuit breaker from tripping, either by soldering wire into the fusebox in place of the fuses or (in Cueball's case) by placing breakers rated at excessively high amperages, defeats this safety mechanism, meaning a fault such as a short circuit is much more likely to become a house fire. The end result is that Cueball has designed an extremely dangerous system with a high level of overkill in order to enable more of his own mistakes and prevent minor nuisances from slowing him down.

Additionally, while Cueball has stated he has changed the service he receives from the local utility company and the ratings of his breakers, he has not stated he has changed the wiring in his house to the outlets. Typical wires for outlets in the US are between 14 and 10 AWG, rated between 15 and 30 amps. In the UK it would likely be a Twin Core and Earth 2.5mm² cable rated for 32A. If he has appliances drawing anywhere near 500 amps, he will most likely melt the wires both inside his walls and inside his appliances and start a fire, even if there is no fault. Cueball is actually aware of this, but rather than put up with normal levels of power he's now trying to find more durable cords and wires that can handle the excessive load.

The amount of electrical power you can use in your house depends on both the voltage and the maximum current you're allowed to draw. The latter is usually protected and limited by multiple breakers both in your home and at the local substation. In the US where the nominal frequency is 120V a 15A breaker would, for example, get you a maximum of 1800 watts of power (current multiplied by the voltage). In countries where 230V is more common, a similarly sized breaker would get you a maximum of around 3500 watts. If you decrease the voltage you can still get the same power by increasing the current drawn, for example to get 3500 watts in the US on 120V, you would need to draw around 30A - double the original amount. Higher currents induce higher resistance in lines, meaning they would need a larger wire to safely draw the power without them overheating and catching fire. Transmission lines solve the problem by transforming the power to a higher voltage (a 400kV (400,000 volts) line transmitting a maximum of 10 amps can still theoretically give out 4 million watts of power without needing excessively thick cables). Conversely, decreasing the voltage means that you need more current drawn for the same amount of power (for example, to get 3500 watts from a 12V car battery you need to draw almost 300 amperes, something that would need really thick wires not to overheat).

The comic might be a reference to a recent video posted by youtuber styropyro where connects 400 car batteries and does various experiements, including popping a 600 amps fuse. While the voltage on a car battery is only 12V (or 24V in some cases) they allow drawing very high amounts of current to provide enough power for the starter engine to turn - drawing 500 amps and more for a short period of time is not uncommon. While power wise these would only amount to around 6kW of power (12V * 500A), the higher current requires the cabling to be thick enough not to overheat even for the short amount of time this draw is used (until the starter engine has turned on the main engine, on a modern car and in warm weather this should be around a second at most). In the video styropyro is however connecting 400 of these, that would allow both a higher voltage (when connecting them in series) and a higher current draw (when connecting them in parallel), which he both uses to get the desired setup for his experiments. He does use not just very thick cables but also large pieces of thick metal as well to make sure the setup itself doesn't break because of the high currents involved.

Transcript

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Discussion

Seems like this would be at least tangentially related to the Cursed Connectors series, although it's just the outlets and cords this time. Zakator (talk) 05:51, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

I would assume that this is related to styropyro's latest video? 142.126.42.193 05:59, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

I’ll second the comment about the new styropyro video; it seems very likely that it inspired Randall to make this comic and is probably worth a mention. 2607:FB91:829C:47BD:C826:B8DB:5A5E:913A 07:50, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

200 amps is NOT "an amount of electricity power"; The amp is a unit of electrical current, from which power can be derived by multiplying by voltage.2001:8003:7087:E602:3CBE:B25:5BFC:61BD 07:41, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

The current explanation seems to assume that Cueball is aware in advance of some of the problems his scheme is likely to cause, and is trying to forestall them. That seems unlikely - it's Cueball after all. It's far more likely that he has already melted all his wiring (and ruined his carpet), but just considers that a new engineering challenge to overcome. 82.13.184.33 09:28, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
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