My foreman in Seattle said 'voltage is pressure, amperage is volume' and it finally clicked for me.

He explained it while we were troubleshooting a low voltage drop on a long run for some landscape lights, and that simple analogy made the whole calculation make way more sense than the textbook definitions ever did.

3 comments

3 Comments

price.alice2mo ago

Geez, @tylerw92 I wish someone had used the garden hose analogy before I nearly melted my own speaker wires trying to figure amps out.

the_james3mo ago

My buddy who works on boats had the same lightbulb moment. He was trying to figure out why a bilge pump motor was struggling at the end of a really long, thin wire run. Someone told him the wire was like a narrow garden hose, the voltage was the water pressure, and the amps were the actual flow. He said it finally made sense why the pump wasn't getting enough push to work right, even though the battery was fine.

tylerw923mo ago

My cousin had that exact issue with his car stereo, @the_james. The amp kept cutting out because the power wire was too skinny and long, basically choking the current. Took us forever to figure it out lol.