My dad once told me that he had to find the circuit breaker that corresponded to a particular wire and because we have around 60 circuit breakers in our house, he had to flick one off, run down and check the wire, run back up, flick the next circuit breaker off, and do that quite a lot of times.
In that moment, I got to explain binary search to him and he was genuinely interested. 🙃
Oh, well, you switch off half the fuses, then you go check the wire.
Let’s say the wire still has power on it, so now you know that none of the fuses in that half affected it (which you can turn back on now).
Then you do the same thing again with the other half of the fuses, i.e. you switch off half of the fuses in that half and go check the wire.
Now, let’s say the wire is dead, so now you know that the fuse you want is in this quarter.
So, then you flick off half of the fuses in that quarter and check the wire again, and so on.
With every step, you eliminate half of the remaining fuses, so for 60 fuses, you need at most 6 steps (which is the logarithm for base 2 of 60).
Once you figure out which one it is, label it! I labeled all the breakers in my panel when I moved in to my house, as half of the existing labels were wrong (no idea why).
Why are so many mislabeled though? It’s not like the loads are being changed every day. I had two breakers labeled “dishwasher” and neither of them were the dishwasher!
My dad once told me that he had to find the circuit breaker that corresponded to a particular wire and because we have around 60 circuit breakers in our house, he had to flick one off, run down and check the wire, run back up, flick the next circuit breaker off, and do that quite a lot of times.
In that moment, I got to explain binary search to him and he was genuinely interested. 🙃
My friend has some upcoming electrical work in his house, can you explain how to use binary search in this instance so I can tell him?
Oh, well, you switch off half the fuses, then you go check the wire.
Let’s say the wire still has power on it, so now you know that none of the fuses in that half affected it (which you can turn back on now).
Then you do the same thing again with the other half of the fuses, i.e. you switch off half of the fuses in that half and go check the wire.
Now, let’s say the wire is dead, so now you know that the fuse you want is in this quarter.
So, then you flick off half of the fuses in that quarter and check the wire again, and so on.
With every step, you eliminate half of the remaining fuses, so for 60 fuses, you need at most 6 steps (which is the logarithm for base 2 of 60).
Once you figure out which one it is, label it! I labeled all the breakers in my panel when I moved in to my house, as half of the existing labels were wrong (no idea why).
That’s the case with virtually every breaker box.
Why are so many mislabeled though? It’s not like the loads are being changed every day. I had two breakers labeled “dishwasher” and neither of them were the dishwasher!
I have only six circuits and both of my recent electricians checked and labelled each circuit. I must have had good luck in sparkies