How To Multiple 120 VAC sources

[prodago]

OK this may be an extremely stupid question which would not be surprising coming from me. But would it be possible to split the 120vac 3 ways or two ways or four ways whatever before the oven and then connect coil elements one per 120 V leg?

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Yes, that is a parallel circuit. Use the formula for parallel resistance to figure out the coil size needed to do this. Running four equal size coils in parallel will drop the resistance to 1/4 of what each coil is. Four 50-ohm coils will act as one 12.5-ohm coil. Remember that this increases the amperage by a factor of 4. If each coil would draw 5 amps, the combination will draw 20 amps.

The way this is usually done is to have a common buss (terminal strip) at each end of the coils, with the 120VAC on the busses. You want a ceramic buss with high temp stainless screws/clamps.

Run in series, the resistance is additive.

 

[prodago]

OK this may be an extremely stupid question which would not be surprising coming from me. But would it be possible to split the 120vac 3 ways or two ways or four ways whatever before the oven and then connect coil elements one per 120 V leg?

 

[Cushing H.]

OK this may be an extremely stupid question which would not be surprising coming from me. But would it be possible to split the 120vac 3 ways or two ways or four ways whatever before the oven and then connect coil elements one per 120 V leg?

Its not clear what you mean by connect the elements "one per 120 volt leg"? Are you thinking about feeding the thing from multiple plugs? If so, then what stacy says applies, and this is just like taking a single plug input and splitting it.

UNLESS the plugs are on different circuit breakers (ie different circuits), in which case you have the opportunity to increase the total amperage going to the oven ... but that would get really complicated, needing separate SSR's, isolation of one circuit from another, etc.