Since 1995, I have produced an energy management system (www.micrometer.com) that itemizes electricity usage in buildings. In 1996 I had a government grant that provided access, among other things, to three-phase power (a high-octane form of electricity) for testing. Again I have a need for this (3-phase) and it is not installed on my premises. The utility was willing to provide it but the county permit office would not allow it. At first they objected to the 3-phase but couldn't sustain that objection. Then they objected to the "testing" (like anyone would even know or care). It turned out to be easier to invent a tech solution than to fight city hall.

Long the bane of audiophiles' equipment, I sought a sixty-cycle hum. A precise, undistorted hum in two stereo channels with a 120-degree phase shift in one. I used my pc soundcard to generate exactly this. Amplified with today's high-powered phatbass equipment, I could produce a kilowatt, or so. All I needed to do then, was transform it to the standard 120 volts and sum the outputs to give me a three-phase wye. A regular house has 120 volts on two sides of neutral that add up to 240 volts. A three-phase wye gives 120 volts on each of 3 legs to neutral. Between any two legs, however, is only 208 volts (due to the vector addition sin(L) + sin(R) = 2 sin(L/2 + R/2) cos(L/2 - R/2)). The power actually rotates in the phases and never stops like the single-phase zero-crossings. This is why it is so efficient.

After burning the sound to a CD, I am free of the computer. Just a cheap CD player, a big amp and a matched set of four transformers will do the job of lighting lamps and running small appliances under controlled, and monitored conditions to collect test data. Pictures and .wav files are available at the above website. It would be fun to see the county inspector's reaction, but I don't want them nitpicking me on anything else.