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Why is higher voltage lower amps

Kelly Marie Angel

This question mite be unanswerable  but here goes we all know that if you gave say 1 Kw at 110 volts it's about 10 amps but 1 Kw at 240 volts is about 4 amps what I was wondering is why?  Amps is the flow of current so how can you have less flow doing the same work?  That's my real question. As always not to heavy on the maths please cheers all Kelly

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  • To possibly add to your confusion with another analogy, if you consider an electrical circuit as being a system of carrying buckets of energy round the circuit to get that energy from one place (the source) to another (the load).

    How fast the energy is being moved overall is the power (in Watts).  The current is how many buckets per second go round the circuit, and the voltage is how big the buckets are.  The total power is therefore what you get when you multiply how many buckets per second go round, by how big the buckets are - Power = current x voltage.

    Therefore if your buckets are 2 and a bit times bigger (240V vs 110V) you only need to move them a bit less than half as fast to get the same resulting power.

    The maths/physics bit follows - so stop reading now if you prefer:

    Power (in Watts) = Joules (energy) per second; Voltage = Joules per Coulomb (Coulomb is a bucket in this analogy); Current = Coulombs per second.

    Power = Voltage x current.  Power = (Joules per Coulomb) x (Coulombs per second) = Joules per second. 

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  • To possibly add to your confusion with another analogy, if you consider an electrical circuit as being a system of carrying buckets of energy round the circuit to get that energy from one place (the source) to another (the load).

    How fast the energy is being moved overall is the power (in Watts).  The current is how many buckets per second go round the circuit, and the voltage is how big the buckets are.  The total power is therefore what you get when you multiply how many buckets per second go round, by how big the buckets are - Power = current x voltage.

    Therefore if your buckets are 2 and a bit times bigger (240V vs 110V) you only need to move them a bit less than half as fast to get the same resulting power.

    The maths/physics bit follows - so stop reading now if you prefer:

    Power (in Watts) = Joules (energy) per second; Voltage = Joules per Coulomb (Coulomb is a bucket in this analogy); Current = Coulombs per second.

    Power = Voltage x current.  Power = (Joules per Coulomb) x (Coulombs per second) = Joules per second. 

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