What do the following electrical ratings mean on a digital timer?

Question

I recently purchased a digital timer to connect my outdoor holiday lights. Reading the fine print on the back of the timer it says not to exceed electrical ratings.

Here are the electrical ratings:
125VAC, 8A resistive
125VAC, 600 Tungsten

I can find the voltage information for all of my holiday lights, but I do not how much voltage this timer can handle.

Can anybody provide me with basic information as to how much voltage this timer can handle? I want to make sure I do not overload the timer.

Correction: It should be 600W Tungsten.

Answer 1

You are not talking about the right concern. Voltage is a fixed number. You need to understand the 3 components of electricity:

Voltage is force that moves the electricity (in Volts)
Current is the measure of electricity moved (in Amps)
Power = Voltage * Amps (in Watts)

So if you know how many Watts your lights are, you just work backwards to the current load. Your outlet will have a breaker that trips at 15 Amps. Bu this timer can only handle 8 Amps and your Voltage is likely 115 - 120V. So your max Watts is 120 * 8 * = 960 Watts. The lights should have a Wattage rating on the box if they are new.

Tungsten lights are slightly different, and should only have a max loading of 600 Watts for this timer, but you won't likely have any tungsten holiday lights.

Happy holidays!

Answer 2

Every body said something interesting and mostly correct
Six lamps might exceed 600watts
A kettle usually is 2000watts
An air Drier although it might be indicated as only 800watt it migh burn it out because of the Power Factor.

Whatever you are going to control with that timer better be less than 600 watts.
Not many countries in the world use a voltage as low as 125VAC

Answer 3

The voltage is not the problem but the wattage. This timer can only handle 600W. Look at the lights and add all the wattage of the lamps together to get the total wattage and that should not exceed the rating of the timer. If the wattage is not written on the lamps itself look on the packaging of the lamps.

Answer 4

Without going too much into AC circuit behaviors.... depending on what you are connecting to your timer, it has different ratings. This is because of something called "power factor" and "in-rush current."

If you have a pure constnat resistive load, which rarely exist in real life, it can handle 125Volts at 8Amps. That makes it 1000 watts capacity.

When you have other kinds of load, you have less. With a tungsten kind of load (which includes all lamps other than hallogen and flourecent), you have up to 600 watts.

This is because when the lights are OFF, it has lower resistance, so for a very short period of time, when it is turned on, (less than one second), it draws more current.

Your question is actually not right. It can handle 125 volt VOLTAGE. It can handle up to 600 watts in POWER. Your limit is in watts.

Answer 5

You will be fine. The device is built for 125V, that's your line voltage, unless you live in Europe. And your Christmas lights won't use 8A, unless you are going all Christmas crazy on them.