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Question:

fuses protect what?circuit breakers,equipment,wire,or people?

circuit breakers,equipment,wire,or people

Answer:

Fuses, standard circuit breakers and the like, unless -extremely- carefully designed are made to protect real-estate, no more. Not even a GFIC device is 100% effective nor are any of them designed to protect against stupidity. If one deliberately inserts one's self into a circuit, one will be injured. There are certain types of fuses (and breakers) that are designed to protect equipment - an example of such is the dual-element fuse that can sustain a high surge on start-up, but will fail at 'design' amps after that surge. There are breakers that are similarly designed. No fuse can be a ground-fault device. But, the bottom line is that fuses are load-based and are designed to fail based on a function (also designed) of excess-load-over-time. A very small excess load will be tolerated for a much longer time than a dead-short (infinite load), as extreme examples. And fuses are more-or-less sized to the wire feeding from them and its theoretical capacity. So it may be argued in a full discussion that fuses are to protect real-estate first, wire second, and in a few deliberately and carefully matched cases the equipment attached to the wire. As fuses are 100% load based, they cannot protect people unless their maximum design load is less than 1/4 watt at 10,000 ohms (what a human being equates to as a resistor).
All of the above. Fuses are actually circuit breakers. If there is a surge of power (common during an electirical storm) they are designed to break and create a separtion between the elctric wires and the appliances they power. This prevents the power surge from damaging the appliance as well as prevents the surge from causing injury to the person using the appliance.
Fuses protect against short circuits but need to be replaced when they blow. Circuit breakers trip to protect against short circuits and can be reset once the problem is fixed. A corollary of Murphy's law for electronics states that the most expensive, difficult to access and unobtainable component will protect both circuit breakers and fuses by blowing first.
A fuse is a circuit breaker. But they are to protect, the equipment from damaging current, the wires from catching fire, and people. So they are used for all 3.
A fuse protects wire from an overload of ampacity, this can prevent fires and it prevents shorts in the system as well. So if you have a short it protects the equipment as well as wire but it can protect people from fires if there is short and a fire. so in essence of your question it protects all of the above in way or another. Some breakers in some cases are protected by a fuse such as in motor or motor controls as well. There are several different type of fuses in the feid today form ow voltage to high voltage fuses and different types too.

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