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	Subject - phase and neutrals able to swap roles?? Westredd Hi, I have moved to Brazil where they have an odd setup for in the fuse panel. I noticed that for each circuit there are 2 conductors, and both go through seperate circuit breakers. Both are coloured Red so there isnt any effective colour coding in place to determine which is to be used as the neutral and which is live/phase. In England the fuse panel has all the phase conductors going via circuit breakers before going out to circuits, all neutrals on a seperate bar (only for neutrals and coloured black incidently) and a seperate bar for earth conductors.. In Brazil , as they dont use colour coding for their conductrors, each pair of conductors will be swapping roles between acting as the phase and neutral roles around the circuit, depending on how it was wired at sockets and lighting points. I am curious to understadn how this works. My theory main question is as follows..: Is it that as the AC waveform passes through the negative side, it acts as a neutral conductor and as it passes to the positive side it becomes a live/phase conductor? thanks West skynrd Measure your voltage to ground if one is a true neutral it should read close to zero and the one reading high would be your hot.If the system is not grounded properly you probably won't get the full voltage reading on the hot leg. lctrc789 Westredd, to answer your qusestion on the common sine wave for a/c circuits, no, the neutral has nothing to do with the wave itself... A sine wave is created by the rotating of the generator it has a total of 360 degrees electrically speaking... It does reach a peak positive voltage at 90 degrees returns to a value of 0 at 180 degrees and a peak maximum negative voltage at 270 degrees and returns to 0 at 360 degrees. The number of complete cycles it has or occur in a second is called a freqeuncy and it is measured in Hz... 60 Hz or 50 Hz as examples.. The neutral is part of the a/c circuit that completes the circuit to its path in a 120 volt circuit so to speak it must complete the loop to work. Hope this has helped..... lucky1122 Think of a coil comming off of a transformer that produces a voltage of 240 volts . If I take a voltmeter across the wires eminating from that coil I'll read 240 volts . In this type system when the one wire maxes out positive the other will be negative and vice versa. Now if I tap the center of the coil I now will have 120v from the outer wires to the center wire . If all three wires are present then that center wire becomes a neutral wire that is the relationship that it has to the outer wires