A public (sometimes private) utility generates electricity and sends it to your home through overhead or underground wires called service conductors. At your home, the electricity goes through a meter, usually attached to the outside of the house, into the main, service entrance panel (SEP).
The meter measures how much electricity your home uses during a certain period and you are charged accordingly. At the service entrance panel, which contains a main fuse or a main circuit breaker or a fuse/breaker system, the electricity is divided into branch circuits. The fuses or breakers protect these individual circuits.
The branch circuits supply safe electrical power to the various rooms in your home: kitchen, bathrooms, living areas, bedrooms, and so on. Each circuit is protected by its own fuse or circuit breaker and is independent of the others. That is why, when something causes one circuit to fail with a blown fuse or tripped breaker, the remaining circuits are unaffected and continue to supply power to the other rooms.
Electricity, as used in your home, is the rapid flow of energy transmitted by electrons. The flow must make a complete circuit from the utility's generating station, along the lines to your home, through your household circuits, back to the utility. The force that moves the energy is called voltage. The flow itself is called current. In alternating current, current reverses the direction of the flow of electricity constantly, 120 times a second. Each set of to-and-fro reversals constitutes a cycle. Alternating current features 60 cycles a second. Thus, we speak of 120- or 240-volt, 60-cycle alternating current (AC).
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