Why are houses wired with parallel circuits?
Houses are generally wired in parallel rather than series circuits for a couple of reasons. Think of the series circuits on old Christmas tree lights. If one light bulb doesn’t work, none of the lights will come on, because all the electricity has to flow through each light bulb in sequence. A broken filament in one bulb creates an open circuit and the electricity can’t flow. Another problem with series wiring is that as we extend the circuit, adding more lights, each light we add makes the other lights dimmer. That’s because we’re increasing the total linear resistance in the circuit. The voltage is fixed, so as the resistance increases, the current flow must decrease. Neither of these are desirable situations and, therefore, our houses are wired in parallel. Electricity has several paths it can follow from the energy source to ground. Even with several light fixtures controlled by one switch, the light fixtures are in parallel. If one light bulb burns out, electricity still flows thr
