Would this be a series or parallel setup?

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Just to have a clearer idea of doing the math:

If I use an IGO-W and do a basic build which would be 1 piece of wire wrapped into coil put on one side of the contacts and another piece of wire wrapped into a coil on the opposite side of the contacts, but they are sharing the negative post while connecting to separate positive posts.

Would this be considered a series circuit or would it be considered a parallel circuit?
 

Jerrycat

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If you did it like positive post to coil to coil to negative post, you would have a single stream of current and it would be in series (as in a series of coils in one stream), and what you are describing is a parallel circuit.. because you have a positive post two coils splitting the stream of current and negative post.. Like a river with white water rapids (coils). Series is a single river with two inline white waters while parallel is a single river with a split leading to two separated sets of white water rapids and then converging back, hope this helps :D
 
I had everything all wrong. Apparently the IGO-W has 2 negative posts and 1 central Positive post. So my original question, except reversed:

So this:

circuit.jpg


Would this be a series or parallel?

If I understand what you were saying, even though 2 sets of wires share a positive post and the both wires going through the positive post are touching each other like a full wire, the positive post still "splits" the stream? Which makes it a parallel circuit?
 
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Jerrycat

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Whether one way or the other is irrelevant... the analogy still works.. all the energy is coming from your battery which is one negative terminal and one positive terminal.. your atty just helps you out by splitting the negative for you instead of making you attach two coil leads to one negative post... but Both negative posts you attach to is still attached to the same negative part of your battery so they are actually one negative.. its still parallel. The current (flow) is still being split along it's path.. and of course, when resistances are run parallel, they (as a total atty resistance) are 1/2 the value of each coil (assuming the coils have the exact same resistance which is ideal). Assuming each coil were (hypothetically) 2.4 ohms.. and they were hooked up like you are showing in your diagram, which is part of a simple parallel circuit, your totally atty resistance would be 1.2 ohms.. half of each coil on the circuit..
 

supertrunker

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The reason you build 2 identical coils (or more for that matter) is to try to make sure both coils do an even amount of heating; if they are wildly mismatched (imagine 2Ω one side and 1Ω on the other) they will still work, kinda, but one with the lower resistance will be seeing a lot more voltage from your battery and will heat a lot faster than the other.

You will see on a lot of videos, especially of dual microcoils that people mess about and squeeze them to make them both heat as evenly as possible, at the same time and that is why. Identical coils share evenly.

I have seen mix and match coils of different materials on either side, but you really have to know your stuff to get them to work. I like the stream analogy Jerry.

T
 
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