Circuit Breaker Poles

 

Poles are the number of completely separate circuits that can be simultaneously protected by a circuit breaker. Carling Technologies circuit breakers come in single pole construction or can be built together into multi-unit or multi-pole assemblies.

Carling Technologies offers 1 to 2 pole construction (M-Series, Q-Series), 1 to 3 pole construction (A-Series Rocker, F-Series),1 to 4-pole construction (D-Series), and 1-6 pole construction (A-Series Handle, B-Series, C-Series, E-Series).

Multi-Pole Breakers

The poles on Carling's multi-pole circuit breakers are electrically isolated, but mechanically linked, designed with a "common trip" linkage that ensures that if one pole trips in the breaker, the other poles in the breaker will trip simultaneously. The most common multi-pole application is to protect and break both sides of a circuit: the wire to, and the wire back from the load. In this application, both poles of a two-pole breaker are identical. Similarly, a three-pole breaker can be used to break all three wires of the three-phase circuit.

Dissimilar Multi-Pole Breakers

Multi-pole breakers can also be made up of dissimilar poles and can control multiple circuits. For example you may have an application where one breaker protects a compressor and another protects a cooling fan. These breakers, at dissimilar ratings, might be combined into a single two-pole breaker so that if one breaker trips, it would automatically trip the other. In fact, these two breakers could be further combined with a third breaker pole containing a voltage coil that would provide the capability to remotely trip the three pole breaker.

For dissimilar multi-pole breakers, Carling assigns special catalog numbers that fall outside the convention of our standard catalog-ordering scheme. However, you can still configure a valid dissimilar pole construction using our on-line Configurit.

Dual Coil

Dual coil construction is also available, where a circuit breaker has two coils in the space of one pole. Contact your Carling Technologies Sales Representative for available dual coil options.

Trip Free Mechanism

All Carling Technologies' circuit breakers are designed with an internal trip-free mechanism, a safety feature making it impossible to manually hold the contacts closed during overcurrent or fault conditions. So even if an actuator is forcibly held in the ON position, the breaker will trip under the appropriate conditions. Because our multi-pole circuit breaker tripping mechanisms are mechanically linked internally and not controlled by the actuator during overcurrent conditions, Carling Technologies does not allow the "ganging" of two or more single pole circuit breakers using handle ties to create a multi-pole circuit breaker.