SORRY ZERO WILL SEE ANY TYPE OF ACTUAL POWER INCREASE FROM THE MOTOR.
This is a known fact, I just cant be drawn into this more than this post this is something for 15 years has been debated on forum to death and the answer has been found. Will it hurt anything not at all so by all means change it over to 240V all mine are converted over.
Below is just one exert from one of the hundreds of papers from people, scientists and companies that have studied it. And a few post on a thread in a forum are not going to wipe out 4 years of my schooling getting a BA in Electronics studying Motors, Electrical and Electronic Circuits and Transform Analysis, the math to go with it and the lab experiments to prove what you are saying just doesn't translate into real power gains.
Now below is a dumbed down explanation, not my words. I guess I can pull the white papers, but it just says the same thing in a far more technical, hard to understand way.
Trying to come up with a scenarios where a user would see a power gain has more to do with everything BUT the MOTOR and going to 240V in itself which is exactly what the many posts already have and will continue to try to state for the people that just do not understand or want to believe there is no power gain. Or prove there are power gains. The motor itself will never produce more power, hopefully everyone can agree on that. The only thing debatable are things the previous poster mentions as length of wire and some other nice points he made that may allow the 240V wired version of the motor to see it's max power using 240V over 120V, but it a very, very small amount and for 99.9% of instances it will not matter.
So yeah we can make up a scenario where 220V will give you more power when a 120V motor is switched over, but that's not reality. You can skip to the last paragraph that I made bold of this post to state a scenario just like that.Even in the worst conditions a 10% increase on a 1.5 HP motor is NOT going to make a difference in cutting anything, especially 2" thick maple.! A 1.5HP motor will never gain .5 HP going from 120 to 240V not even under the worst conditions we can come up with. Most homes and shops are not large enough nor wired poorly enough to encounter these issues..
You won't save moneyA common myth surrounding 240V vs 120V is that the machine now uses only half as much power. Remember, a motor draws a certain amount of current, which is volts multiplied by amps. So if we double the voltage, we cut the amps in half. Unfortunately, the power company measures your electrical usage (and charges you) in watts, not amps. DO we really need get inot power formulas, I think not.
You won't get more powerThere are some motors that do produce more power at higher voltages. Your power tools don't use those motors. Your motor produces the horsepower it's rated for. Really, can you imagine that a company's tool can produce a higher power rating and they wouldn't tell you about it? Your buddies who tell you their saw is more powerful, starts up quicker, etc, are engaging in wishful thinking unless their tool is long way off from the panel box (See "why would you do it" below).
There's no point in "balancing" the legs.One of the stranger justifications I've seen for converting to 240 is that, because it uses both legs, the load is "balanced". The idea is that a 10-amp 120v load puts 10 amps on one leg and nothing on the other. On the other hand, a 5-amp 240V load puts that load of 5 amps on each leg, using a smaller portion of each leg. However, keep in mind that a 100 amp panel allows you 100 amps on each leg, for a total of 200 amps. Since a 240V load uses both legs, you're putting that 5A load on each one. So a 10-amp 120V load uses 5% of your panel's capacity (10/200) while the 5amp also uses 5% of the capacity (5*2/100).
You will cut down on your panel's physical capacityEach 240V circuit breaker takes up two slots in your panel, whereas a 120V breaker only takes one. In most shops, where only one or two high loads run at once, slots for circuits are more of a premium than amps.
You (probably) won't increase your motor's lifeYes, a higher-amp motor runs hotter which cuts the expected lifetime. But we rarely run our equipment long enough for heating to be an issue. And if we cut our motor's service life from 30 years to just 25, is that really worth getting worked up over?
Why would you do it?
There are really only a couple reasons to bother with converting
You can use smaller wires in the circuitThe amperage your motor draws determines the kind of wire you need to run to it. Too high of an amp load will cause the wire to overheat. But larger wires are more expensive, harder to work with, and may not be available. For example, if your motor draws 25 amps @ 120V, rewiring to 240 will drop the load to only 12.5 amps. That means you can use 14/2 wire instead of 10/2, although you should probably use 12/2 to be safe. Of course, that only matters if you're installing a new wire. If you have an existing wire, rewiring for 240V means you can fit a bigger motor onto the same existing wire.
You will lose less power along the way (and you might notice it)If your tool is located quite a ways from the panel box, higher voltages experience less drop during the voyage. Let's look at a fairly typical example. Let's say you have a 120V motor that draws 10 amps. The total wire length to the tool is 50' of 14/2 wire. The voltage drop for that situation would be 3 volts or 2.5 percent. Changing that motor to 240V would reduce the drop to 1.25 percent, in other words completely and totally not noticeable.
If, however, we quadruple that length to 200' we also quadruple the loss, i.e. 10% versus 5%, which now might be noticeable in a 10hp motor, but in the real world NOT anything smaller.
