Delmar's Standard Guide to Transformers

Rating:
Summary: A super book for transformer users!
Review: Delmar's Standard Guide to Transformers (or DSGT) is definitely worth owning.

It's a book targeted at vocational school students, but valuable to anyone that uses, installs, specifies, or services transformers. Every idea the book's text attempts to convey is supplemented by a drawing, photo, or illustration. The author left his ego out of the pages; at no point did I every feel talked down to nor did I detect any hint of academic condescension. Not to oversell the product, scientists and transformer company engineer/designers probably won't benefit as much, for the book is decidedly slanted to the users of transformers, not the makers of them.

After reading DSGT, transformers will be real to you, not just an abstract concept. The book begins with the basics of magnetism and a painless review of electrical theory, then starts building on that foundation. Unlike many EE text books that contain mostly page after page of verbiage and equations, this book has many large photos and detailed cut-aways of real transformers: tiny, small, medium, large, and enormous. Photos are numerous, all high-quality, professionally shot of every kind of transformer...but one.

This is a mild criticism, no photo is included of a common dry-type transformer of 30-60 KVA transformer very commonly found in most businesses and industrial settings. I would also liked to have seen a reproduction of a sample manufacturer's transformer data plate from this same size and type of transformer along with an explanation of how to read it.

After finishing the section on autotransformers, I was impressed by the depth of my personal ignorance and misconception on that subject!. The coverage of single-phase systems is quite good and 3-phase systems especially good. The most complete and concentrated collection of transformer interconnection schemes I've yet found is in this book.