How far can I go before the breaker trips?

Even though I've spent some time searching at Yahoo.com and on this website, I still can't seem to find the answer to this one simple question. As you probably know, the typical household circuit breaker has a time delay feature that prevents it from tripping if the circuit is only overloaded for a short time. I did find a webpage about some industrial breaker that would trip in 30 minutes at 135% of it's rated capacity. But I don't know how applicable this would be to a typical residential breaker. Does anybody know where I can find a chart or graph or anything on this subject?

Robert

 

Breaker manufacturers in their technical literature publish a chart showing how long before a breaker trips as a function of amperage. Slight overloads of a fraction of an amp can take days to trip the breaker (thermal trip). Dead shorts produce thousands of amps and trip the breaker in milliseconds (magnetic trip). If you visit the web site of your favorite breaker manufacturer, you can probably find the graph for various breakers.

 

I already went to the Siemens and Cutler Hammer websites to no avail. Certainly, there must be some kind of electrical code governing the circumstances under which a circuit breaker must trip?

Robert

 

Just when I was about to give up, I found this.

http://www.cutlerhammer.com/unsecure/cms1/29160930.PDF

Robert