Thank you guys for the kind responses. Word of this install didn't come to me directly from the customer but through a co-worker so I didn't get much info. After some thought, and now I see others thinking the same, is a concern, or wonder rather, what size the service is in this situation. If he only has 120v coming in, in all likelihood it couldn't be that big, what, 60a tops? I'm not too worried though about this guy's predicament though, he's not a customer of mine, but the fact that I didn't/don't know much about auto transformers, which led me to the title of this thread. After eight years in the trade (Residential, commercial, industrial) I've never had to use one, thus my limited knowledge on this item. Sometimes I do feel dumb when I can't answer someone confidently or screw up in other ways. For example, last week I worked with a buddy of mine and he asked me to change out an in wall timer with another and to change the cfl's to regular incandescents, because the new timer wasn't rated for them. After hooking up the timer, live, he comes over, "Blah, that timer's not rated for cfl's" I said I know, "But the cfl's are on right now, that damages the timer". You see, I didn't know that the timer automatically comes on, my bad.
