Most people only have single phase power here in the US with +120 and -120 legs separated by 180 degrees angle. The power company steps the voltage down from a single phase on the distribution wires. Circuit breaker panels are set up with alternating legs so that the neutral current is approximately balanced whether you fill up the panel on one side first or from top down.

> people tend to connect more stuff to L1 on average.

I just plug into the wall socket and it works.

How could I choose to connect things to L2?

If your property has 3 phase power, chances are your single phase breakers are just on some random phase (picked by your electrician) ie phase 1.

Because phase 1 is picked so often, they actually rotate the phases at the street ie switch 1 2 3 with 3 1 2 to avoid having ie 300% more load on phase 1 and having the grid just die.

> If your property has 3 phase power, chances are your single phase breakers are just on some random phase (picked by your electrician) ie phase 1.

That's bollocks or speaks for a completely incompetent electrician. Usually, you have three phase rails coming out of your GFCI that distribute the phases sequentially to each breaker [1] to avoid that scenario, as well as ending up with a tripped main breaker because the customer overloads the phase.

The only case where great care is being taken to avoid random assignment of phases is in event stage technology - you do not want your lighting dimmer packs on the same phase as your amplifiers because dimmer packs inject extreme amounts of EM noise, and you also have to take care to not put overloads on any single phase anywhere. However, it's questionable on how long this will stay relevant, given that most lighting load is moving off to LEDs.

[1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Busch-Jaeger-Hage-Phase-KDN380A-3...

Guessing you’re from the UK where you seem to have fancy pre configured sub boards. In Australia the standard and 99% of house installs are just hand wired with single wires from breaker to breaker and they’re twisted together and rammed into the bottom of the breakers :)

Germany, and I've worked on construction sites and in stage tech for a time in my career.

What you describe is... beyond awful and an absurd fire risk.

Lmao I moved from NZ to UK and the house wiring here has very often not been touched anywhere from the 60s-80s or so.

They are very slowly modernising here, but they seem to have a cultural resistance to change/modernisation; they're in love with the old days.

Very different to Aus/NZ where we're eager to get the latest stuff/NZ is often used as a test market.

Ours are called red, green and blue which helps avoid all on P1.

UK Phases used to be coloured as well. The wiring regs changed to make it much less confusing (and cause fewer issues for colourblind people) so that they're now L1, L2, L3.

The GP is also a bit misleading. Most residential properties in the UK are only fed one phase - either the street only has one phase or the grid connects houses up L1, L2, L3 in sequence. Of course I'm speak about detached and semi-detached houses, in larger groups of houses (e.g. blocks of flats) you usually get 3 phases, and one of the jobs of the electrician is phase balancing.

I'm from Yeovil, Somerset! I have a fair idea about 'leccy here.

Then you'd know they're Red, Yellow and Blue, and that colouring went out in 2006:

https://www.newfound-energy.co.uk/electrical-three-phase-wir...

I wonder if there can still be a statistical discrepancy due to the electrician favorite color.

It seems blue is strongly favored by psychology students for example : https://www.livescience.com/34105-favorite-colors.html

Hopefully not 123 -> 312 but e.g 231.

AFAIK phase order matters for e.g. three-phase motors, they will spin in the wrong direction if wired with the phases in the wrong order.

312 is also a clockwise direction; the anticlockwise ones are 132 213 321.

I'm not following, aren't 123,231 and 312 all in the same order?