Single strand solid aluminum conductors expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose, and eventually create shorts and fires. They make special connectors so you can remedy this by attaching a small piece of copper wire (a pigtail) to the aluminum, and don't need to replace all the wiring in your house. This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building, as we should do anyways, and we could safely use single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring instead of copper virtually everywhere.
As is NOT required. This is old old info: antioxidant paste is not just not required, in some places you will fail inspection if add it, and other electricians might laugh at you for not keeping up to date.
> expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose
Nope, this is also not true. It's simply that there is a new allow of aluminum used today (since 1975) which retains its strength under heating and this problem is solved.
> This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building
Connector rated for Cu/Al are widely available, and not hard to make. There's just no market for it for smaller wires since everyone got scared and no one wants to install aluminum anymore.
It doesn't have to be that way, the current alloy is 47 years old at this point. People just don't want to change.
Some of the problems with aluminum wiring and whether all problems are solved:
https://inspectapedia.com/aluminum/Aluminum_Wiring_Hazards.p...
Requirement for antioxidant paste whenever manufacturer requires it (most of the time).
https://www.howtolookatahouse.com/Blog/Entries/2022/1/is-ant...
> I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves.
What issues do you find? All you need is a connector rated Cu/AlR and that's it.
Eg I don't think there's a legislation that floorplans have to be useful (and how would you even define that in the abstract). Yet, most buildings have quite reasonable floorplans.
There's some transaction costs in that its hard for the eventually consumer of the building to express all their preference to the builder. As you say, for some aspects the price signals can be weak.
More competition can help.
See also how it's pretty easy to find restaurants that serve tasty food, despite taste not being legislated nor regulated.
But seriously though, since when did Laissez-faire economics and legislation ever lead to sufficient safety not to kill people or burn down their homes willy-nilly?
HN is the only place I visit that has such wild ideas as "safety regs are too burdensome, let the free market sort it out".
Contrast that to 250,000 deaths per year (in the USA) by medical mistakes or preventable adverse effects.
At some point, we have to decide where to put our efforts. Electrical safety is arguably oversolved - ie. we put too much effort into it compared to the safety gain of any extra effort, compared to medical accidents which is likely undersolved. Even simple things like requiring a doctor to not do more than an 8 hour shift, like we require of truck drivers, would probably save a lot of lives.
The idea of 'more safety is always better' needs to be broken.
I did not suggest throwing out any existing regulation, merely that we don't need more regulation.
Surely you can not argue that we need an infinite amount of more regulation? There must be some level that's enough?
> yet they see a lot of need for regulation
Of course they do, their ideology reaches for that solution by default. Look at this particular thread just to see how misguided the recommendation for regulation was in this case.
Yes and No. I have a lot of sympathies for that argument, but also for the view that individual votes don't matter.
See builders/landlords and insulation.
If buyer or renters are totally oblivious, why offer any features at all?
Some countries just prefer to ignore long term problems for short term "gains" though, in a tragic fractal way.
I don't think there's any law anywhere that prohibits a manufacturer from sticking the required information on their product and in their marketing.
As a customer, I can draw my own conclusions when a manufacturer doesn't provide the information: I'll assume that thing is a gas guzzler and will avoid it. (Unless I read trusted reviews to the contrary.)
In this case:
good guy installs insulation
bad guy doesn't
good guy publishes info on future savings
bad guy publishes fake info
good guy publishes trusted reviews
bad guy publishes fake reviews.
and so on.
The good guys want the legislation, not to force then to do the thing they wanted to do anyway, they want it to stop bad guys putting them out of business via scamming customers.
> bad guy publishes fake info
That's already illegal.
> bad guy publishes fake reviews.
That's already illegal.
The better analogy for the prisoners dilemma is a drug deal or a spy swap. How can you trust the other person to do the right thing with no legal system to enforce penalties if they don't? Without that, less deals are made than they would otherwise, a loss of efficiency.
Just the opposite. I am much more likely to purchase from a builder that has a reputation for transparency and after-market support.
It's very similar to the 'market for lemons' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
> The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism is a widely-cited[1] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought.
The obvious-in-hindsight business solution to this problem didn't require legislation. It's just to build a used-car dealer that builds and safeguards a really solid reputation.
Well your past history of housing problems would suggest your optimism here is misplaced
> It's very similar to the 'market for lemons' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
People don't need lemons. They do need home. So often in free market economies you see companies virtually colluding to put themselves first in sectors where consumers are required to buy into that product or service. Because in those sectors, businesses have a captive audience with no other options and they don't need to worry about reputation.
Housing is one of those sectors. Often people need a home based around requirements other than the reputation of the builder like location to the school that their kids already attend, or family members, or work, bus or rail stations, etc. Cost to rent. Is parking available. etc
If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple. For starters even if your ideology worked in practice, you still require a bunch of customers to get burnt initially in order to generate that reputation. However there's also nothing stopping disreputable businesses restarting with a new company name and branding so the reputation model doesn't work in practice (you see this all the time with online sellers eg on Amazon). And that's on top of the former point about how some products are essentials that people don't have the luxury to shop around on.
We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
Who is 'you' in that sentence? I can see that I have optimism, but what's my past history of housing problems?
And what makes you so sure that those past problems were caused by not enough regulation? (Instead of eg too much regulation, the wrong kind of regulation, or they might have nothing to do with regulation at all.)
> If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
Huh? It's always a trade-off. All else being equal, I'd grab a house from a builder (or landlord) with a great reputation before one without a reputation or even a bad reputation. I might even pay a bit extra for a great reputation.
Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
> I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple.
Who said that? Huh?
I suggested that in this specific case more regulation is not required.
The free market won't get you a girlfriend, for example. But neither would any sensible regulation.
> We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
You know that European real GDP per capita is quite a lot lower than in the US? (You can pick almost any European country. Or pick the average etc.)
And the US is also still pretty overregulated.
I grew up in Germany, but put my money where my mouth is, and now live in rather more pro-market Singapore.
That all said, one part did stick out for me:
> Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
I'd argue that disproves your point rather than proves it. The reason being, lousy jobs still exist because employers know that people need jobs. So there's no incentive for employers to change. Hence why we need employment laws.
In Singapore our legal minimum wage is 0. However good luck finding anyone working for 0 dollars.
I would suggest checking why jobs exceed the legal minimum, and how we can ensure more people can have better jobs.
(My view is perfectly compatible with there being some crappy jobs, and some people even taking those crappy jobs.)
Oversimplified: legally everyone is already a gig worker in Singapore.
Seems to work out fairly well.
This is also closer to how the system worked in eg the US until a few decades ago, when it was easier to get a job just by walking into the shop and asking and also work your way through college etc.
I remember, Slatestarcodex had an article about the dangers of outsourcing your social welfare to employers.
The reason America needs legislation is because American companies have a culture of abusing a free market.
What works for one country doesn't automatically work for another.
Connectors could be copper, the wire itself could be aluminium, completely sealed in pvc.
12- or 14- AWG wire is extremely easy to terminate correctly.
For service connections and large scale power distribution where trained professionals are already required and lack of maintenance is already a fire hazard, it isn't a problem.
For small branch circuits where work is often done by random Joe's and where any sort of preventative maintenance is few and far between, it is a failed experiment.
Either way, home and commercial construction is likely to crater (already starting in many areas) due to cost of $$ going up, so that should help tamp down demand quite a bit.
The aluminum wires of today are a different allow of that simply does not have the problem anymore. It's a solved issue. You don't even need anti-ox on the connection.
Not that you can buy small gauge aluminum wiring anyway.
We can discuss the theory behind changing it of course, it just isn’t material to the field until the rules change.
There are real reasons the benefits (right now) do not outweigh the known hazards (right now).
If you have new evidence to add that you believe does, then please do. But so far, not seeing it.
In addition, German Wikipedia mentions some extra paperwork and hassle German doctors have to jump through if they want to prescribe.
It already is better, this is VERY old news. Modern aluminum alloys do NOT have this problem, but it's too late, no one wants to think about aluminum wires.
But 50 Hz as a system frequency is just wrong. It results in oddities like running your railroad at 16-2/3 Hz.
(I guess you are talking about three-phase power in general, or is there anything special about railroads?)
In practice, just like everything in engineering, you don't run your grid at 50 Hz nor your railroad at 50/3 Hz. You run the grid at some frequency that varies slightly around 50Hz. There's always engineering tolerances.
So even if you don't like rational numbers, it doesn't really matter whether you run the railroads at 50/3 +-0.01 Hz, or at 16.66 +-0.01 Hz.
(I don't know how tight the tolerances are in practice here. It doesn't matter for the argument.)
> So even if you don't like rational numbers, it doesn't really matter whether you run the railroads at 50/3 +-0.01 Hz, or at 16.66 +-0.01 Hz.
In practice the nominal frequency was changed to 16.7 Hz anyway due to some weird edge case created when running motor-generators [1] for prolonged periods of time at exactly the nominal 3:1 frequency conversion ratio. (See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrom#16_2%E2%81%843_Hz_ge... and use an online translator at your own peril if necessary.)
[1] These days, newly built (or probably occasionally re-built) substations prefer to use solid-state frequency converters, which are immune to this particular problem, but there still are enough of the older motor-generator sets around, too. Wikipedia also claims that motor-generator sets are more tolerant against earth faults, which might or might not preclude against getting rid of all of them even long-term.
Also, 60 is a common base for several things (degrees, time), which interact with the grid in numerous ways.
It’s convenient to have them match.
(If you need more precision, go for nano-Hertz..)
50 Hz railway systems are probably more common than 50/3, at least in Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_system...
25 kV AC 50 Hz (60 Hz in countries using such grid frequency) is the modern standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
A classic commutated series-wound motor is a DC machine. The problem with DC power is that without power electronics, you can't really change the voltage (except downwards by wasteful resistors), so your transmission voltage is limited by your maximum motor voltage and you incur relatively high transmission losses and need frequent substations every few kilometres. (Mainline railways can cheat a bit by equipping all of their rolling stock with two (or occasionally more) motors permanently linked together in series, so each motor only gets a fraction of the voltage, but you can take that approach only so far…)
So you want to switch to AC power, which is more efficient because it can be easily transformed up and then down again, because transformers can actually be made small enough to fit into a locomotive.
Fortunately with some adaptations a series-wound motor can be made to work on AC, too, but there are some trade-offs depending on the required amount of power and the frequency. I.e. the motor still works better if your AC current is more "DC-like", i.e. doesn't have too high a frequency.
It turns out that for something more modest like a hoover or a domestic power drill, an AC series-wound motor ("universal motor") will work fine enough even at 50 or 60 Hz, but for railway purposes with their somewhat higher power demands things didn't work so well.
Because at that time power electronics didn't exist or were still in their infancy (e.g. mercury arc rectifiers), there was no possibility of doing anything useful on board of the locomotive, so instead it was decided to reduce the frequency of the railway's power supply system, because at 16 2/3 or perhaps even 25 Hz motors could still be made to work reasonably enough.
Also at that time changing the frequency meant using a motor-generator set, and presumably choosing some simple integer ratio for the two frequencies also simplified things.
By the time other countries started considering switching to AC electrification, usable rectifiers existed that could be used on locomotives, so those countries could electrify at the full 50 or 60 Hz and then rectify the current to DC on board of the locomotive, thereby sidestepping the problems of running a commutated series-wound motor with AC power.
Even later on we then got fully variable voltage and frequency inverters, which finally allowed serious usage of (usually asynchronous) three-phase induction motors.
(Some railways used three-phase drives even before that, but without modern electronics this was a somewhat more cumbersome prospect, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1lm%C3%A1n_Kand%C3%B3)
The 120V in the US is a 640kb ram should be enough situation. You were first, thought you build the spare capacity, were surprised by the explosive growth and how useful electricity really is.
With modern homes moving to 100% electricity even 240 is not enough. In my flat I have pizza oven (3kw),inducation burner x 2 (3kw each), normal oven, 12000 btu AC x 2, tumble dryer, some other appliances that chug sub 1k... throw in some car charging, electrical water heater... A modern home is using orders of magnitude more electricity. And it is going up.
As homes need more power, they are delivered more amps. The common for newer construction in the US is 240V at 200 amp or 400 amp for larger homes. Older homes will have anywhere from 80-150A depending on when they were built or remodeled enough to require replacing the main service panel.
Stove, HVAC, and dryer require their own dedicated 240V circuits.
In eu you don't have to think where to plug 2.5 kw space heater. Any outlet is good enough. In the US you have to. And with home appliances actually becoming bigger and more powerful I think that even the EU baseline will become too constraining eventually. Since usually there are limitation on the gauges that are ran from the main breaker to the sub-breakers (don't know english electric jargon)
Where I live I have a wire that can hold I think 40 amps in the wall from the main breaker to the board where the small breakers terminate the different home circuts. If I want to upgrade it is dig baby dig. 6 floors.
2 base 2 orders of magnitude perhaps, but not 100x more…
The heavy load stuff is 240V anyway.
The British plug is a pretty decent design from an electrical safety point of view. (However, they turn into caltrops in the dark.)
It's needlessly huge. I like type J (SN 441011, Swiss plug) and type N (IEC 60906-1, South Africa).
It's just that the American plugs are really the worst. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_q-xnYRugQ for other badness.
208V (vs 220/230/240V) has minimal to do with it being a condo and everything to do with the type of incoming power. 208V is from taking two phases of a 120V three phase service. One phase to ground, 120V, phase to phase, 208V. For the alternative voltage (named 220/230/240V depending on context), the incoming power to the transfer is a single phase. The transformer then produces a split phase 220/230/240V where each phase is 180° opposite each other. The only reason you _might_ see it more frequently at a condo/apartment is due to there being a need or desire for 3 phase power.
Where it gets a little funny is that the Canadian standard for "industrial" power is 600V, not 480V, and that can make it hard to find replacements in some larger buildings with custom requirements.
Yeah, didn’t mean to imply it was unusual, just explaining for others that it’s not a quirk of condos/apartments specifically.
> Where it gets a little funny is that the Canadian standard for "industrial" power is 600V, not 480V
Speaking of 480V, you ever dealt with 277V much? That’s a real “fun” voltage to be around when something goes wrong. :(
My condo parking spot has a wonderful looking junction box above it labelled “600V”.
But I’ve heard some Canadian factories will still get spec’d with “US Voltage” (ie: 277 and 480) for “standardization”, but probably so they can move the plant to the US without having to find electricians that can speak Canadian.
Yeah, if you don’t have 480V, extremely unlikely you’ll have 277V. 347V has comparable issues to what I was referring to with 277. 480/600 aren’t voltage you’ll normally find wire nut’s in a jbox or behind say a light switch for example, but 277/347 you will. Unlike 120V though, if something were to cause it to arc (or worse, electrocute you), you’re going to have a very bad day! Not tagging off a circuit is always a bad idea, but especially when voltages are 250+.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4&ab_channel=Techn...
Basically, you'd express things in terms of speed of light, electron charge, planck length etc.
In this case, [Planck energy / electron charge] might be an appropriate unit.
(It would also be a pretty useless unit, because it's absurdly large compared to everyday voltages.)
But for big feeder wires, it’s a different story. Compare:
2 AWG XHHW-2 Al: 0.358 inches OD, 0.081 lbs per ft, $0.90/ft
4 AWG XHHW-2 Cu: 0.33 inches OD, 0.129 lbs per ft, $1.78/ft
I know which one I would pick under most circumstances. And insurance companies are just fine with the aluminum option.