And for good reason. Gas cookers require ventilation, to prevent carbon monoxide build up. An electric extractor fan won't work during a power cut.
I'd love to have a real setup. Unfortunately I've not been given that option and it is the same for many others.
Electric hot water heater = 20 amps
Electric stove = 50 amps all burners on and oven
Washing machine = 15 amps
Car charger = 50 amps
Total = 135 amps
Standard residential service in the US = 200 amps split phase @ 240v
Whats the problem?
Add in the 80% rule and 200amps doesn't go as far as one might hope in a gas free-house.
None of those devices pull the rated amount continuous except may the car charger which can be adjusted for less draw / longer charge time if needed.
Simply scheduling car charing for overnight would eliminate any issue, even so there is plenty of headroom on a typical residential system.
Requiring new builds to have even more electrical capacity and more robust incoming infrastructure is a win-win-win situation and hopefully that is what code & consumers demand.
If you can stick to plugin hybrids and go without AC during a power outage...
Electric hot water heater = 20 amps
Electric stove = 50 amps all burners on and oven
Internet, Misc = 1 amps
Total < 75 amps
Its not like its year 10'000 and we polished technology, infrastructure and everything to the max physics allow. For example you can easily break whole internet if significant portion of its users decide to download something relatively big at the same time.
When they pass these laws, they should come with an SLA for the utility provider to approve “engineering” plans for the utility hookup and whatever transformer upgrades are required utility-side.
There should be a ~ $250 per day fine, payable in cash to the homeowner once the SLA is exceeded. That’s roughly 2x normal homeowner costs due to delay of construction approvals (and therefore financing / alternative housing costs for those days) and using gas generators to power the site.
Must have been a while ago because in 2021 they charged me $0 (not a typo) to go from 100A to 200A. It took just a month or so to arrange.
It is almost like talking about 400HP cars/suvs, my 3 cylinder car is doing just fine at 84 kW max.
Am I being pedantic?
If you think about it, there is still plenty of room for optimizing our energy consumption.
The trend seems to be, replace the gasoline car not with a more fuel efficient one but rather with a car weighing almost double because it has to drag along a huge battery. Then replace all copper wires with double the section (copper mining, plastic production, tearing open perfect roads, ...)
Some ideas, not very far fetched I would say, combine a few of these will get us a long way:
Car pooling.
Electric bicycles.
Insulate your house better?
Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
> Electric bicycles
> Insulate your house better?
> Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
> Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
> Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
People do these things anyways with the right incentives, just to save time and money.
But we still need to get off of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation if we want to avoid the worst climate change scenarios.
The reality is that people really value convenience, and we have to find sustainable ways of delivering that. That might mean a great electric bus system, EVs, community thrift exchanges, etc
> Electric bicycles
I only ride bicycles for exercise or as an activity but never to go somewhere. I’m no longer 12.
> Insulate your house better?
If the government wants to use my tax dollars for this instead of SNAP/TANF then I’m all for them paying for it but it’s not going to be me paying.
> Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
See point #1
> Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
I do this where possible because I’m cheap but I doubt it is any kind of significant savings of energy.
> Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
Now I’ve got clean clothes covered in dust and pollen. Thanks.
My point in this discussion thread is, i saw 200 Amps at 240 V per household being mentioned, i want to show this should not be the norm or trend. Imo this way of thinking is not leading to an efficient system.
If you have an electric car, you probably don't need to charge it most of the times at the highest current. And when you do, you won't turn on all electric devices with high amperage.
The other examples are just examples, not everyone needs to apply them all. I advocate for the culture shift, the more-is-not-better mentality. This needs to go hand in hand with cleaner technologies and government policies.
The unit of billing - kW/h - however remains the same.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/487836/how-d...
I was already confused with the 240 being mentioned somewhere in this thread... it becomes a bit clearer now.
In the breaker panels the phase alternates as you go down the rows of breakers. So you can install a dual breaker for 240V. Typically only large appliances like stoves, water heater, driers, and air conditioners are 240V. Everything else is 120V.
For older constructions however, it can be more involved - the line from the main line to your home might need an upgrade, the main line might need an upgrade or in the worst case the transformer might need an upgrade. The further up in the grid you go, the more expensive it gets for the utility - and some measures might even require significant work involving construction permits.
This wasn’t on my radar as being a thing. What type of service is typical out there? Where I am, 200A is fairly normal and I haven’t really perceived of the concept of not having enough electricity to run a family as a thing.
Do people trip the main breaker more than “almost never” out there?
Continuous-flow electric water heater: 20 kW
Heat pump or central air, big home: 12-15 kW
EV charger: 7 kW
Electric tanked water heater or hybrid water heater in electric mode: 7.2 kW
Clothes dryer with heating element on: 5 kW
Heat pump or central air, small home: 3-4 kW
Electric oven: 3-5 kW
Induction range: 1.8 kW
Instapot: ~1.5 kW
Toaster oven: 1-1.5 kW
Electric kettle: 1 kW
Microwave: 1.2 kW
Dishwasher: ~500-1000 W
Heat pump water heater: ~600W
Washing machine: 500 W
Vacuum cleaner: 200-300 W
Home server or desktop: 100-200 W
Box fan or air purifier: 100 W
Laptop on fast charge: 65W
Laptop on slow charge: 30W
LED light bulb: 12-15W
Cell phone charger: 6W
Individually coordinating appliance loads or including a battery with each appliance seems like an inefficient, expensive and unnecessary extra step. Basically, all you need to do is a.) charge your EVs at night when nothing else is running b.) don't use electric water heaters unless they're heat pumps and c.) insulate your home if you're using heat pump HVAC. All of which you should be doing anyway. The kitchen appliances are easily manageable if the EV and HVAC are not running at the same time, and everything else is rounding error.
There might be some benefit to grid-coordinating EV charging and heat pump HVAC operation, particularly since these are the cases where naive loads all hit the grid at the same time, and they already come with batteries included (literal ones for EVs, thermal batteries for HVAC). For smaller appliances it's totally unnecessary though.
I have a gas range and it doesn't work when the electricity is off. If that's your contingency plan, check that a safety valve doesn't close when power is lost.