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We need a lot more electricians

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Re: We need a lot more electricians

#211

Post by 13of40 »

londons_explore wrote: post #175
jxramos wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why's that, is there some guarantee they fail to live up to? Is there something probabilistic to them or something?

AFCI's are of dubious effectiveness at their purpose (preventing fires). They're kinda snake oil because each manufacturer won't tell you under what exact conditions they'll trip. Somehow the law in the USA now requires them on every circuit, although they aren't used at all in Europe (which has a higher voltage yet far fewer electrical deaths).

FWIW, Google says 540 electrical deaths per year in Europe vs. 200 per year in the USA. Whether that's from lower voltage or more GFCI is anyone's guess.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#212

Post by brianwawok »

Scoundreller wrote: post #192
sokoloff wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have twice lost a fridge full of food due to spurious GFCI trips, once when I was a recent graduate and it was a painful experience financially. I now make sure my fridge/freezer is NOT on a GFCI. I'll take my chances of getting a 120VAC shock from my fridge [which is attention-getting, but very unlikely to be injurious].

Also funny how fridges are required to have their own circuit, but newer fridges are increasingly vfd/inverter drive, and don’t have surge power draws anymore. They use a few hundred watts continuously and that’s it. I’d be more quickly to find out my fridge died if the lights in the kitchen stopped working. Not sure why fridges don’t just have a battery-powered alarm that goes off when the temperature gets too high…

I have a lot of power surges in my area. Recently, the old power shut off, then power back on in 3 seconds thing happened - and the surge was enough to pop my fridge motors and cause a $900 repair.

I upgraded them to not only a surge protector, but this little neat shut off device. It's a device that goes between the fridge and the wall outlet, and basically if for any reason this device loses power - it shuts off the power to the powered device for a minimum of 3 minutes. This way the power can blink 100 times in 3 minutes, and my fridge won't have to eat 100 surges. It will just happily sit off for 3 minutes, and then come back on.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#213

Post by kuschku »

petre wrote: post #179
kuschku wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The service drop in EU/UK is 380V. The point stands.

400V between phases, 230V phase to neutral. Most homes have single phase though.

So how would you run an instant water heater or electric induction stove then? Every apartment and house I've ever lived in had 380V three-phase right to the kitchen, to the bathroom, and to basement rooms (e.g. for prosumer workshop tools).

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#214

Post by sokoloff »

repiret wrote: post #138
BitwiseFool wrote: post #11

Something to keep in mind is that most homes, if they haven't been constructed within the last 10 years, likely have some non-compliance with the current electrical code. For instance, I needed to install an exterior disconnect which wound up costing me more than a thousand dollars on top of the existing electrical work I needed done. The electrician also needed to replace my existing ground wires because they are su…

You don't say where you are, but that certainly hasn't been my experience. Where I am, in Oregon, USA: * I own a house that was built in the early 20th century. As was typical of the time, the house has a small number of fused circuits, which do not have a ground wire, and where the wire gauge is thinner than would be required for a modern circuit of the same capacity. Just the same, it's perfectly legal to: * Add ne…

Multi-wire branch circuits (your second point) will likely always be legal, because they're fundamentally safe from an engineering point of view.

Requiring common-disconnect (but not common-trip) breakers I think was a requirement since before 1998, but because it only needs common-disconnect, a listed handle-tie between the two breakers will suffice. (In other words, this should be a quite inexpensive situation to remedy. $8 for 3 of them at Home Depot for one particular common panel: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Square-D-QO-Circuit-Breaker-Hand...)

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#215

Post by zbrozek »

brianwawok wrote: post #205
carcostthrow wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it gets even funnier then that. So I took quick look into what it would actually take to upgrade the main circuit breaker in the house assuming a 100A to 200A upgrade is needed to accommodate both an EV and a heat pump. I thought it was $5000 or so. As it turns out, $5000 is for pole mounted service. It's range is actually around $15,000 to $25,000 for underground service, as it requires digging the line from the…

EV or not EV, I really think you want 200A service? It has been the standard for quite a few years, and I cannot imagine only having 100A service in a proper house (would be fine for an apartment or whatnot). Now I am higher electric usage than most, but I hit over 100A several times a day (but have never hit 200A and flipped my breaker). The actually switching out your circuit breaker from 100A to 200A is cheap (2-3…

Electrical code has completely unreasonable and unrealistic demand factors associated with appliances. Basically "1" for just about everything, as well as 3 watts per square foot of floor area. If you sum all of these things up, I'm well above the 200 amp service delivered to my home.

Reality? I had a peak draw of 23 amps from the grid in the last year. Luckily the NEC has an escape valve for folks who can prove that.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#216

Post by throwaway4aday »

malfist wrote: post #70
vehemenz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article does a disservice to its thesis by focusing on California. Half the country lives in places where subzero temperatures are an issue. Not to mention, the rest of the country doesn't have the sunlight hours to make solar as viable, let alone the disposable wealth to upgrade their homes. Electric cars are still a long way from viability in most places, though it may not seem that way in California.

> country doesn't have the sunlight hours to make solar as viable California somehow gets more sunlight than the rest of the US? If I recall for physics, the amount of light depends on the latitude, not what state you're in.

Solar elevation, length of day, weather including clouds and snow. Those vary quite a bit.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#217

Post by kurthr »

mfer wrote: post #107
epistasis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transportation is literally already battery, it is trivial to load shift charging, and in fact standard practice for anybody with electric transportation already! Heating is similarly trivial to load shift; heat or cool a little extra before the peak, stop during the peak, and then pick up afterwards. This goes for both space and water heating. Do you have any evidence about what upgrades are needed? I have a feeling…

Two pieces of evidence. 1) Places today have rolling brown outs at times in the year. Some power companies have seasons where they ask customers to limit their electricity use. Even peak load today can be a problem and the electrification of all the things means peak load will increase. 2) Articles that dig into this call out how the power grid will need to change to support the growth in consumption. When it's cover…

Yes, I can refute those.

Those rolling brownouts happen in the summer when AC demand is high and the grid is barely capable of meeting peak demand. Vehicles do not need to charge at that time (when most people are at work or staying home) and could even provide some power to homes during that time. Most electric vehicles are charged at night (when rates are lower).

Of course utilities would love to have people pay more maintenance, because they already have to do it and their profits are capped. But they have already built to peak demand and the only driver now for that peak is rising summer temperatures... because electric vehicles need not be charged then, and they are computer controlled so they know when to charge.

In some localities residential solar is changing the exact time of peak load and often reducing daily peak load. The best argument is that electric vehicles require improvements to the utility writing is that electricity even more important so reliability of the network is more critical. But, well cell phones are pretty important.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#218

Post by dboreham »

mfer wrote: post #181
bluGill wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing the grid with generation capacity. They are different. Generation capacity is where we have more need. For the most part the wires have enough capacity - though even then there are places that need upgrades.

I have a few reasons to believe the wires we have today aren't enough 1) I was recently talking with someone who lives in a community where homes have 60A service. The homes and last mile in places like that can't handle the draw people will need to electrify everything. 60A isn't enough. 2) Where I live there has been work to upgrade the wiring because it's not enough. It's not done yet and other communities I've be…

> 60A isn't enough

Definitely. Homes in the US usually have 200A service (at 220V, so the 110V thing doesn't pertain).

My place has 7.5KV distribution and a 50KVA transformer, for example.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#219

Post by traceroute66 »

anikom15 wrote: post #100
londons_explore wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> likely have some non-compliance with the current electrical code. It frustrates me that every year quite a lot of people are killed due to old houses not having whole-building GFCI's. A GFCI costs only $20 and can be installed inside 10 minutes. So it seems crazy to be letting people die... Yet typically electrical regs require that if an electrician installs a GFCI, they bring the whole house up to modern standard…

Which country? In the U.S., GFCIs only need to be installed in specific locations, which is good. I do not want my refrigerator or computer on a GFCI. In the U.K., you just can’t have plugs in bathrooms (aside from the shaver plug), which is probably more sensible.

> In the U.K., you just can’t have plugs in bathrooms (aside from the shaver plug),

Disclaimer: I'm not an electrician

My understanding is that is not entirely technically correct.

You can have standard sockets in bathrooms in the UK.

But, and it's a big BUT, 99.999% of bathrooms in the UK are not big enough to be able to place the socket 3m away from the relevant wet "zone" (shower and/or bath and/or sink, IIRC).

However, IIRC, shaver sockets are OK, as are spurs. Irrespective of bathroom size.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#220

Post by mikeg8 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #133

I thought I wanted to be an electrician growing up in the 80's, but my parents steered me away from it into the then-booming programming field. It does seem like programmers are doing a lot better than electricians these days.

Financially, yes. Physically? I’d bet good money most electricians are in much better physical shape. Pulling wire, climbing ladders, using hand tools… it’s more physically demanding than people think. (My cousin is a journeyman electrician and I helped him wire the new house I built).
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