331–340 of 533 posts
Really buried the lede in the last paragraph imo: > According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage for an electrician in the U.S. is about $63,000 compared with an average of $58,000 for all occupations. They go on to point out it's higher in the Bay, and there's a wide range with many making more, but that's the mean so that means many are also making less. As explained earlier in the piece those…
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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…
Right, don't go off code for having to do a big upgrade like this. I legit hit 100A several times a month. Have hit over 150A. Easy way for me to draw 100A at once: 40A: EV charging 32A: Electric Oven warming up at max 24A: Electric Dryer 40A: HotTub jets on 40A: AC ON Max Unlikely all of those are on full max, but it's pretty easy to imagine getting past 100A before we even touch things like lights and computers. EV…
Really buried the lede in the last paragraph imo: > According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage for an electrician in the U.S. is about $63,000 compared with an average of $58,000 for all occupations. They go on to point out it's higher in the Bay, and there's a wide range with many making more, but that's the mean so that means many are also making less. As explained earlier in the piece those…
The adoption of EVs, which are very common around here, has been very good for the owners of the companies that install them -- but the workers get paid the same hourly whether they are installing EV chargers or boring old normal stuff.
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There is a good chance that if you installed GFCI in some old house it would just... trip due to shitty wiring. But yeah, the law should probably have exception for installing safety devices, it's better to have some than zero because someone can't afford it.
>There is a good chance that if you installed GFCI in some old house it would just... trip due to shitty wiring. No, that's not true! A GFCI measures the current going in and the current going out and if they are not equal it trips.
OP is correct that in this case a GFCI would trip all the time.
But on the other hand, GFCI leaks are fairly easy to track down and fix, especially with the right equipment.
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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 th…
Can you share what device you're using for the 3-minute shut-off and recovery?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7KP8S4
But am not partial to this brand or anything. But it seems to do what it says it will do.
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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…
>It has been the standard for quite a few years, and I cannot imagine only having 100A service in a proper house 100A service is fairly normal here for smaller homes. As heating here is primarily done by natural gas furnaces rather then electrical heating. Which make sense; gas is way cheaper to heat with here then electricity. And it saves a dollar for the developer. I don't know about larger homes though; I'd imagi…
Smaller House: Default 150, pay a little more to get 200
Bigger House: Default 200, pay a little more to get 2x200
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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 r…
The handle-tie would get you common-trip too, wouldn't it?
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Right, don't go off code for having to do a big upgrade like this. I legit hit 100A several times a month. Have hit over 150A. Easy way for me to draw 100A at once: 40A: EV charging 32A: Electric Oven warming up at max 24A: Electric Dryer 40A: HotTub jets on 40A: AC ON Max Unlikely all of those are on full max, but it's pretty easy to imagine getting past 100A before we even touch things like lights and computers. EV…
Do Americans quote large appliance current at 220V or 110V equivalent? From the EV it seems the former, but in that case I'm horrified at how power-hungry your appliances are. A typical new oven sold in Europe is 3.6kW, 16A @ 230V. A new tumble drier is 600W, so about 2.5A at 230V. There's such a range of hot tub and AC sizes I can't compare these.
[1]: The 120V rails in the middle of the breaker panel alternate between each split phase, so if you connect a circuit to any two adjacent breakers you will get 240V. A 120V circuit is connected to neutral and a single breaker.
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Right, don't go off code for having to do a big upgrade like this. I legit hit 100A several times a month. Have hit over 150A. Easy way for me to draw 100A at once: 40A: EV charging 32A: Electric Oven warming up at max 24A: Electric Dryer 40A: HotTub jets on 40A: AC ON Max Unlikely all of those are on full max, but it's pretty easy to imagine getting past 100A before we even touch things like lights and computers. EV…
Saving the world driving an EV, while running the AC, oven and hot tub simultaneously, full blast.
But A full EV charge can be 6-7 hours, so could easily be all evening. A hot tub could easily be an hour of overlap in there. So someone turns on the Oven? Would def pop 100.
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Good luck finding an easy-to-install whole house GFCI in the US market. IMO there should be standardized trip curves so that outlet GFCIs can coordinate with branch breaker GFCIs, which can coordinate with whole-house or other larger GFCIs, etc. You really don’t want a 5mA GFCI on your house. You do want a 5mA GFCI somewhere involved for a regular outlet, though, especially if it’s anywhere damp or wet. (And you prob…
> Good luck finding an easy-to-install whole house GFCI in the US market. Not sure I'd want one, to be honest. There are some devices that trip GFCIs and I don't think I'd like my mains to trip that easily. I just use GFCI breakers as necessary. And certain circuits I go with AFCI instead.