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We need a lot more electricians

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Re: We need a lot more electricians

#441

Post by kennend3 »

carcostthrow wrote: post #317
brianwawok wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I live in a large home (~5,600 square feet) in the "Greater Toronto area" built in 2000. I have a 100A service.

This has never been a problem for us.

Stove, furnace, and dryer are gas. So the only "power hungry" device we have is our Air Conditioner.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#442

Post by danans »

nemo44x wrote: post #373
danans wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Precision makes no sense for a pan and is something a person who doesn't actually cook would care about. Your pans change temperature when cold food is put into them. Anyone who cooks knows that you are changing the temperature on your cooking surface constantly in many applications and it's based on the visual and audio queues your food give you. I know exactly what to expect when I set my induction stove to 8 (ou…

> I know exactly what to expect when I set my induction stove to 8 (out of 10) and let my daily-use pan heat for 1 minute. That's the setting at which I can temper oil with dry spices without burning them. Same, I just turn a knob and it outputs the same BTUs every time - it isn't random. >An induction stove can heat anything quickly, not just water. And importantly it can rapidly change temperature, unlike a resista…

> Seriously, get a nice gas range and a high end copper pan and cook with it - you'll be amazed.

I cooked on gas for 25 years, including with all sorts of pots/pans. It was great and I preferred it greatly to resistance electric stoves. And then I switched to induction and couldn't be happier with both the cooking performance and the indoor air quality improvement. You (and many others) aren't concerned with or don't believe in the air quality problems of burning gas in a house. To each their own!

For my part, I tell everyone I know to maximize ventilation if they are cooking indoors with gas, and to try an induction stove to see if it works for them.

> When I'm not using gas to cook you'll find me outside burning wood fires to cook with.

That has nothing to do with the discussion about induction, but thanks for sharing, because I also love cooking over burning wood! We're more alike than you think!

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#443

Post by atoav »

rootusrootus wrote: post #330
amluto wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There are some devices that trip GFCIs

In Germany where I lived for the past decade I have never seen a non-faulty device trip a RCB. The ones that tripped it hat the full 230V on their metal case.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#444

Post by kennend3 »

brianwawok wrote: post #341
Symbiote wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost all big appliances are 220. Fridges are 110, but the big guys * EV Charging * Electric or Induction Oven * Electric Dryer * AC * Electric Water Heater are all doing to be 220. The amps will vary, and most will not peg the required wire 100%, but may for example do a big pulse to startup (ACs are famous for this).

For which country is this?

Only a handful of countries actually us 110/220

If it is North America, I think you mean 120 and 240

https://www.powerstream.com/cv.htm

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#445

Post by wlesieutre »

mcbishop wrote: post #351
wlesieutre wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger downside is nuisance tripping because the breaker doesn't like electrical noise emitted by some device or another in your house. I don't have any AFCIs but I've heard it's pretty common. You'd rather have one circuit go out instead of the whole house, and if all you have is the one AFCI breaker you're going to have a much harder time identifying what device(s) is the culprit.

This nuisance tripping is the bane of my electrician friend's professional life.

And god forbid you use anything with a brushed motor, which has sparks in its normal operation

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#446

Post by sokoloff »

crgwbr wrote: post #366
Scoundreller wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What kind of fridge do you have that draws several hundred watts continuously? I haven’t tested my fridge, but I have a very large chest freezer that never draws more than ~35W. Surely a fridge can’t be 10x worse than that.

I seriously doubt that your freezer max draw is 35W. An Energy Star freezer can only average ~25W across the entire year. I doubt that the peak is less than 1.4x the average draw.

A fridge max power draw is usually during the defrost cycle. My defrost heater measures a bit over 500W.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#447

Post by rootusrootus »

russdill wrote: post #430
rootusrootus wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiwire branch circuits must be wired with tied breakers. If the person rewiring doesn't understand that this must be duplicated in the new panel, they definitely has no business upgrading their own panel.

This doesn't appear to have been the case until 2008, at least with multiwire branch circuits that supply separate outlets. Many if not most 100A panels with multiwire branch circuits will have been wired with breakers without ties.

I'll take your word for it, but I thought that at least as far back as 2002 it was required that the breaker for a MWBC trip both sides if one trips.

I really don't like MWBCs myself, if I would've known the electrician for my house was going to utilize a bunch of them, I'd have happily paid him not to do that.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#448

Post by Domenic_S »

jacquesm wrote: post #437
OJFord wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow ok, I've never seen that in the wild. RCDs are required on all circuits including lighting in the current regs (i.e. old installations can not have them and be compliant, but they have been required and socket circuits for a long time; bathroom & outdoor lighting for less; all lighting more recently). Maybe these sockets are for when you have no more room in the panel and don't want to replace it, but need it upg…

The lack of grounded sockets in the US has always been a complete mystery to me. Especially for kitchen appliances.

Grounded outlets became code for kitchens and baths in 1961, although it wasn't that uncommon to see in '50s new construction. 1971 code started requiring them throughout the house.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#449

Post by rootusrootus »

atoav wrote: post #443
rootusrootus wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> There are some devices that trip GFCIs In Germany where I lived for the past decade I have never seen a non-faulty device trip a RCB. The ones that tripped it hat the full 230V on their metal case.

I've got three examples for ya.

1. Deep freezers are prone (for reasons unclear to me at my level of knowledge) to tripping GFCIs. For this reason they're allowed to be on a non-GFCI outlet in the garage (must be a single outlet receptacle by itself on the circuit).

2. Downstream GFCIs are prone to messing with upstream GFCIs, so you should not put them in series. My RV has it's own power distribution panel with GFCI, so it gets plugged into a dedicated TT-30 RV outlet without GFCI protection.

3. My Tesla doesn't like GFCIs at all. It does a brief ground check before charging and trips the outlet. Known issue, solution is to find an outlet that isn't protected by a GFCI. In a pinch, when I was renting my first Tesla from Turo I stole the freezer outlet in the garage for a few hours at a time to charge the car. When I bought my own Tesla, I put in level 2 of course, problem solved.

I'm all for GFCIs on individual circuits, that makes total sense. Just not on the mains.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#450

Post by rootusrootus »

tablespoon wrote: post #405
rootusrootus wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> And certain circuits I go with AFCI instead. IIRC, in the US, code now requires AFCI pretty much everywhere except when GFCI is required. And AFCI is a bit of a PITA, to the point where electricians advise me against adding anything new to existing circuits in my house (because then the local inspector would require a new AFCI breaker, apparently in other areas the inspectors are less picky and would be satisfied w…

Last time I had work done, which was about six months ago, we didn't have to use AFCI for anything other than bedrooms (and maybe others, nothing that applied to the four circuits I was having installed though). Maybe a very recent change?

I agree on them being a PITA sometimes. They're somewhat prone to thinking that electric motors (e.g. fans) are trying to start a fire.

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