Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We need a lot more electricians

canarymedia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 533 posts

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#511

Post by boringg »

eppp wrote: post #256
boringg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Grid is not ready for this it need significant capital upgrades. Yes its designed for peak load but the load profile is changing significantly. And no you absolutely cant just load shift away heating and transportation of residential homes. That isn't cost free and we don't even have the projects in place to manage that yet.

I don't know where you live but in my state (TN) most of the residential heating is electric already in my area. If the gas was turned off, the local coop wouldn't have any issues whatsoever meeting the demand.

Im predominantly talking states with cold weather and natural gas heating.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#512

Post by boringg »

epistasis wrote: post #71
boringg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Grid is not ready for this it need significant capital upgrades. Yes its designed for peak load but the load profile is changing significantly. And no you absolutely cant just load shift away heating and transportation of residential homes. That isn't cost free and we don't even have the projects in place to manage that yet.

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…

What are you talking about? Transportation is not anywhere near electric at this point. Once you aggregate all that demand for all vehicles in california charging its significant amount of power and the cost of Lion batteries to manage that “load shifting” is excessive if put behind the meter.

You have grossly oversimplified of the problem set with little regard for how people, utilities, policy development and the real world actually work.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#513

Post by someguydave »

atoav wrote: post #497
rootusrootus wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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) Guess when the compressor kicks on you get sharp current spikes in units that do nothing to prevent that from hitting the grid. > 2. Downstream GFCIs are prone to messing with upstream G…

selectivity is an English word. I usually hear it in the context of describing the bandwidth of a radio receiver system (how well the receiver can select signals of interest and reject others)

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#514

Post by boringg »

kurthr wrote: post #217
mfer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

I think the difference is since you do this at scale it puts a lot more pressure on the grid. EV adoption is still quite low relative to the fleet.

Yes heat load and AC are drivers for california grid and similar climate grids.

I would wager that if the north east went electric heating and EV they would have significant problems in the winter. Grid reliability would be even more important given that transportation and home heating are tied to it.

Those load profiles in aggregate would most certainly but pressure on the system both in transmission of electricity and production of energy.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#515

Post by garbagecoder »

1. “We need a lot more ______ look at how much they get paid!” 2. Rush to re-train 3. Now ______ is paid way less

There’s a name for this, something something market. Just make sure markets are fair, workers are protected, re-training is easy and this problem won’t keep repeating. But instead the focus is always on “learn to code/do wiring” whatever.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#516

Post by danaris »

atoav wrote: post #455
shawabawa3 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a GFCI installed in my 1930s built house the other week The circuit repeatedly tripped, so the electrician uninstalled it. To install the GFCI he would need to spend 1-2 days splitting circuits to find the leak(s) so instead of ~$40 + 1 hours labour it's potentially thousands of dollars

Yep, that means somewhere there is current flowing through some pipe, some wall, something. And that is bad. 30mA is not much of a threshold, but it has been chosen because currents above that (or currents that flow longer than the 0,03s it should take maximum to trip an RCD will kill people. Not to speak of fire hazards. So, somewhere you have a thing, that could kill you, a firend, a loved one or whomever. And you…

> And you decide to ignore it because money.

I mean...this doesn't seem to apply to the GP, but you do understand that there are many, many people in the US for whom the amount of money needed to install that whole-house GFCI would be fine...but the amount needed to track down the faulty wire and fix it to make the house genuinely safe would bankrupt them?

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#517

Post by frankus »

VLM wrote: post #509
frankus wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm proposing is that the electrical box (the blue plastic thing that's essentially non-removable in current practice) would have the vampire connection to one or more cables passing into/through it, and the actual device (outlet, switch, light fixture) would plug into some conductors at the back of the box. So you could replace outlets more easily than you can today. The boxes would come in a few varieties base…

You might be in for a difficult discovery about how unreliable consumer-grade connectors have always been across all the history of EE-land, compared to professionally installed (or even amateur installed) wire nuts. (edited, not to say its impossible; perhaps your innovation would in itself be the world first reliable connector...)

Something along the lines of what circuit breakers clip into should be reliable enough, I would think?

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#518

Post by eatbitseveryday »

Johnny555 wrote: post #456
shawabawa3 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a GFCI installed in my 1930s built house the other week The circuit repeatedly tripped, so the electrician uninstalled it. To install the GFCI he would need to spend 1-2 days splitting circuits to find the leak(s) so instead of ~$40 + 1 hours labour it's potentially thousands of dollars

Instead of spending thousands of dollars to fix the wiring, another option would be to spend hundreds of dollars installing GFCI outlets at every outlet instead of protecting the whole circuit with a GFCI breaker (or upstream GFCI outlet) But if I had wiring that was leaking enough current to trip a GFCI, I'd rather find the fault in the wiring. When I rewired an old house, the livingroom circuit kept tripping the GF…

Can’t find GFCI outlets for aluminum, which is one problem I have in certain areas of the home.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#519

Post by hajile »

metadat wrote: post #388
yamtaddle wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the damn things. If a breaker pops, it's easy. You have a box, maybe two if you live in a really huge house. Go there, look for the switch that's not quite lined up, toggle switch, done. GFCI, you gotta figure out which one popped. If the wiring's not great, it may well be in a totally different room from the outlet that stopped working. On top of it, they seem to outright fail (get stuck in a broken state, st…

What are you talking about? GFCIs are integrated into the outlet. Did you mean something about chaining GFCI plug wiring? If it's even possible, such a wiring configuration seems like an obvious building code safety violation. For example: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oGJ0LxRFZ9FNcRtpABAlXPnUApM=... Edit 1: If you're in Europe, my apologies - I have no experience with the wiring outside of the US. It sounds genuin…

Good GFCI receptacles are almost 10x the cost. Adding them everywhere would add a few thousand extra to building costs.

In any case, new houses must use arc fault breakers which do the same thing and more for most things.

I would add that big motors will trip these every time, so they aren’t usable for every circuit.

Re: We need a lot more electricians

#520

Post by quickthrowman »

jly wrote: post #417
quickthrowman wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You do want your refrigerator on one. What when your mom is putting a metal saucepan into the fridge of leftovers, knocks and smashes the lamp inside, and the AC lamp power supply kills her though the metal saucepan? Your fridge scenario is.. fantasy. What is the path to ground? There isn’t one.. you can hold onto a live phase conductor all day and not get shocked if the circuit isn’t completed. Refrigerator only n…

> Refrigerator only needs a GFI if it is within a certain distance of a sink. Not anymore. NEC 2023 requires GFCI for every 120 or 240V outlets in the kitchen, regardless of their location or proximity to the sink. This was a big change.

Oh I wasn’t aware of that change, my state hasn’t adopted NEC 2023 yet and I haven’t received my NEC 2023 code book from my employer yet.

It’s a negligible cost change for new construction, AFCI breakers and AFCI/GFCI breakers are the same price, at least for Square D 120v 15A 1P

Post reply on HN