Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it
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@e4tmyl33t said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
they had two layers of some material I have only ever seen there
Lath and plaster, maybe?
That's pretty obvious
My previous house (also built in the early 40s) had 2 layer walls too. I think it was just a early version of drywall. Those sheets were smaller (can't remember exactly, but something more like 2' by 5' - hey, that was back in 1992-1995!)
This house (1941) has lath and plaster.
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@dcon said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
This house (1941) has lath and plaster.
Mine still has it in some of the upstairs walls. Built sometime in the 20s, as far as we've been able to tell (mostly based on some scraps of newspaper found in the walls during the bathroom remodel some years back)
When my father redid most of the walls downstairs he ripped that all out and replaced it with drywall.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
they had two layers of some material I have only ever seen there
Lath and plaster, maybe?
No. It is a sheet good that looks similar to drywall but the inside of the sheet is more like concrete backer board. It isn't plaster board, it is concrete. It dulls tools in a hurry.
The sheets are also 2' wide and fairly long. 12'? 16'? They're slightly less than 3/8" thick and were installed two sheets thick with a 1' overlap. About 11/16" overall thickness.
It really does dull tools very quickly. It would be impossible to overstate that. Conventional drill bits are absolutely dull after one hole. I ruined blades on my oscillating tool I'm a single cut. When possible I would use masonry bits and blades but sometimes you don't have the proper size and say goodbye to your cutting edge.
I've never seen anything like it anywhere else.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
It really does dull tools very quickly.
Definitely not what was in my old home then.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
No. It is a sheet good that looks similar to drywall but the inside of the sheet is more like concrete backer board. It isn't plaster board, it is concrete. It dulls tools in a hurry.
Cement backer board? For putting in tile?
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I've only seen them referred to as L1, L2 and L3
Which reminds me of my own installation...
We're extending the house and re-doing the kitchen, so to have a kitchen usable while it's done (and also because it'll be convenient), we've ripped out the old one and reinstalled it in the basement. As far as the electricity goes, the biggest question mark I had was how to get a proper circuit for the induction cooker (and oven, which in theory and according to code here should be on two different circuits but fuck that).
The obvious solution would be to reuse the existing circuit, as the basement kitchen is approximately exactly just under the old one, so I spent some time fumbling in some of the junction boxes trying to find out how it works (spoiler: I didn't really understand it and ended up running a new cable from the box which is just next room to the basement kitchen, it's ugly as hell but will do).
Now our house electricity supply is on 3 phases, which isn't that common here (but not so uncommon either, just... not standard). Fine. When the house was initially built (50-ish years ago), there were a number of 3 phases plugs that were installed (typically for washing machine etc.), we removed a few across the years as we redid a bathroom etc. (we remove them because nowadays there isn't any standard white good that needs it, regardless of what's to come in this story) So there were obviously three cables running from the fuse box up to these plugs.
But then at some other point in time, the fuse box was modernised and it seems that was done in a... slightly lazy way? Each phase was sent on a different series of fuses, powering different circuits. Which means that there is absolutely no care taken to balance out loads (well they tried to split the heaviest devices across phases, but of course it all depends on how you actually run them), which isn't ideal (though I've got no idea what is the actual practical impact of not balancing loads?). So for example the cooker, which before (I assume) was on tri-phase circuit, now is on only one.
But wait, there is more! They decided that they still had nice thick cables running from the box to the cooker (three, one per phase), and thus decided... to reuse them for the three cables that they needed for the new single-phase circuit! Earth, neutral, live... meh, they're just bits of copper, who cares about colours?
So when we unplugged the cooker, it's a standard modern 3-wires thing which is rigged into a 3-phases wall plug, the 3 
phases then running down back to the fuse box.To top it all, they clearly needed at least one more circuit so they ran yet another set of wires in the same route, so I have one junction box in the basement with something like 6 cables running from it, almost all of the same colour. Some of them are actually connected to earth in that box. Some other run back somewhere behind the fuse box where they may be connected to something that matches their colour. Or maybe not. Who knows?
Uh, yeah, my ugly fix with a new dedicated cable running from the box to the basement cooker might be visually ugly, but at least there is no confusion about it.
(also the cables they were using were smaller than what the code requires (code here says 6 mm2, it was... 2.5 mm2, I'd say?) which probably isn't really an issue as the cooker itself uses an even thinner cable (what's the point of mandating larger cables in the walls though?), but of course the new cable that I added is of the correct size)
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@remi As far as I've heard, here, there is no need to balance single-phase loads in a residential setup. Just mind the main fuse is per phase, typically 25A each.
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@PleegWat I'm not too worried about fuses (and also both not very familiar with exactly how the whole thing is set up, and the equivalent English technical terms!).
There is a main fuse in the mains box that comes from the street (this box is physically sealed, apart from two buttons to turn it on/off, and is legally the property of the electricity supplier, everything downstream from that box is mine). No idea how large that fuse is, but obviously that's all out of my control anyway. It's likely pretty large since the electricity supplier can switch me to a larger contract (within reason) without physically coming to my property, so I assume that fuse is larger than my current maximum allowed use (btw, I have no idea if/how the supplier monitors what I actually draw, and what would happen if I were to draw more than what my contract says... obviously I'll pay for what I use but in theory I should also switch to a larger contract... or not?).
From that box run 3 cables for the 3 phases (uh, plus one for neutral, I guess...), going to my fuse box. Now initially (when the house was built) I assume that some circuits were wired with those 3 phases and the whole thing was set up... differently from now (I have no real way to know). Now, each of the 3 phases goes to a differential switch, and then downstream of those are several fuses for the various circuits in the house.
So apart from the main fuse in the supplier's box, there isn't any single fuse, it's just one fuse per circuit. (some rough numbers: the cooker is, by the code, on a 32A fuse, so the mains fuse is likely more than that (though of course in theory nothing forces that to be the case); the cooker actually draws something like 20-25A, according to specs. I'm not sure what my current contract is, it's probably around 50-60A but I could probably get twice as much just with a phone call. So overall I don't think it's likely that the mains fuse would be 25A (per phase)? I have no idea what the code says here...)
Now when it comes to the balancing... obviously there isn't much that is done now, but also obviously it's working, in that nothing has ever broken in the years we've been there. So clearly it's not a huge deal. Which isn't surprising since we're just a small residential client (we don't even have AC or electrical heating that would draw a significant amount, the largest thing is the cooker). But I don't know how much that whole thing matters.
(when one electrician came to give us a quote for the work to do in the (new) extension, they said basically that my fuse box was a mess (no real surprise there) and that they don't want to just patch it (not hugely surprising either). So either they will redo the whole box (
) or just bypass all the existing differential switches/fuses and instead install a new differential switch with all three phases going into it (so that it takes care of doing the balancing), and new fuses downstream of that for circuits going into the extension)
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Looking around, it seems the standard here for the mains is either 60A on a single phase, or 20A on 3 phases. But then again the code says that a cooker should be on a 32A fuse (and e.g. a 6000W induction cooker would draw up to 27A, so that's the correct ballpark).
So assuming my mains is fused according to specs (which is actually somewhat unlikely given that the box is 50 years old so I would need to know what "specs" were 50 years ago!), I shouldn't be able to run my cooker on a single phase -- and it should cut not at the cooker's fuse but at the mains' fuse!
I assume that either my mains fuse is larger (again, I suspect it is as while modern mains boxes can be easily programmed, this one is a very old one and was likely dimensioned so that it could service a higher load without having to send someone to change it), or I just was lucky until now that I never overloaded the circuit (probably because I never ran all fires of the cooker at maximum at the same time)!
Now I'm starting to get why the electrician wants to rewire things so that all 3 phases are used together...
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I wonder if both your and my kitchen were installed by the same guys. (Or maybe electrical
are an industry standard for kitchens?)My house is single-phase, and the cooktop in the kitchen is wired using a 6-wire cable:
- yellow/green is earth (OK, that's the standard)
- brown is live (still OK)
- blue is live ( - it's supposed to be neutral!)
- black is neutral
- another black wire is neutral as well
- a third black wire is not connected to anything
My guess is that the guys didn't have a cable with properly sized wires, so they winged it by using two smaller wires in parallel, without caring about colors. Both being Bad Ideas™.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So assuming my mains is fused according to specs (which is actually somewhat unlikely given that the box is 50 years old so I would need to know what "specs" were 50 years ago!), I shouldn't be able to run my cooker on a single phase -- and it should cut not at the cooker's fuse but at the mains' fuse!
The current draw for a cooker hasn't changed much in decades (the oven or ovens will be the biggest part of that) so your mains is probably fused to about that sort of spec. Indeed, the maximum current/power draw is probably a key factor in cooker design, and has been for a long time; things are that way because they were that way and are expected to continue to be that way, and shit works because this is so.
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@remi Here in the US (120 V nominal), a "standard" electric stove (oven + cooktop) is on a 50A, 2-phase (240 V) dedicated circuit for 12 kW. Small ones use a 40A, 240V circuit (9.6 kW). The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
So a single-phase circuit over there is 230V (nominal) and a 3-phase circuit is 400V (phase angles, aren't they fun?). So I'd expect a much bigger breaker. In fact, I'm really shocked that your conventional main breaker is only 60A@230V. That's considered "dangerously small" and "should be updated ASAP" here even for a small house (apartments can get away with it).
Unless, of course, I'm doing the math all wrong somewhere.
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@Zerosquare If you hadn't said your house is single-phased, I would have guessed that it was wired for 3 phases (hence the 3 black wires). Then again, maybe your house was 3 phases at some point in the past and switched to single phase later (apparently back in the days it was more standard to supply 3 phases where nowadays residential installation never do that, so maybe one time that e.g. your meter had to be changed, it was also changed?), and this is all a remnant of that time?
(Or maybe electrical
are an industry standard for kitchens?)FTFY.
I suspect that the problem with electricity is that it's actually very easy to do it yourself. After all, a cable is just a bit of copper, all you need is a screwdriver and some pliers and you can wire about anything. Also, despite being obviously possibly very dangerous, an electrical circuit is somewhat forgiving in "normal" condition. An exposed contact won't matter (as long as nothing touches it). An under-dimensioned wire won't matter (for a while). And obviously using the wrong colour doesn't matter either to the electrons travelling in the wires.
So you get a lot of sloppy jobs, because "I can do that" and "seems to work, good enough."
Some other trades are less forgiving. A badly made water connection leaks. A badly painted wall is visibly ugly. Not that you don't get
there, but the visible parts have to be slightly more correct. And of course, other trades usually don't risk killing you, so you can more easily forgive a tradesman doing a bad job.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi Here in the US (120 V nominal), a "standard" electric stove (oven + cooktop) is on a 50A, 2-phase (240 V) dedicated circuit for 12 kW. Small ones use a 40A, 240V circuit (9.6 kW). The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
So a single-phase circuit over there is 230V (nominal) and a 3-phase circuit is 400V (phase angles, aren't they fun?). So I'd expect a much bigger breaker. In fact, I'm really shocked that your conventional main breaker is only 60A@230V. That's considered "dangerously small" and "should be updated ASAP" here even for a small house (apartments can get away with it).
Unless, of course, I'm doing the math all wrong somewhere.
It depends on how much load you have in total, and you can mostly just count the heavy-draw items. Cookers, tumble driers, AC, room heaters, toasters, kettles, that sort of thing. Not all of which you'd use at once. Electronics and lighting are rarely factors these days (unless you're doing something crazy like running a GPU-equipped server cluster in your basement).
Some items (cookers, driers, HVAC) may well have their own special sub-circuits so their draw doesn't interfere with anything else.
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@dkf said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The current draw for a cooker hasn't changed much in decades
Most modern cookers nowadays are induction, which is definitely very different from cookers 50 years ago (though maybe not in terms of the current draw, but it might also be a bit of a chicken-and-egg in that manufacturers of induction cookers went for draws similar to what non-induction cookers did, because this is how most places are wired!).But still, looking at just the cooker is likely a bad indicator of the overall code from 50 years ago vs. now. For one thing, as I mentioned, 3 phases was very common, if not standard, at the time, and nowadays I don't think newly built residential homes ever use it (it's all 3 phases in the street but what matters is what comes out of your mains box, not how the supplier handles things on their side of the box).
Still, you made me
and walk to the box. If I understand correctly the arcane markings and wiring, I think each phase is fused to 30A (funnily, the box is made so that in theory I could have different fuses on each phase!). So my cooker should be OK, if there isn't much more draw on that phase (and if I were using it at its maximum power, which never happens).
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@dkf I guess the big difference is that in the US, most new-construction houses (and even many older houses) use electrical heating (plus AC in many areas) and have electrical water heaters. And that's a huge draw that's largely independent of the others--you're running the AC at the same time you're running the water heater at the same time you're running the cooker.
And an electric furnace needs an (average, from a quick google search) 80-100 A@220V breaker. Just by itself. So that dictates the smallest main supply you can do. Stand-alone water heaters are a 30A@220V breaker and (by code) have to be on their own circuit. Not sure about the on-demand ones. AC breakers are similarly large and have huge transient current draw when they first turn on.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, where you only need occasional heating, a lot of older places (and apartments) don't have central HVAC at all--no central AC and only cadet heaters (small electric baseboard or wall-mounted heaters wired to a fixed thermostat per room), with the intent that you're not running all of them at once. Those are on much smaller breakers.
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@Benjamin-Hall Our house was built at a time when electrical heating was uncommon and indeed it's not how it's done. So clearly the installation wasn't designed with that in mind.
Yet I found a webpage from a supplier that recommends subscribing a 12 kVA contract for a 100-150 m2 house with what we call "all electrical" (i.e. heating, water, possibly AC...), which works out at around 50 A (230 V), so it's consistent with the 60 A that I saw elsewhere. "Standard" domestic contracts go up to 36 kVA (150 A), but I think by far most people will be on 12 kVA or lower (smallest contracts start at 3 kVA but that's for e.g. single room flats without
electricalheating).I'm not sure what more to say about your numbers in comparison to ours...
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I'm not sure what more to say about your numbers in comparison to ours...
I see there are a diversity of "standards" out there
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Another way to look at ballpark numbers: for electrical heating, the recommended power of radiators is 100 W / m2. So for a typical 100 m2 house, that'd be 10 kW total i.e. 45 A. (and of course, everything else on top of that, cooker itself being easily 25 A)
Yeah, I don't really see how that squares with suppliers saying "12 kVA is OK up to 150 m2 with electrical heating."
I mean, I guess in practice it works because you never have all of your radiators turned up to 11 at the same time, but still, I agree that it sounds very small...
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Also another thing that amuses me, and that I alluded to, about circuits and code.
The recommended wiring for a cooker is a 6 mm2 wire (pretty thick!). But when you get to connecting the cooker, you realise that the bit of wire that sticks out of it is much, much smaller than that. Something like a standard extension cord i.e. maybe 1.5 mm2 or so.
I sort of get why this is so, but it looks a bit weird. Something about chains and weakest links and all that...
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Another way to look at ballpark numbers: for electrical heating, the recommended power of radiators is 100 W / m2. So for a typical 100 m2 house, that'd be 10 kW total i.e. 45 A. (and of course, everything else on top of that, cooker itself being easily 25 A)
Yeah, I don't really see how that squares with suppliers saying "12 kVA is OK up to 150 m2 with electrical heating."
I mean, I guess in practice it works because you never have all of your radiators turned up to 11 at the same time, but still, I agree that it sounds very small...
Also consider that breakers aren't sized to the exact need--they're over-estimated. And there are (in the US at least) pretty strong rules for how exactly they're estimated. I want to say that the ballpark is "80%", but it's more complex than that.
One of the major contributors to the strong decrease in residential structure fires over the last few decades is that the electrical code got a whole lot more picky and better enforced, at least for new construction. Older houses, like the one I'm in, are anyone's guess.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Something about chains and weakest links and all that...
And where you do not want that to be in the wall
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@dkf said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The current draw for a cooker hasn't changed much in decades
Most modern cookers nowadays are inductionThis is probably a regional thing. They exist here but are certainly not the most common type of electrical stove.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Another way to look at ballpark numbers: for electrical heating, the recommended power of radiators is 100 W / m2. So for a typical 100 m2 house, that'd be 10 kW total i.e. 45 A. (and of course, everything else on top of that, cooker itself being easily 25 A)
Yeah, I don't really see how that squares with suppliers saying "12 kVA is OK up to 150 m2 with electrical heating."
I mean, I guess in practice it works because you never have all of your radiators turned up to 11 at the same time, but still, I agree that it sounds very small...
Electrical HVAC is most commonly a heat pump with an "emergency heat" mode where it uses electricity to heat up coils directly, but that should only be used rarely for most systems. If that's not true then either your heat pump is dying or you have the wrong one installed for your building / climate.
As mentioned the compressors do take a big initial load when they start up, just like refrigerators do.
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@boomzilla said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Electrical HVAC is most commonly a heat pump with an "emergency heat" mode
Sure, but not all "electrical heating" is HVAC. Around here, newly built flats are more likely to be standard electrical radiators (not heat pump). New houses are a bit more likely to use a heat pump, but that's not a given. AC is fairly uncommon (in residential buildings). Buildings more than 10-15 years old won't have a heat pump. Retrofits... will tend to put heat pumps wherever possible nowadays, but that's a recent thing.
So you need a pretty beefy circuit to handle that. Which we apparently don't have.
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@PleegWat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Something about chains and weakest links and all that...
And where you do not want that to be in the wall
What, you got a problem with hanging the floors from the roof now?
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@boomzilla said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Electrical HVAC is most commonly a heat pump with an "emergency heat" mode
Sure, but not all "electrical heating" is HVAC.
Yep. Just like the cooker thing. Guess I should have been more specific.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Around here, newly built flats are more likely to be standard electrical radiators (not heat pump).
Are these pupil stupid? If they're building something from scratch why are they including a heating solution which leads to at least triple the operating costs?
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@boomzilla said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Another way to look at ballpark numbers: for electrical heating, the recommended power of radiators is 100 W / m2. So for a typical 100 m2 house, that'd be 10 kW total i.e. 45 A. (and of course, everything else on top of that, cooker itself being easily 25 A)
Yeah, I don't really see how that squares with suppliers saying "12 kVA is OK up to 150 m2 with electrical heating."
I mean, I guess in practice it works because you never have all of your radiators turned up to 11 at the same time, but still, I agree that it sounds very small...
Electrical HVAC is most commonly a heat pump with an "emergency heat" mode where it uses electricity to heat up coils directly, but that should only be used rarely for most systems. If that's not true then either your heat pump is dying or you have the wrong one installed for your building / climate.
As mentioned the compressors do take a big initial load when they start up, just like refrigerators do.
Except for all the ones built more than a decade ago, which still use forced air resistive heating (even as an HVAC system). Especially in places that don't generally (or didn't generally) install AC due to "not needing it" during the summer.
The only constant is that everything is different.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@boomzilla said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Another way to look at ballpark numbers: for electrical heating, the recommended power of radiators is 100 W / m2. So for a typical 100 m2 house, that'd be 10 kW total i.e. 45 A. (and of course, everything else on top of that, cooker itself being easily 25 A)
Yeah, I don't really see how that squares with suppliers saying "12 kVA is OK up to 150 m2 with electrical heating."
I mean, I guess in practice it works because you never have all of your radiators turned up to 11 at the same time, but still, I agree that it sounds very small...
Electrical HVAC is most commonly a heat pump with an "emergency heat" mode where it uses electricity to heat up coils directly, but that should only be used rarely for most systems. If that's not true then either your heat pump is dying or you have the wrong one installed for your building / climate.
As mentioned the compressors do take a big initial load when they start up, just like refrigerators do.
Except for all the ones built more than a decade ago, which still use forced air resistive heating (even as an HVAC system). Especially in places that don't generally (or didn't generally) install AC due to "not needing it" during the summer.
The only constant is that everything is different.
Yeah, I guess I don't have experience in those weirdo places that don't need AC.
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@Rhywden because fitting a heat pump in a block of flat is a bit more work for the architect? (you have to find a place for the unit with a link to the outside, someone will complain that it's ugly/noisy/misplaced/whatever) I mean, obviously many other countries manage to do that so it's not impossible, but people being people and cheese being moved (i.e. "it's not like we did before!"), well, you know how it goes...
Though TBH I don't really have that much experience of newly built flats, so maybe I'm wrong and they do put heat pumps. I don't really know.
Until very recently it was perhaps 50/50 as to whether a new flat would get gas central heating or electrical. Gas has brutally fallen out of fashion in the last 2-3 years (regardless of
), so I assume that new flats are more likely to be electrical now. Whether this has significantly shifted to heat pump vs. electrical radiators, I don't know.But again, this is mostly my gut feeling, not a carefully sourced analysis of the building market in France.
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OK so apparently my gut feeling is totally wrong (
) and newly built flats go mostly for heat pump nowadays, based on a very thorough and scientific literature review.I'd still say that it's a very new thing, probably less than 10 years.
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@boomzilla said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Yeah, I guess I don't have experience in those weirdo places that don't need AC.
I could have done with it over the past few days, but that's the first time for a few years. Heating OTOH is pretty important through a lot of the year.
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@boomzilla said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
No. It is a sheet good that looks similar to drywall but the inside of the sheet is more like concrete backer board. It isn't plaster board, it is concrete. It dulls tools in a hurry.
Cement backer board? For putting in tile?
No. It has paper faces like drywall but the inside is not gypsum. It is grayish, but not quite as hard as backer board.
I'm guessing it is some sort of transitional material that died out quickly after gypsum drywall became widespread.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
I've known of small factories that didn't have grid connections with that much capacity.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So you get a lot of sloppy jobs, because "I can do that" and "seems to work, good enough."
If you're talking about me, at least have the courtesy to @ me. 😜
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
I've known of small factories that didn't have grid connections with that much capacity.
WTF is he planning to run in there?
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@PleegWat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
WTF is he planning to run in there?
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@PleegWat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
I've known of small factories that didn't have grid connections with that much capacity.
WTF is he planning to run in there?
He's 4,001 A short of a Super Saiyan training school
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Zerosquare If you hadn't said your house is single-phased, I would have guessed that it was wired for 3 phases (hence the 3 black wires). Then again, maybe your house was 3 phases at some point in the past and switched to single phase later (apparently back in the days it was more standard to supply 3 phases where nowadays residential installation never do that, so maybe one time that e.g. your meter had to be changed, it was also changed?), and this is all a remnant of that time?
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Before being replaced by a smart meter recently, the meter was the original one installed when the house was built (in the late 60s), and AFAIR it was single-phased. Also, the cooktop was added much later, in the early 90s.
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So you get a lot of sloppy jobs, because "I can do that" and "seems to work, good enough."
Sounds like a much more likely explanation.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
Sure. "A friend". Huh huh.
Filed under: wink wink
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
I've known of small factories that didn't have grid connections with that much capacity.
I didn't know grow farms (on an industrial scale) were legal in Florida.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
I've known of small factories that didn't have grid connections with that much capacity.
I didn't know grow farms (on an industrial scale) were legal in Florida.
Maybe they're using laser cooling.
If a lot of that is dedicated to the sound system, it would also make sense.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Also another thing that amuses me, and that I alluded to, about circuits and code.
The recommended wiring for a cooker is a 6 mm2 wire (pretty thick!). But when you get to connecting the cooker, you realise that the bit of wire that sticks out of it is much, much smaller than that. Something like a standard extension cord i.e. maybe 1.5 mm2 or so.
I sort of get why this is so, but it looks a bit weird. Something about chains and weakest links and all that...
Also distance. That makes a big difference.
Ever use power tools on an extension cord? A circular saw plugged directly into the outlet may only have a 16-18ga cord on it. For extension cords less than 25' you can probably get by with a 16ga cord. Get out to 100' or more and you're going to be pushing the limits of a 14ga cord and probably start popping breakers.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Except for all the ones built more than a decade ago, which still use forced air resistive heating
I have literally never seen this in our area. Ever. That would be a massively wasteful and expensive way to heat. The only way that you could make it more expensive would be to literally burn cash to heat your home. Baseboard heaters are moderately common as zone heating to help keep problem rooms comfortable. Baseboard heaters were at one point installed in some homes as primary heating but almost all of that has been scrapped by now because of their expensive operating costs.
Even heat pumps are not all that prevalent around here. Winters get cold enough that heat pumps struggle to keep homes warm enough.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Except for all the ones built more than a decade ago, which still use forced air resistive heating
I have literally never seen this in our area. Ever. That would be a massively wasteful and expensive way to heat. The only way that you could make it more expensive would be to literally burn cash to heat your home. Baseboard heaters are moderately common as zone heating to help keep problem rooms comfortable. Baseboard heaters were at one point installed in some homes as primary heating but almost all of that has been scrapped by now because of their expensive operating costs.
Even heat pumps are not all that prevalent around here. Winters get cold enough that heat pumps struggle to keep homes warm enough.
The home I grew up (built in the 70s in Idaho) in had a central "furnace" that was basically identical to a gas furnace...except using resistive coils instead of gas flames.
An internet search says they're pretty commonly available still: https://www.lowes.com/pl/Electric--Forced-air-furnaces-Furnaces-furnace-accessories-Heating-cooling/4294618084?refinement=4294827490
Heat pumps are quite new as far as actually being reliable and affordable--really only the last decade or so. There are a lot of houses built before then that haven't been completely renovated since. Heck, I'm pretty sure my Florida Townhouse (built in 2014 or so) had a standard AC unit, not a heat pump.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Rhywden because fitting a heat pump in a block of flat is a bit more work for the architect? (you have to find a place for the unit with a link to the outside, someone will complain that it's ugly/noisy/misplaced/whatever) I mean, obviously many other countries manage to do that so it's not impossible, but people being people and cheese being moved (i.e. "it's not like we did before!"), well, you know how it goes...
Though TBH I don't really have that much experience of newly built flats, so maybe I'm wrong and they do put heat pumps. I don't really know.When you say "flat" you are referring to what we call "apartments", correct?
Here in the USA they have through wall units that are installed in each apartment below one of the windows in order to do heat exchange. On the outside it looks very similar to the units that are installed in lots of hotels/motels but on the interior it is connected to a central HVAC air handler. Or they make just have an area at the back of the apartment block that they place the compressor/heat exchangers at. Some have a single roof mount unit that handles the heat exchange for the entire building and then pumps heated and/or cooled water to each individual air handler.
There are lots of ways to skin that particular cat. But I have no idea how they do it in France.
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@PleegWat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The "main supply" for the house is either 100A@240V or 200A@240V.
A friend is building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. The feed to the house is 5,000A. That is not a typo.
I've known of small factories that didn't have grid connections with that much capacity.
WTF is he planning to run in there?
20,000+ sqft home, 8 garage bays all with rapid chargers for EVs and there is also shore power run to the dock for his boat (yacht).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Heat pumps are quite new as far as actually being reliable and affordable--really only the last decade or so.
I grew up in a home that had a heat pump. We moved out of that house when I was going into first grade, so that way 35ish years ago.
Mind you, they hated that heat pump and we ended up having to add supplemental wood fired heat to keep the house comfortable in the coldest part of the winter. The upstairs bedrooms also had supplemental baseboard heaters. I remember this very well because I had some toys get thoroughly melted into the fins and my mother was none too happy with me and even after thoroughly cleaning it I would still sometimes smell burnt plastic.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Heat pumps are quite new as far as actually being reliable and affordable--really only the last decade or so.
I grew up in a home that had a heat pump. We moved out of that house when I was going into first grade, so that way 35ish years ago.
Mind you, they hated that heat pump and we ended up having to add supplemental wood fired heat to keep the house comfortable in the coldest part of the winter. The upstairs bedrooms also had supplemental baseboard heaters. I remember this very well because I had some toys get thoroughly melted into the fins and my mother was none too happy with me and even after thoroughly cleaning it I would still sometimes smell burnt plastic.
Hence the "reliable" part. They've existed for a while, but they sucked outside of very particular climate zones.
