Electricity in U.S.A. households (and not only there)

[Telecolor 3007]

Hello. I'm opening this subject because I do have some curiosities about electricity use in U.S.A. households (and not only there).
I do know that electricity is common in U.S.A. households use, for eg, not very much houses or apartaments are having gas for cooking or heating, electricity beeing more common.
Individual houses do have theyr own transformers on the electricity poles. And you can get 240 Volts for some bigger consumers (in Europe that would be 400 Volts today, 380 up untill the '000's, when they rised the voltage a little bit). Do some apartament buildings offer 3 phase current onto the apartament?
I got me the 2nd volume of a book about electricity use in U.S.A. Yes, the printed that in communist Romania, but it was not a book adressed to the general public. Got it from a 2nd hand book store not more then a mile away from me, a 2nd book store from which I got a lot of old books about electricity. In the book they are mentiong that electricity is cheap compared to the early days and so it's common in farms. The only time when electricity was cheap in Romania it was in the '60's and '70's, then restriction camed, then after communism, big prices. In the '60's? and '70's they even made electric cooking machines in Romania (such machines where sold in Romania in the '30's)... some where installed in apartament buildings whre gas wasn't avaible (yet). On a '30's magazine (again not destined to the general public - even if you could probably buy it - it was edited by the company that provided coal (town) gas and electricity in Bucharest) they sayed that refrigerators in U.S.A. could be found even in farms... in Europe they where luxury items and in Romania only the upper class could afford them. Refrigerators started to become more common in the '60's, but only in the late '60's they reallay becamed more common in cities (on the country side, in the '70's-'80's).
If you are intrested, you can ask me more about electricity use in Romania.

[Electronic M]

One thing not mentioned in the other thread is factories, especially ones with large rotating devices (saws, belts, etc) that could harm you if touched accidentally, will use 3 phase fluorescent lighting... Single phase fluorescent lighting flickers and will often cause the stroboscopic effect to occur where in a spinning object, say a saw blade, appears to be stationary because it's only being illuminated by 1 phase.

Supposedly 3 phase 120V is becoming more common in newer residential. I haven't seen it myself yet though. It's required in any building with an elevator.

I've heard there used to be a cheap 3 phase 120V delta system where there would be a floating 120V pair that bridged the hot ends of the 2 standard 120V phases, but it was more dangerous so it got phased out.

As I understand it basically every home except the dirt poor with an active kitchen in the 60s had a refrigerator. Farms away from the grid (there was a big rural electrification program post WWII) typically had either an ice box or a propane powered fridge. Many farms had 6, 12, or 32V generators and or windmills for lighting, small appliances, radio and TV.

My grandparents built a 3 room vacation cabin(the 1st room was a cook shed) up north out of salvaged barn wood in the 60s. Two of those rooms were just bare framing on the inside all the way up to the mid 90s when I first visited. Electricity reached there in 1973 and they wired it up and got a used 1960s fridge for it that lasted into the 2000s...I don't know if the relatives changed the fridge and stove at the same time because one failed, or because they were sick of old appliances.

[old_tv_nut]

This site will give you a lot of info on U.S. household energy use:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/...on%20in%202020.

[Electronic M]

Another thing. Usually a house in a city doesn't have it's own dedicated stepdown transformer on the pole. Occasionally you'll see that if you are out in the country and the nearest other house is far enough away that it's cheaper to have 2 transformers than the cable to run 240 split phase to both.

Everywhere I've lived the transformer was shared by atleast 3 houses. Individual transformers are more common in industrial and commercial applications. If one factory in an industrial park or one store in a commercial center blows a transformer or needs to triple it's power consumption (requiring a bigger transformer) if the power company has to shutdown 4 such customers over an issue with one and those other 4 loose thousands of millions because of the other guy the utility is going to have angry customers.

[MadMan]

There are really no residential homes that have 3 phase. Only in big apartment buildings will the building have 3 phase, but each apartment will only get 2 of those phases. Which is a little weird, because they only get 208 volts for electric stoves, etc, instead of the normal 240v. The 120v part of it is still 120v... somehow. So most 240v appliances in America will say 208-240v on them. There are really no residential appliances that use 3 phase power, so there's really no reason for a house or apartment to have it.

As for gas, it's much more common than you seem to think. It depends, of course, on where you are. If there is a gas supply service available. For example, I live in Chicago, a fairly old city. I want to say every single home and business has natural gas supply. We have cold winters, and we need gas for heat. Besides heat, probably about 90% of homes in Chicago use gas for water heaters, stoves, and clothes dryers. There are some oddball exceptions to that, like if the homeowner simply prefers an electric stove. Or the dryer is in some weird place that cannot be vented outdoors. Or it's in an apartment building big enough to make it inconvenient to plumb gas to every unit. Funny, my shop is just about the only building I've seen around me that has no gas supply. And that's only because we burn waste oil for heat, and the gas company kept erroneously billing us despite us having cancelled our gas service a long time ago. So we told them to remove the meter entirely.

Now for another example, my brother lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Which is a desert hellhole. Since it almost never gets cold there, most homes do not have heat, which is the major use of gas. Although I think they do have a gas company that serves some of the city, most homes are just electric and no gas.

Then you have rural areas, which go back to having gas, even though there is no gas service. Instead, each home has a massive propane tank, which a truck will come out and refill when it's empty. Electricity is not terribly expensive, but natural gas and propane are cheaper. And cheaper by enough that it warrants having gas plumbing and paying a separate bill.

As for refrigerators on American farms in the 1930s, I doubt it. I'm sure there were plenty of them, but probably not the majority. Gas powered refrigerators were a thing, as Electronic M said, but I think even then they were not cheap and it was still the great depression dragging on. I think after the war a lot more farms started getting access to electricity, then surely a lot of farms would've got a refrigerator. They had also gotten simpler and cheaper by that time.

[old_tv_nut]

In older sections of Chicago, gas light was used at one time. One apartment we lived in (built in the 1920s or earlier, I think) had the electric light fixture in the center of the kitchen ceiling mounted to the old gas pipe simply by screwing a cap over the end of the pipe to capture the mounting bracket. When I went to replace the fixture, I found that the gas supply was still connected and had never been capped in the basement. Wow, was that a scare.

i wonder about your statement about no heat in most homes in Phoenix. Here in Sahuarita we are on average only 6 degrees F cooler than Phoenix, and still need heat in the winter. I would expect that all-electric homes in Phoenix have some electric resistive heating or a heat pump. Even homes in Yuma (hotter, like Phoenix) have some heating for winter.

Edit: the house I'm in has two independent HVAC units, one for upstairs and one for down. They are both installed in the attic, and use gas for heating.

[nasadowsk]

Out where I am, houses are far enough apart to have their own pole pigs. I don’t know what mine is rated at, but probably more than the previous owner thought….

[MIPS]

My neighborhood is semi-rural and the first places started going up around 1965 or 1970. Unless you are an arterial road you don't have streetlights and even then its every two or three other poles.
Three or four houses share a pole transformer and a master fuse. The main road has three phase running along it, presumably for the school and water lift stations but all side roads are single phase.
The transformer steps the voltage down and we all get split phase 120/240.
We had 100A service when the house was built in the early 70's but recently had to upgrade to 200A for HVAC. BC at least has a pretty arbitrary code that even if the old stack on the house down to the meter and panel is in excellent condition and will fit the higher capacity feed cabling, it cannot be reused. Many of the houses up here had the stacks and meter boxes embedded in the wall, so you can identify other people in the neighborhood who had service upgrades by 3" conduit snaking around the exterior of the house, because the new stack is going to cost you $800, there is no point paying another $4000 to rip a wall out to hide it, get it inspected and the put your stucco back up.

[Electronic M]

In Lakeland FL the house we used to have had both electric heat and AC...No gas feed. Our subdivision started in the 70s and was too far out of the city. Restaurants along the main drag had gas.

[Telecolor 3007]

If the household does have electric heating for water and in the same time it using an electric cooking machine, it dosen't need 2 phases or 3 phases?
In Romania for one phase you can use no more then 6-7 Ampers on one phase and we have 230 Volts... at 120 Volts you need more Amps.

Gas lighting was used in Buchares too. Coal gas, or gaz aerian (aerial gas) how it was named here. I think it went out of service around 1950.
In 1943 natural gas camed in Bucharest. They had the intention to bring it before that, but the lack of funds and intrerest. Well, during W.W. 2 you had to use less oil, so at the big Grozăveşti * power plant (at 40 M.W.'s it was the most powerfoul in Romania) they bringed gas for boilers. Household natural gas, the 1st person in 1944, but natural gas becomed more common in households only after 1960 and some people had to wait for natural gas pipes for years 1980-2000. Well, there is the posibility of small household gastanks (butelii de aragaz).

Heh, I do have an old French book (1931) about electricity meters.

I thought that the thing with light on not all poles was a thing of Romania, because here electricity is expensive.
1998 holliday, Prahova country side (Prahova is a quyte developed county), disco (I was between 15 and 16 years of age back then), the lighths where turne of at 1-2 P.M., so we had to use an electric torch. And sometimes we missed the batteries (had to go to the city). When we got 4 D (R20) batteries, there was a very shiny Moon.
A song to rember me of that holliday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnbL0js_spo

Maybe that 1936-1937 Romanian magazine exagerated with the accesibility of refrigerators in U.S.A. in those years. But I do think that more people could afford them comparing to Germany, France, U.K.
Here is something intresting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nDSYpMXdKA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVfZCKCzEWg

* Grozav means great (not in the way of big, but more as hot shot, good thing), and Grozăveşti means "you are great". Probably there was a great guy in that are.
A guy named Victor Iliescu-Grozăveşti wrote some books about boilers.
In Romania, some household used sobe (don't know how that is called in English) for heating and boilers for hot water.

[kf4rca]

I've seen ONE home with 3 phase (in Charleston) when I was with SCE&G. It had a flat pack HVAC system which is really a commercial unit. It was a very large home.
There are 4 homes connected to a 25 KVA transformer. But I've seen up to 10 connected to a 37.5 transformer. The kva is stamped on the side of a transformer and can be read from the ground. Never seen a 50 in a residential area. Sometimes you'll see a 10 for only two homes.
I remember going to a residence out on one of the barrier islands south of Charleston. It was really a 10x12 shack with a tin roof- rusted.
It had 110V 2 wire service. It was located down a 1/4 mile dirt road. People were living in it. They didn't have much.
They got electric when REA came thru. It was the ONLY 110 service I had ever seen to a residence!
That area had 4KV distribution- which is what they started out with.
I've never seen any 4KV stuff with Ga.Power. Its all 13.8/23.9 stuff here!

[Electronic M]

240V 100A main breaker is basically the minimum you'll see in residential homes in the USA. 240V 200A is basically the standard in homes 70s or newer.

The house I lived in in Florida was ~3Ksqft. NO gas in the neighborhood so everything was electric. Two different electric heater/Air-conditioning units (each handled it's own floor), water heater, separate built in stove/oven, swimming pool pump, pool heater, hot tub, dryer and an outlet for a welder in the garage all powered off 240V.
Every breaker spot in our panel was occupied...I don't think it was possible to add a circuit to it.

[old_tv_nut]

A stated above, I have two independent HVAC units, one for upstairs and one for down. They are both installed in the attic, and use gas for heating. The good thing is that the house can be made bearable by one while the other is down for repair. The bad thing is that the peak demand when both ACs randomly run at the same time disqualifies me for limited demand rates. Even though demand is recorded by the electric meter, this info was not accessible to first line customer service - they had to refer me to the engineering department to call me back a few days later and tell me the peak demand on my account and determine that switching to demand-limited service might actually cost me more overall with penalties for exceeding the limit.

I have a 200 amp panel with nine open slots out of 40 total.

Since we have buried utilities here, I have no idea what the transformer ratings or homes per transformer are.

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

A stated above, I have two independent HVAC units, one for upstairs and one for down. They are both installed in the attic, and use gas for heating. The good thing is that the house can be made bearable by one while the other is down for repair. The bad thing is that the peak demand when both ACs randomly run at the same time disqualifies me for limited demand rates. Even though demand is recorded by the electric meter, this info was not accessible to first line customer service - they had to refer me to the engineering department to call me back a few days later and tell me the peak demand on my account and determine that switching to demand-limited service might actually cost me more overall with penalties for exceeding the limit.

I have a 200 amp panel with nine open slots out of 40 total.

Since we have buried utilities here, I have no idea what the transformer ratings or homes per transformer are.

If both units are in the attic you could probably implement some really simple relay logic to lock out AC on one unit when it is on on the other...

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

If both units are in the attic you could probably implement some really simple relay logic to lock out AC on one unit when it is on on the other...

True, but first I'd have to determine if max 50% duty cycle is sufficient in the summer. Plus, this would be creating a non-standard setup that would have to be explained to confused repair techs, since I no longer go attic crawling to work on this stuff.