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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

You CAN add breakers to a panel that appears to be filled up using a tandem breaker. Its basically two breakers built into the space of a single breaker.
I've seen them in the field but personally I would not use one.
I understand there are homes in Appalachia like the island home in my previous post. But they didn't have a front door view of the Atlantic.
After that summer job with SCE&G, I realized I wanted an air conditioned job like a TV station control room. The summers are HOT in SC!!!

That's the split-phase.
Breaker panels are setup with a common neutral and when you plug a breaker in you are either tapping into one half of the phase or the other. Going from that one half to neutral (basically earth ground but by code it can only terminate in the breaker panel) it's 120v, but if you take one half the phase and connect it with the other half the phase you get 240v
There is some variance on the voltage, hence you will see North americans show a line voltage anywhere between 110 and 120v, but when you combine the halves it's always that voltage, but doubled.

For people with electric water heaters that will almost always live on a 30A breaker. Same goes for the stove and dryer. I've seen electric heat furnaces use that, and higher like 40A or even 50A single phase. In most places around here electric heat makes no practical sense because gas and propane are so cheap compared to electricity. Even oil burning heaters are rare.
The last electric heat system I removed though was three-phase on a 30A breaker

But in areas where it can get cold in the winter there are gas networks everywhere or a lot of people have a propane tank near the house?
Oh, my bad, I screwed it. I meant 6-7 kilo Watts per phase, not Ampers... I think you can get 16-20 Amp. per phase in Romania.

Here in Britain every home is supplied with 240 volts at 40 to 100 amps, my house is 100 amps. Our supply cable is underground, there are 3 transformers about equidistant from my house & I have no clue which one is my feed. Most powerful thing is my electric shower at 9.6 Kw's & has a dedicated feed & circuit breaker, next is the oven at 2.9 Kw's & also a dedicated feed. Then an electric fire at 2.6 Kw's, then a washing machine & dishwasher at 2 Kw's, then a George Forman grill & an air fryer thing at about a 1Kw each, these are all plugged into a 13 amps socket/outlet. We also have 3 fan heaters of 2 Kw's each that we use now & then when main heating is off, plus loads of things like TV's, 2 laptops, mobile phones, even got electric reclining chairs. (How lazy is that? lol) We have gas central heating with radiators for main heating & a gas hob... Not happy at moment as the gas/electric combined direct debit is going up from 99 pounds to 163 pounds a month at beginning of April.... BTW we don't have air conditioning, we open windows wide & turn on a fan on the few hot humid days we get in our summers...

I will say that more Americans were early adopters of major appliances such as refrigerators, water heaters, central heating plants, and washing machines compared to England, France, Germany, etc. Whether that was due to availability, affordability, I don't know. But I did find it interesting how it was even mentioned in a book from 1914 that the English were resistant to adopt electric washing machines. Even that far back. It's probably more of a cultural thing, if you ask me.

Reminds me of that time y'all were having a marathon in summer, and runners were collapsing from heat stroke, because it was a sizzling 32C. As an American, I had to convert that to Fahrenheit to be sure, it was like 85F. That's hot for you guys, I guess. Many places in America regularly have summer days in the 100s(F), or 40s(C). And I'm not just talking about desert places. Chicago, for example, has freezing cold winters and hot summers. Air conditioning is not necessarily an extravagance. Opening the windows doesn't always cut it.

In Bucharest too it can get really cold and really hot. Usually not as cold as in Chicago, because there is no big lake here. I live in an apartaments (flasts) buylding with concrete wall, no thermo insulation, about 3/4 oriented to West (Sunrise). So in the summer it gets really hot... and we need even 2 a.c. units, because of it's L shape. This winter we had to consume a lot of electricity because the central heating didn't worked proprely... the hot water radiators where mearly worm. Hot water problems too.
20 years ago I was sleeping with the bathroom window (luckly I do have a window at the bathroom) a little bit open, because it was very hot. Not anymore.
Oh, central heating here... big power plant, hot water pumped for kilomiters/miles. The power plants are having problems, the pipes do need to be replaced. The scum of Sârma (The Wire), last mayor of Bucharest before the actual one didn't invested in it.
I hate her for a lot of reasons.

Brits didn't wanted electric washing machines. Lol. Germans and Americans did want them.

@ Colly0410 : but a transformer, how many houses it serves?

In U.S.A. the smaller proportion between incomes and product prices made products more avaible. In Romania, even in 1970 a refrigerator could cost 2-3 wages (sallaryes).

Here are some intresting things about old refrigerators: http://edisontechcenter.org/Refrigerators.html
Some one haves 2 editions of a book about household refrigeration: http://musingsonentropy.com/2013/02/...ting-machines/
The 1927 edition can be read on-line!!! https://archive.org/details/househol...l&view=theater

Uk
 

A bit late but while you’re talking about mains electricity.

What you may not know is that the UK mains is wired differently from most countries. Its why we have much larger plugs.

Basically the mains outlets in a house are wired using in a loop from and back to the breaker board using I think 20amp cable, so potentially each outlet could supply 40 amps. Normally one ring per floor. Certain spurs from the ring are allowed. Cookers and electric showers have a separate (I think 30 amp) circuit. Sounds unsafe? Well of course we have breakers on each circuit - but there is also a fuse (either 2 amp, 5 amp or 13 amp) in every plug, so if the device goes open circuit its cable wont melt and cause a fire. The idea was to reduce copper at a time of shortage - it has been used (i might add very safely) since 1947. Thats when the square pin fused plug was first used and also the reason why the EU abandoned plans for a standardised plug design, as our houses would need rewiring…

Prior to 1947, houses were wired the same way as everywhere else but had three different plug sizes. 2 amp, 5amp (like the current plug used in India) and 15 amp (like the old south african plug. Some were two pin some were three pin. My grandparents house had a variety of sockets. Usually the lighting was on different circuit because at some point before ww2 electricity was more expensive for lighting than for heating.

The UK 13 amp square pin plug may be large, but it was designed to be safe, all sockets are shuttered and normally switched. There is loads on the web about its safety features.

Normal 13 amp sockets werent allowed in the bathroom, but are now as long they are a certain distance away from a sink or bath/shower. There is a special two pin isolated bathroom socket permitted for electric toothbrushes etc. lighting switch is usually a pull cord or a switch outside the room. Sometimes I think they need to bring those requirements into the 21st century?

Hope you find this interesting…

Patrick
Ps I thought you might like to see my breaker board, much simpler than in other countries I think. Latest UK requirement is for the box to be metal, mine is plastic…

In Romania we had all kind of voltages, types of electricity (a.c. and d.c.), two phaes current, even different frequncyes (42 and 50 Hz. (Cy.) ). But the sockets, I think they where common - German standard.
As for today's fuses, I think the case can be from plastic. I do like plastic more because is an better insulator. In the past, they used metal, but also wood and marble and plastic or P.V.C.
Who haves 3 phase current at home?