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Old 03-13-2022, 08:55 PM
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MadMan MadMan is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2016
Location: Chicago
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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.

Last edited by MadMan; 03-13-2022 at 09:01 PM.
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