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Turskarama | 3 months ago

It's the same issue, if you have a higher voltage then you can get more power without increasing current.

For example in Australia a standard house circuit is 10 Amps, but because it's at 240V we can get 2400 Watts (realistically more like 2300) out of a _standard_ wall outlet that is in every room of your house.

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inferiorhuman|3 months ago

It's not the same issue. The vast majority of kitchens in the US have 20 amp circuits (so 2,400 watts peak, 1,920 watts continuous) exclusively. It's a bog standard receptacle (NEMA 5-20R instead of 5-15R) that's backwards compatible with 15 amp plugs. In fact these days most 5-15R receptacles have identical guts to their 20 amp counterparts save for the additional provision for a horizontal blade.

The electrical code (NEC) has started moving towards requiring 20 amp circuits in other rooms and more 20 amp circuits in kitchens.

Dylan16807|3 months ago

But they're staying shy of the amp limit on purpose. So designing for 20 amps would be somewhat of a boost but not enough. While doubling voltage would actually fix the problem.

mschuster91|3 months ago

Meanwhile, here in Germany, we have 230V, but every standard wall outlet is rated for 16A continuous load over 1 hour so you can get 3.6 kW on each circuit.

Your standard home has a supply of 3 phase power @ 35A (southern Germany) or 63A (northern and western Germany), I think only the former GDR is at standard 3x25A, because like in many former Communist countries they had to save on expensive copper and aluminium, and since a lot of the GDR was heated by steam-based central district heating systems, you didn't need that much power anyway.

whatevaa|3 months ago

Lot's old homes and flats here limited to 5A or 3A 220v. If you don't use electric heating your power demands go down substantially, though 3A is a bit small these days.