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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

EV or not EV, I really think you want 200A service? It has been the standard for quite a few years, and I cannot imagine only having 100A service in a proper house (would be fine for an apartment or whatnot). Now I am higher electric usage than most, but I hit over 100A several times a day (but have never hit 200A and flipped my breaker).

The actually switching out your circuit breaker from 100A to 200A is cheap (2-3k?). Almost all of the cost is for the utility to run you a bigger line, and they can pretty much charge you anything they want (what is your alternative if you don't like the price?)

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Electrical code has completely unreasonable and unrealistic demand factors associated with appliances. Basically "1" for just about everything, as well as 3 watts per square foot of floor area. If you sum all of these things up, I'm well above the 200 amp service delivered to my home.

Reality? I had a peak draw of 23 amps from the grid in the last year. Luckily the NEC has an escape valve for folks who can prove that.

Right, don't go off code for having to do a big upgrade like this.

I legit hit 100A several times a month. Have hit over 150A.

Easy way for me to draw 100A at once:

40A: EV charging

32A: Electric Oven warming up at max

24A: Electric Dryer

40A: HotTub jets on

40A: AC ON Max

Unlikely all of those are on full max, but it's pretty easy to imagine getting past 100A before we even touch things like lights and computers.

EV + Dryer + Hot Tub pretty much pull max for the entire run, the other stuff is more likely to cycle up and down.

And if you only have a 200A service, your service drop is likely only 2 or 1/0.

Most 200A services around me are 4/0 Aluminum

2/0 copper would work but would cost more, so likely not used.

Do Americans quote large appliance current at 220V or 110V equivalent?

From the EV it seems the former, but in that case I'm horrified at how power-hungry your appliances are.

A typical new oven sold in Europe is 3.6kW, 16A @ 230V.

A new tumble drier is 600W, so about 2.5A at 230V.

There's such a range of hot tub and AC sizes I can't compare these.

240V circuits are simply both legs of the 120V split phase connected together, so the amperage is measured at 120V. The circuit breakers for 120V and 240V circuits are the same, except 240V circuits use two breakers with the handles tied together[1]. Electric resistive heaters like ovens and clothes dryers are always perfectly efficient, so I'm not sure how you even thought it would be possible to have an inefficient heater.

[1]: The 120V rails in the middle of the breaker panel alternate between each split phase, so if you connect a circuit to any two adjacent breakers you will get 240V. A 120V circuit is connected to neutral and a single breaker.

> I'm not sure how you even thought it would be possible to have an inefficient heater

They're inefficient relative to a 250-500% efficient heat pump.

As well as using a heat pump, a more efficient dryer can be better-insulated, or make better use of the heat produced in drying clothes, however that might be done.

Almost all big appliances are 220. Fridges are 110, but the big guys

* EV Charging

* Electric or Induction Oven

* Electric Dryer

* AC

* Electric Water Heater

are all doing to be 220. The amps will vary, and most will not peg the required wire 100%, but may for example do a big pulse to startup (ACs are famous for this).

For which country is this?

Only a handful of countries actually us 110/220

If it is North America, I think you mean 120 and 240

https://www.powerstream.com/cv.htm

My small, or at least unremarkable, oven is 4.8kW, also 230V. It's from about 2006, iirc.

Electric tumble dryer is 5.6kW at 230V. It's from 2017. Maybe yours is gas, and 600W is the motor?

I have a smallish 1900sqft 1950s house with average or smaller appliances.

I love doing appliance comparison with European houses, though.

New heat pump tumble dryer, 600W: https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/laundr...

New condensor tumble dryer, 2600W: https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/laundr...

My dryer is 8 years old and similar to the second one -- half the power of yours, and I'm still not sure what the 24A from above would mean.

> Do Americans quote large appliance current at 220V or 110V equivalent?

Fist, North America is a 120/240V system, not 110/220. For the life of me i will never understand the confusion over why some people, including North Americans keep referencing 110 volts?

The code is clear, 120 Volts +- 5 to 10 percent?

Perhaps because the "allowed range" is 110 to 125? If i measure my house right now, it is 121 volts and this is pretty typical.

Your dryer example seems like it is running on gas?

In North America, electric dryers use anywhere from 1800 to 5000 watts.

AC depends on the home size, the location, etc. Mine has a 60A 240V breaker but again the "code" states you can only have an 80% "continuous load" on a circuit so technically this circuit can not pull 14,400 continuous watts.

One thing Europeans dont grasp is the difference in house sizes vs north ameria and so naturally our appliances are larger and more power hungry.

What may take a European washer 2 loads, most north american washer/dryers will do in one. So the "power usage by load" is the same?

Using a device like a range's maximum power draw is dishonest. If a north american range is twice the size of what is available in EU, but not all the elements are in use at once... does that mean something?

(110V: I'm just copying/misremembering, I don't live there. There are places in the Caribbean that do use 110V.)

> Your dryer example seems like it is running on gas?

This is part of my horror. You can't imagine that an electric drier might only use 600W? Try [1]. From the EU site of all rated driers [2] (click "Models distribution") 23% of driers on sale are this efficient. A further 44% with A++ rating are around 900W. (Note the measurement is of the energy needed to dry a load of clothes to the required standard, the maximum power draw is related but not a criteria.) The worst one is still only 2300W!

From a 2013 news article "Europe's Clothes Dryers Consume Half As Much Energy As America's" [3]:

> The study, which was funded by the Super Efficient Dryer Initiative (SEDI), concluded that Europe's heat pump dryers can dry the same amount of clothes as North American conventional dryers using only about half as much energy. The catch is that European heat pump dryers also took about twice as long to dry a load of laundry as North American conventional dryers.

I'll add that American driers appear to be cheaper to buy.

> house sizes ... naturally our appliances are larger and more power hungry

That explains the AC -- though I can still criticise the waste of energy heating/cooling two, three or four times as much space per person -- but it doesn't explain the drier. Do you wear twice as many clothes as I do?

[1] https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/laundr...

[2] https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/tumbledriers

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/06/11/euro...

Saving the world driving an EV, while running the AC, oven and hot tub simultaneously, full blast.

AC and Hot Tub full blast would almost never happen, Hot Tub is more a winter thing.

But A full EV charge can be 6-7 hours, so could easily be all evening. A hot tub could easily be an hour of overlap in there. So someone turns on the Oven? Would def pop 100.

>It has been the standard for quite a few years, and I cannot imagine only having 100A service in a proper house

100A service is fairly normal here for smaller homes. As heating here is primarily done by natural gas furnaces rather then electrical heating. Which make sense; gas is way cheaper to heat with here then electricity. And it saves a dollar for the developer.

I don't know about larger homes though; I'd imagine that they'd have 200A circuits but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't unless the builder specifically requested it.

I cannot find any new homes with smaller than 150. What I have seen is:

Smaller House: Default 150, pay a little more to get 200

Bigger House: Default 200, pay a little more to get 2x200

I'm in Canada in the prairies, so that might be making a difference. Where are you looking at?

US Midwest

I live in a large home (~5,600 square feet) in the "Greater Toronto area" built in 2000. I have a 100A service.

This has never been a problem for us.

Stove, furnace, and dryer are gas. So the only "power hungry" device we have is our Air Conditioner.

I think my house has 2x200A. It was zoned multi family but the previous owners had a separate service for an electric car, and there’s still bits of electronics in the attic from where they tried to do crypto mining.

I’m sure their equipment overheated. The roof is not insulated and the attic fan is pushing against a louver that’s the wrong design. It gets hot up there without any equipment.

Yah in most cases 2x200 is the step up from 200. The reason being is your wire that runs your 200A service isn't big enough to carry 400A, so you would need to tear it out. Why tear it out a perfectly good wire when you can just run another?

My house is a really big house built in the 50s. It was initially 2x100A service as I don't think 200A service at home was really a thing. It had 2 meters and everything. Sometime in the 80s they tore out the feed from the pole and put in a proper single 200A line, and just left the second meter as defunct.

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