North America has standard plugs for 240V too. They’re different from the 120V plug for the obvious reason, but it’s not a particularly special setup.
Besides, it’s not like European homes actually have more heavy appliances than American homes. Americans are much more likely to own clothes dryers, despite the fact that Europeans could easily just plug one into any normal outlet.
Unless the prior owner was a welder anyway. Then you might have a few in the garage.
Either way, not convenient for kettles.
And yes, the 240V outlets are set up for heavy appliances rather than small countertop appliances. Remember, we were talking about washing machines and dishwashers, and the claim that European appliances don’t need to consume hot water because they have 230V circuits. American appliances have 240V circuits and they still consume hot water so that’s not a satisfying explanation.
It’s true that Americans don’t plug electric kettles into a 240V plug. There are a few reasons for that:
* Americans generally prefer coffee to tea. So the tea kettle is usually a lower priority in an American household compared to a British one.
* Stovetop tea kettles and microwaves are both perfectly fine at boiling water. Are they as optimal? Maybe not but it’s not a priority. (Microwaves might be just as fast actually.)
* Electric kettles work totally fine on a 120V circuit anyway. I have one. Is it as fast as it would be on a 240V circuit? No, but it’s not a priority. We probably make up the time difference by having faster dishwashers and washing machines that consume hot water in addition to using 240V power.
No one installs L30R/L6-30R receptacles in the US for ‘normal’ (as in used by a human for random stuff) use as standard practice, because yes - most of the time no one needs it. Maximum power for a normal 120/20 amp branch circuit is 2.4kw, and that’s 7.2kw. The most I’ve ever actually had a use for in a residential building was 50 amp @ 240v (arc gouging), but I did setup 50 amp @ 480v for a massive CNC milling machine once.
And when someone does, it’s a special case.
Most of Europe and Asia, they have receptacles that can handle that kind of load. And many other wiring changes.
But they also don’t really use them to capacity very often either.
But it is convenient to be able to run a decent welder off a normal house outlet in Germany or Singapore if you want.
Sorry about that, but I’m not sure how you expected me to know that about you or why we’re arguing about tea kettles. I think I inferred more disagreement from context than we actually have. Do we actually disagree about anything here or are we all good? At the very least I think we’re on the same page about washing machines, which was the original point of contention here.
And yes, the point about welding is a good one; higher voltage standards are a lot more convenient for that.
Maybe also a very high spec gaming PC, which here could run (monitors and all) from a single outlet. Would tripping the breaker have been a concern at a 2000s LAN party in the USA? I have no idea.
In some countries it's common to have a 400V (3 phase) socket in the garage. Excellent for car charging, but that is also OK from 230V. That is probably by far the biggest current benefit of 230V everywhere. Charge the car at a decent speed at that holiday cottage in the mountains.
And the kitchen, for electric ranges.
Having never heard of it until now I’m very curious what the use-case for a residential arc gouging machine is.
The UK versions from the same brand are 3000 watts, but only reduces the boil time by 1 minute.
I'm not sure about efficiency one way or the other, but it's interesting to note that double the power does not yield one half boil time.
Additionally, at this elevation I would estimate my morning coffee, Americano (Italian coffee that requires boiled water), takes less time to make than it would at higher wattage at sea level. I'm only guessing.
I think it comes down to practicality more than either culture's love of tea or coffee.
Yeah, come to think of it a coffee machine is solving a very similar problem to an electric kettle. Whats more, I’ve even used a drip coffee maker as a makeshift electric kettle before. So that was just a dumb argument on my part. Thanks for bailing me out with actual data on the diminishing returns of dumping more power into an electric kettle!
A modern European washing machine uses 30-50 litres per wash, vs 75-100 for a modern American one.
That's also halved the time required to heat the necessary water, so another reason a hot water connection might not be so useful
Europeans are going to look at the energy efficiency sticker that by law must be displayed with the machine, either out of altruism, to reduce the running cost, or because the machine with A must be better than the one with G. See the coloured symbols on [1] and the more detailed information if you click one, showing capacity, water use per cycle and typical annual electricity use.
Walmart's site [2] doesn't show this information anywhere.
[1] https://www.johnlewis.com/browse/electricals/washing-machine...
[2] https://www.walmart.com/browse/home/all-washing-machines/404...
All the energy usage and other details would be on the website of a retailer that actually sells appliances, like Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy/Costco/etc.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Electrolux-4-5-cu-ft-Stackable-F...
> Europeans are going to look at the energy efficiency sticker that by law must be displayed with the machine,
The US has this too with. See in “Details” in above link:
>Energy Consumption (kWh/year) 85
>Energy Efficiency Tier Rating Tier II
Maybe we just have bigger washing machines? You need to control for washer capacity to make a fair comparison here. If you need to do twice as many loads of laundry because you can only fit half as much laundry in each load, you’ve gained nothing. And it’s not like having a bigger washing machine requires every load of laundry to use the full water capacity of the machine even if you only do small loads. On older machines you can set a dial for load size while newer ones have sensors for that.