alt Hacker NewsSure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.
In a renovated house, you won't have aluminum wire at all, so these concerns are null.
My original statement should be qualified. Since we were talking about aluminum wire it's relevant -- an updated house will have new (copper) circuits that can handle all this stuff. An NON updated house might have Al wire and be overloaded in a more severe way than it was in the 60s.
But FWIW, new >100W appliances:
- microwaves (1200+W)
- air fryers (1500W)
- electric pressure cookers
- rice cookers (mine claims 610W on the plate)
- stand mixers (old: 80W, new: 475W)
- desktop computers (esp gaming rigs)
- resistive space heaters (1500W)
- *bigger* TVs (compare 72" LCD to 19" CRT?)
- air purifiers (mine clocks 175W on high)
- towel warmers? :)
- and the ubiquity of 10-20W small stuff has of course exploded, and it all adds up
> Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.
Perhaps, but none of them are continuous load, which absolutely matters.
Rice cookers, microwave, stand mixers, air fryers, pressure cookers, etc are all short duration usage, not continuous load. If homeowners decide not to add dedicated kitchen circuits and instead use a 120V 12A load on a 120V 15A shared circuit and trip the overcurrent protection, that’s their own fault.
These loads don’t really matter in the way a heat pump, air conditioner, furnace fan, or water heater does, it’s a bunch of random kitchen appliances that you won’t be using simultaneously. Your utility does not even take the full non-continuous load into account when calculating the kVA demand of your electrical service. IIRC a random convenience duplex receptacle for non-continuous loads only adds like 180 VA (this is 1.5A at 120V with a power factor of 1) to the demand calculation.
You are correct in a technical sense that people have more devices they plug into a wall, but most of the power consumed by a home is to devices that are hardwired in, aka continuous loads, not cord and plug connected appliances.
The continuous load of a home should be lower than ever without electrifying heat. Every continuous load (which are almost exclusively motors and lighting) in a home is more efficient now than in the past due to variable frequency drives and electrically commutated motors.