ECN Forum Forums Photo Discussion Forums Electrical Nostalgia "Wired For Electricity"

Image courtesy of Joe Tedesco

It would be interesting to see the figures upon which these estimates are based.

Bait & Switch

"one hour of ironing for 5 cents" seems to imply the following: An electric iron consumes about 1000 watts, so that's 1KWHour. So it must be 5 cents per KWH. Which would have been expensive back then....

Which makes 10 cents or 2 units seem like a lot of work with that vacuum cleaner.

'ise — I don’t have a date for the image, but John Carr at UTEC sent me some images including this one that shows a rate of 8¢/hour at 1kW demand, so I think a nickel/kWh could be in the ball park for the early part of the last century.

I don't know about US irons back then, but for a European iron of those days 300W would be much more realistic. Until the 1950ies there were hardly any loads exceeding 400W, except for electric heaters. Most sockets back then incorporated a 1 or 2A fuse, so that would be a max of 127/254 or 220/440W (Back then Austria used various voltages, I think they had 110, 127, 150 and 220, both DC and AC, I took the 127 and 220V figures). Most circuits were fused 4A.