ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Euro outlet in US kitchen

uksparx...

The WHOLE idea of moving to 50 Hz and double voltage, i.e. 220 was to stop American appliance exports -- indeed American electrical anything over a century ago.

THE LAST THING European manufacturers ever want to face is identical standards to the US. The reason is market size and manufacturing scale: one leads to the other.

If you look, many of the European manufacturers, in fact, will offer their stuff in ( by their standards ) exotic frequencies and voltages. The deal is that any such 'trick' production will always be limited distribution.

Now that more and more actual production is out of China, the nominal manufacturers may be even more willing to support American voltages. For them, all it might take is a phone call.

When you consider all of the hoops the end user must go through to use non-NEMA schemes even a price bump of 20 percent might be quite acceptable.

Sometimes, as they say, a cigar is just a cigar.

Electrical standardisation, even within the US, is a fairly recent thing. Even today, older cities have multiple skyscrapers that generate their own, unique form of electricity .... some even DC. And, no, there is not any 'normal' 120 available in these buildings, even today; I've had at least one service request from such a building.

Cross over to Europe, and the common use of 230v is even less established. In these instances, it was political (rather than commercial) considerations that obstructed any agreement. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that those little countries were happily invading each other. Why make life easier for the invader?

Just as important, America hasn't been "the" world leader all that long either. Companies like Siemens and AEG could, once upon a time, have every expectation that 'upstarts' like GE and Westinghouse would follow their lead.

If ignorance is bliss, the American consumer is often in ecstacy. The range of products in Japanese and European markets often is quite different from what is available to us here. Sometimes the difference cross the ocean, sometimes they don't. I can understand why folks might want to make a foreign appliance work here.

Getting back on topic, I do not accept that it is proper to split 120v circuits off of a 240v BRANCH circuit. I believe that's what panels are for. Yet, I cannot point to any particular line of code that spells this out.

The standardized IEC C13/C14 and wide mouth switcher power supplies on electronic equipment is making a lot of that thinking obsolete. You can order stuff these days with a variety of power cords and the unit remains the same. 100-250v 50-60hz.

I travel a lot, and it's very rare that I have something that doesn't work if I can figure out some way to physically jam it into the native power sockets. Same with naval power, where there is no neutral in a 115V outlet, only two hot legs, each 57V to ground.

I have had a few, though. Had a cell phone once where the 60Hz wall-wart worked to charge the phone but got awfully hot awfully quick at 50Hz, and was pretty clearly one appliance that can't do dual-frequencies.

My motivation for asking this question is that... A 3000W coffee pot kicks the pants off a 1500W coffee pot, and this seems like a fairly easy & low-impact retrofit where pulling in a new home-run is impractical.

I guess 3kw does get the coffee going right away. Just counting on my fingers I think that 10200 BTU/H ends up boiling a quart of water in less than 2 minutes assuming a room temperature start. I guess I am not in that big a hurry.
I suppose the next question is, can you extract the "speed" from the bean that fast?

That's simply not true actually not true at all. 50Hz has been around for a very long time, going back to the very early days of AC power.

Using 230V 50Hz actually exposes Europe to *far* more competition than the US as it's the most commonly used system in the world. It is also used in China and India.

50Hz has been around for a very long time, and seems to have been adopted by AEG in the 1800s. You might consider it a metric frequency as it is 100 peaks and troughs per second or 50 full cycles per second. As such, it fits into the general European metric approach to such things.

220V has also been around for a long time. For example, here in Ireland 220V 50Hz has been standard certainly since the early 1920s.

There were various other systems in use around Europe in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. These were a mix of voltages, AC and DC. Although, it seems it was almost always 50Hz when it was AC.

The AEG / Siemens inspired 220V single phase standard seems to have spread quite quickly across most of the continent and it was standard everywhere before long, except in the United Kingdom, Malta and Cyprus. Do you seriously think the Brits would have adopted a German inspired standard in those days ?? They ultimately settled for 240V 50Hz.

The systems developed separately on either side of the atlantic. There wasn't all that much regular movement of people between the two areas and it really didn't matter that they weren't compatible.

CENELEC, the European electrical standards body, decided to harmonise the two very slightly different voltages i.e. 220V and 240V by moving to 230V. Initially this was just a nominal change of voltage and but as time has gone on, power companies have actually moved to 230V. Typically this is done when transformers at the Medium Voltage level of the distribution grid are replaced, or if they can be modified they were.

There aren't any exotic frequencies or voltages in Europe, it's rather boringly standard 230V/400V 50Hz.

Even the plugs and sockets are rather blandly the de facto standard CEE 7/X family. The only oddities are the UK, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta (BS1363). Denmark (now migrating to CEE 7/X), Italy (also migrating to CEE 7/X) and Switzerland which has its own system. Every other EU country and all of the former eastern bloc countries use CEE 7/X. That's something like 1 billion people!

Incidentally, the first application of AC power on a large scale was in London. Deptford Power Station went online between 1889 and 1891 generating at 10kV AC - Designed by Ferranti and operated by LESco (London Electrical Supply Corporation)

This generated AC at 10kV 85Hz !

Steve- I think you win the prize for "customized personal interpretation of ambiguous language". You're right, the code does not specifically prohibit what you want to do, but there's not an electrician in the country who doesn't read 210.52(B)(2) to mean that the minimum 2 small appliance circuits are to serve 120v receptacles on the kitchen counter top and nothing else. In fact I think that the people who wrote it meant that too.
There's a lot of off topic stuff in the replies, some of which makes sense but the thing I see in your question that shoots this down, even if 210 doesn't is the idea that somehow two 12/2 romex are parallel conductors in the same raceway. I think you knew the answer to that before you asked. What would the schematic for that arrangement look like? I'm thinking that they don't even run to the same box. Would you reroute them to a single box, put the coffee pot plug on the circuit first and then split them out? And that would be easier than a new circuit? Curious.

How do places like that deal with equipment procurement? Surely they can't all have it custom-built, or keep repairing stuff from way back when. And, what about computers and the like? Local xfmrs at each workstation?

I did not get a chance to reply here for a while anyway I have two European sockets in my house in USA due I do go back and forth between USA and France pretty often.

I have no issue with it at all.

Merci.
Marc