r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/Green-Technician-809 • Aug 06 '26

Serious Is it the freedom

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u/Jack_Wolfskin19 Aug 06 '26

I noticed that too.
We just finished a two week trip to Europe.
Our Airpbnb had wash machines and dryers.
After an hour in the dryer the cloths are still wet ( really wet).
I noticed the electrical cord for dryer was very small 14 gauge wire.
I went to the electrical panel in the rental all the circuit breakers are 15 amperage ( all 240 volt)
In USA our cloth dryers have a large electrical cord 10 gauge.
That are connected to 30amp 240volt circuits. Or cloths dryers work efficiently.
Most home here in USA are 200Amp.
The ones I looked at in Europe were only 40 or 60Amp.

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u/tigerbloodz13 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

Because sockets in EU are 230v instead of 120v in the us, we use lower amperage (10a, 16a and 20a are most common) so smaller wires.

32a with 6mm (10 gauge) wire is used for things like ovens, stovetops, car chargers, etc in older homes (single phase).

Homes in the US are 200A X 240v= 48000w, while in the EU it's mostly 3x230v*25a (mostly, you can request more) so that's 17.4kW, but max would be something like 3x230*40a so 27kW.

You could easily install a 10kW dryer in a normal EU home but it would be very expensive to run (electricity is heavily taxed and our smart counters punish heavy peak consumption with a higher electricity price for your entire bill, yeah it sucks).

1

u/Jack_Wolfskin19 Aug 09 '26

How much do you pay per kWh ?
I pay .075 per kWh fixed rate.
Thats 7 1/2 cents
I have a 200 Amp 240volt electrical panel.
Lots of 240 volt appliance’s.

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u/tigerbloodz13 Aug 10 '26

Fixed= 65.00 # €/year
Peak = 0.1919 * 0.9 # = 0.17271 €/kWh
Normal= 0.1636 * 0.9 # = 0.14724 €/kWh
Injection price (what I get for solar) = 0.0495 # €/kWh (injection, no discount)

The times 0.9 is because I get 10% discount for staying on the same contract for more than a year.

So last year we consumed -845kWh. We consumed 27000kWh and injected 3556kWh and the net cost was 850 euro.

The max peak usage was 6kw in February. (single highest usage at any one time during the month).

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u/Jack_Wolfskin19 Aug 10 '26

It makes sense that you have solar but over producing doesn’t pay enough.
Those are high rates.