> power plugs with 16A [...] at 230V they can deliver 3600W/4600W
That makes me a bit sad. We used to have a mess of plugs and sockets, with older plugs being either two round non-insulated pins or two equal-sized flat pins (sockets that could fit both kinds were not uncommon, but sockets which could fit only one kind were also not uncommon), and a Y with three flat pins for air conditioners, with NEMA 5-15 also being popular for computers (and we had sockets which could fit both the NEMA 5-15 "computer plug" and the other two types). We switched the whole country to a really neat new plug type (NBR 14136, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBR_14136 for a few pictures), but unfortunately it's only 10A (or 20A, but that's mostly for higher-power appliances like air conditioners; nearly all sockets are going to be the 10A variant, even though the 20A socket is designed to work fine with 10A plugs).
Our voltage can be either 127V or 220V depending on which city you live in (yeah, both voltages use the same plug, but that was already the case even with the older plugs), and on how your building is wired (even in places with 127V you can get 220V by wiring phase-phase instead of phase-neutral), so it's not unusual to be limited to 10A at 127V which is around 1200W only.
I wonder how hard it is to do a bottom-up conversion of the USA to 230.
If the "all-electric" branch of the environmental movement are right, we'll eventually need to adopt the superior European kettle technology. Getting everyone on the same plug would be great.
Every single home in the US has 220 already. They're taken from 220 to 110 at the breaker for common outlets, but many large appliances (and EV chargers) already are 220.
Worse kettle performance is unfortunate. But better safety is a nice side effect (in particular as the NEMA connector the US uses is dangerous/poorly designed/bad, even with the ground pin).
If houses in the US are 240V, than houses in Europe are 480 (or rather, 400V because it's usually triphasic).
The voltage arriving at the building is kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether a connection could even sustain the house network at double the voltage with larger appliances than it was designed for.
> The voltage arriving at the building is kind of irrelevant to the discussion.
My post talked about voltages arriving at appliances in US homes. Many appliances are designed and in fact receive 220 V. There's even a common (i.e. near every home) plug/wiring/breaker standard for 220 V.
You're the one trying to steer the discussion towards "arriving Vs. using" whereas the first line of my post was expressly about the active use of 220 V in near every US home today (tumble dryers, ovens, central heating, EV chargers, shop equipment, etc).
> The question is whether a connection could even sustain the house network at double the voltage with larger appliances than it was designed for.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. A full end-to-end circuit has to be built for a specific voltage and amperage. If you want to turn a 110 V into a 220 V, you have to re-wire from the breaker otherwise the wiring will overheat and catch fire.
I haven’t watched the video yet, so I don’t know if he addresses this, but: considering many devices with a switching PSU support “universal” voltage, plugging a US style plug into a 220/240V source would probably be fine.
I've melted extension cords at lan parties before... There is always going to be a point where the # of electrical contrivances trips a certain threshold and starts causing problems.
If you've ever been to dreamhack or one of those gigantic lan gaming conventions, you would probably have noticed the massive power distribution transformers staged every 300 feet or so on the floors.
I honestly don't know how they would manage power delivery if every single person was running a ~1kW gaming load.
