Spurious Response writes:

On Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:05:44 +0100, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

A 1000 watt kettle would take forever to boil. UK ones are normally
2500/3000 watts.


If you paid California electric rates, you wouldn't use it very many
times a year.

It takes the same amount of energy to boil a quantity of water whether
you're using a 1 kW or 3 kW kettle. Infact it would probably take less
energy with the 3kW kettle as it gets the job done quicker, which
means less losses.


It must be nice to be able to build everything higher output, more
consumptive. We have to conserve here. Miniaturize.

Agreed, but you can't really save on a kettle, unless you switch to
some alternate energy source.


What types of appliances get used in Japan? High wattage? Low?
Other places?

Not an appliance, and in Sweden, not Japan, but I have lowered my
hosehold energy consumption from 40+ MWh annually to around 18 by
converting from direct electrical heating to a rock heat pump, and
paying attention to the consumption of appliances.

I have a 200 m drilled collector in my back yard that feeds the heat
pump. The collector is also used as a source (drain?) for cooling in
the summer. One only needs to pump the +8° brine coming from the
collector through a few convectors, no need to run any compressor.

I'm currently installing the air conditioning parts of the system,
which when finished will provide about 10 kW of cooling power for about
300 W of input power to run a brine pump and the fans in the
convectors. Theoretically it will also warm up the collector slightly,
which improves winter operation, but that is marginal, if any.

Oh, and while were talking about electrical systems, domestic feeds in
Sweden are almost universally 400V three phase.

My main fuses are 25A. When we bought the house in 1987 it had 20A
fuses, and electrical heating. One of the main fuses would
occasionally trip in the winter when the washer and stove was used,
while the radiators were running on full blast. Switching to 25A fuses
solved that. After the heatpump conversion I can most likely go back
to 20A fuses and save some on the electrical bill.

When we bought the house, the stove, washer, dryer, boiler and sauna
were all wired for three phase 400V operation. The radiators were 400V
two phase. The new washer and dryer are single phase 230V units, and
we've ripped out the sauna and the heatpump produces the hot water, so
the stove and heatpump are the only remaining three phase consumers.