"Mike Tomlinson" wrote in message
...
In article , Arny Krueger
writes

Seems like a lot of wiring and separate little boxes to handle not so many
circuits.

I presume that it provides service for more than just one little hotel
room.

Yes, it'll feed the entire building.

It doesn't belong in a closet for a rented room!

Note the wiring includes the
supplier's meter, unlike those ugly external meters used in North
America. The meter is read remotely.

Remotely read meters have been in the US for a long time, but there is an
immense backlog of old work. Ours was converted in the past few years. It's
still large, ugly and outside, by the side door.

We did not have the "cleansing" effects of a world war fought in our
country to push us along. Also, electrical distribution had a very rapid and
early introduction so we have a ton of very old work that is still in use.

It's not binding on the rest of the world but the town I lived in in Germany
looked like it had been reworked from top to bottom *after* WW2. We had
416 3 phase in our apartment for heating water.

AFAIK the nearest three phase distribution point here to my house here in
Grosse Pointe is about a half mile away. Our church here in town has a
number of 3 phase motors and it has its own 3 phase line and separate pole
transformer for just that phase. The electric company can't figure out how
to size that transformer, and it fails about every 5 years.

As another poster said, this is a 3-phase supply. Notice how thin the
main incomer is, yet that'll be supplying 100A per phase.


Yes, the salutary effects of higher voltages on conductor size are very
apparent. U.S. standards for wiring are getting to be excessively expensive
to implement. Aluminum was tried and rejected for general house wiring, but
is being used for distribution up to the breaker box and for large loads
downstream of it.

You have to remember that when most of our standards were developed and
widely implemented, copper was a cheap byproduct of mining silver. ;-)