The problem was not the oxidation. That problem is easily dealt with by applying antioxidant paste at the wire terminations, as is required. The problem was single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring. Higher capacity wires are multistrand, and virtually all such wiring is aluminum due to the cost difference.
Single strand solid aluminum conductors expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose, and eventually create shorts and fires. They make special connectors so you can remedy this by attaching a small piece of copper wire (a pigtail) to the aluminum, and don't need to replace all the wiring in your house. This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building, as we should do anyways, and we could safely use single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring instead of copper virtually everywhere.
> by applying antioxidant paste at the wire terminations, as is required
As is NOT required. This is old old info: antioxidant paste is not just not required, in some places you will fail inspection if add it, and other electricians might laugh at you for not keeping up to date.
> expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose
Nope, this is also not true. It's simply that there is a new allow of aluminum used today (since 1975) which retains its strength under heating and this problem is solved.
> This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building
Connector rated for Cu/Al are widely available, and not hard to make. There's just no market for it for smaller wires since everyone got scared and no one wants to install aluminum anymore.
It doesn't have to be that way, the current alloy is 47 years old at this point. People just don't want to change.
Doing a little reading and there is some truth to some of what you say, but it is not any more correct than what I said because we are both a bit lacking in nuance, so I will just leave a few links for further reading. I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves. My point on legislation would be just to take anything not rated for the use off the market, so there would be no worry about installations using the wrong products.
Some of the problems with aluminum wiring and whether all problems are solved:
I looked at your link and they confirm what I said 100%. Aluminum installations after approx 1975 are simply not a problem. There is no issue with oxidation, no issue with multi strand, nothing.
> I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves.
What issues do you find? All you need is a connector rated Cu/AlR and that's it.
Not really. If the higher insurance costs are born by the building owner rather than the person who installs the wiring (which is likely the case), then increased insurance premiums aren't likely to haveuch effect. Classic externality
The causal connection can be remarkably tenuous, especially if you add securitization or other financialization into the mix. The people supplying the money often care more about hitting standards than maximizing overall eventual profit. Understanding this aspect of human and market behavior is useful for realizing why a lot of libertarian ideas are unworkable in practice.
Not sure, it's very workable for lots of other aspects of buildings.
Eg I don't think there's a legislation that floorplans have to be useful (and how would you even define that in the abstract). Yet, most buildings have quite reasonable floorplans.
There's some transaction costs in that its hard for the eventually consumer of the building to express all their preference to the builder. As you say, for some aspects the price signals can be weak.
More competition can help.
See also how it's pretty easy to find restaurants that serve tasty food, despite taste not being legislated nor regulated.
But seriously though, since when did Laissez-faire economics and legislation ever lead to sufficient safety not to kill people or burn down their homes willy-nilly?
HN is the only place I visit that has such wild ideas as "safety regs are too burdensome, let the free market sort it out".
In the UK, only around 1 person per year is killed by electricity in the home. And often that person is doing something totally non-standard, for example building a tesla coil, or deliberately committing suicide.
Contrast that to 250,000 deaths per year (in the USA) by medical mistakes or preventable adverse effects.
At some point, we have to decide where to put our efforts. Electrical safety is arguably oversolved - ie. we put too much effort into it compared to the safety gain of any extra effort, compared to medical accidents which is likely undersolved. Even simple things like requiring a doctor to not do more than an 8 hour shift, like we require of truck drivers, would probably save a lot of lives.
The idea of 'more safety is always better' needs to be broken.
If you live in a representative democracy and vote for politicians that expand regulations, you are effectively regulating.
> yet they see a lot of need for regulation
Of course they do, their ideology reaches for that solution by default. Look at this particular thread just to see how misguided the recommendation for regulation was in this case.
Yeah, with perfect information these wouldn't compete. This is why some countries put energy efficiency labels on products and on property sales. To make the market work better.
Some countries just prefer to ignore long term problems for short term "gains" though, in a tragic fractal way.
I don't think there's any law anywhere that prohibits a manufacturer from sticking the required information on their product and in their marketing.
As a customer, I can draw my own conclusions when a manufacturer doesn't provide the information: I'll assume that thing is a gas guzzler and will avoid it. (Unless I read trusted reviews to the contrary.)
It's not the law that prevents the people in a Prisoners Dilemma situation from freely choosing the best outcome for themselves. It's the lack of enforcement of rules which incentives defection.
In this case:
good guy installs insulation
bad guy doesn't
good guy publishes info on future savings
bad guy publishes fake info
good guy publishes trusted reviews
bad guy publishes fake reviews.
and so on.
The good guys want the legislation, not to force then to do the thing they wanted to do anyway, they want it to stop bad guys putting them out of business via scamming customers.
Yes, the answer that evolves is co-operation, i.e. in the real world, regulations and legislation, binding all the individual players to do the thing that's best for all of them and punishes defectors to ensure incentives are aligned.
The better analogy for the prisoners dilemma is a drug deal or a spy swap. How can you trust the other person to do the right thing with no legal system to enforce penalties if they don't? Without that, less deals are made than they would otherwise, a loss of efficiency.
Yeah, I'm sure the fossil fuel industry would be overjoyed if they couldn't dump CO2 into the atmosphere without first contracting with every person and animal on earth to reimburse them.
And how are you going to ensure that buyers are aware of those ongoing maintenance costs? In a free market builders are disincentivised to make such issues public. So I guess the only way to be sure is to create legislation forcing such detail to be exposed. But if you're going to do that, then why not just create legislation that solves the actual problem instead?
> The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism is a widely-cited[1] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought.
The obvious-in-hindsight business solution to this problem didn't require legislation. It's just to build a used-car dealer that builds and safeguards a really solid reputation.
People don't need lemons. They do need home. So often in free market economies you see companies virtually colluding to put themselves first in sectors where consumers are required to buy into that product or service. Because in those sectors, businesses have a captive audience with no other options and they don't need to worry about reputation.
Housing is one of those sectors. Often people need a home based around requirements other than the reputation of the builder like location to the school that their kids already attend, or family members, or work, bus or rail stations, etc. Cost to rent. Is parking available. etc
If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple. For starters even if your ideology worked in practice, you still require a bunch of customers to get burnt initially in order to generate that reputation. However there's also nothing stopping disreputable businesses restarting with a new company name and branding so the reputation model doesn't work in practice (you see this all the time with online sellers eg on Amazon). And that's on top of the former point about how some products are essentials that people don't have the luxury to shop around on.
We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
> Well your past history of housing problems would suggest your optimism here is misplaced
Who is 'you' in that sentence? I can see that I have optimism, but what's my past history of housing problems?
And what makes you so sure that those past problems were caused by not enough regulation? (Instead of eg too much regulation, the wrong kind of regulation, or they might have nothing to do with regulation at all.)
> If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
Huh? It's always a trade-off. All else being equal, I'd grab a house from a builder (or landlord) with a great reputation before one without a reputation or even a bad reputation. I might even pay a bit extra for a great reputation.
Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
> I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple.
Who said that? Huh?
I suggested that in this specific case more regulation is not required.
The free market won't get you a girlfriend, for example. But neither would any sensible regulation.
> We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
You know that European real GDP per capita is quite a lot lower than in the US? (You can pick almost any European country. Or pick the average etc.)
And the US is also still pretty overregulated.
I grew up in Germany, but put my money where my mouth is, and now live in rather more pro-market Singapore.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. Partly because this is really more of an opinion-based discussion but also because comparing Singapore to the US or Europe is never going to work given how massively different their cultures are. So there's far more variables at play than just how the markets are run.
That all said, one part did stick out for me:
> Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
I'd argue that disproves your point rather than proves it. The reason being, lousy jobs still exist because employers know that people need jobs. So there's no incentive for employers to change. Hence why we need employment laws.
This comes back to my point about different cultures. For example some American and UK companies have been gaming the system, arguing that people who work from them are not employees. In the UK we call them gig workers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gig_worker) and they're effectively working for 0 "dollars" if business is slow that day. Yet some people work them simply because they have no other choice.
In Singapore, we just have employment laws that aren't as strenuous on the employer, so there's less need to 'game the system'.
Oversimplified: legally everyone is already a gig worker in Singapore.
Seems to work out fairly well.
This is also closer to how the system worked in eg the US until a few decades ago, when it was easier to get a job just by walking into the shop and asking and also work your way through college etc.
I remember, Slatestarcodex had an article about the dangers of outsourcing your social welfare to employers.
I feel this point is getting lost on you but Singapore has a vastly different culture to America. The fact that Singapore doesn't need to "game the system" isn't because there are fewer regulations. It's because it's a different culture.
The reason America needs legislation is because American companies have a culture of abusing a free market.
What works for one country doesn't automatically work for another.
Singapore is mostly made up of immigrants from China. Remember, China is the place where we like to complain about 'companies abusing a free market' even more than in the US.
It seems like this is an ideal case for modular wiring, ie the wire is cut to size, and terminated with modular connectors at the factory. Installation is just threading the wire through the building and pluging it in.
Connectors could be copper, the wire itself could be aluminium, completely sealed in pvc.
In addition to the other mentioned reasons, larger gauge wire is commonly terminated in blocks rather than at end points and likely won't be touched after initial installation, compared with branch circuits which will have their outlets or switches changed multiple times and often without professional assistance.
You can take precautions to avoid the oxidation. This is already done reliably on airplanes and in overhead power distribution, where aluminum wire is the standard.
Which is relatively expensive and error prone, compared to copper connections.
For service connections and large scale power distribution where trained professionals are already required and lack of maintenance is already a fire hazard, it isn't a problem.
For small branch circuits where work is often done by random Joe's and where any sort of preventative maintenance is few and far between, it is a failed experiment.
Assuming copper prices continue to outpace aluminum prices, eventually copper will be the expensive option vs. aluminum (done right). Not sure if the error prone aspect could be remedied though.
Compared to electrician labor? It would have to be price at silver prices to matter; most likely.
Either way, home and commercial construction is likely to crater (already starting in many areas) due to cost of $$ going up, so that should help tamp down demand quite a bit.
That's actually myth. Widely believed, but not actually true.
The aluminum wires of today are a different allow of that simply does not have the problem anymore. It's a solved issue. You don't even need anti-ox on the connection.
Building code is not a standard by which to judge possible practices, it just formalizes the normal approach to prevent halfassery. (And arguably, to prevent disruption of established businesses in a regulatory capture kinda way.)
Aluminum wiring is the thalidomide of the construction industry. No matter how much you improve it, you will never get over the stigma. No one will buy a house with state-of-the-art aluminum wiring just like no one will ever take thalidomide, even though they know exactly what caused the birth defect issue (chiral molecules that were created during the manufacturing process).
It's not just stigma with thalidomide - the two forms of the molecule interconvert in the body. So even a dose of 100% pure R-thalidomide (the useful kind) will invert into its mirror image, L-thalidomide (the harmful kind), and will approach a 50:50 mix. As the sibling comment says, it's still used in cases where there's little to no chance of pregnancy, because we don't know another way to make it safe.
Wikipedia straight up says "thalidomide causes birth defects." Could you please cite where you found this info? I might take a stab at updating the article if it's a legit source. Thanks!
> Maybe a new generation of aluminum wire could be better.
It already is better, this is VERY old news. Modern aluminum alloys do NOT have this problem, but it's too late, no one wants to think about aluminum wires.
they will if it goes up 10-20x its current cost (adjusted for inflation of the time). that's the beauty of the market, it forces you to try new things not to go bankrupt.
Just because the US isn't on the metric system doesn't mean that every single standard we adopt is inherently wrong. Hating on our electricity is one of the silliest things I can think of. In my house the only thing that needs 240V are kitchen appliances, A/C and a car charging outlet, those get circuit breakers that tap both phases. Everything else gets one phase. The way more and more appliances and light fixtures(LED > CFL) are trending towards high efficiency and solar even 120V is more than necessary.
If there is anything to change, it is the horribly dangerous electric socket. I was also shocked to see that many house still doesn't use differential circuit breakers. I guess using 120V reduce the risk of a fatal electric shock, but I still wouldn't trust any installation that doesn't use differential circuit breakers.
Building codes only require upgrading the home's electrical when doing certain types of repairs/renovations. Newer homes will have afci or gfci breakers on most circuits.
Don't forget kettles and space heaters. Also, visiting vacation homes or cabins where the owner doesn't have an electric car leads to very long charge times.
I'm not sure what's so odd about running your railroad at 50/3 Hz? Do you not like rational numbers?
(I guess you are talking about three-phase power in general, or is there anything special about railroads?)
In practice, just like everything in engineering, you don't run your grid at 50 Hz nor your railroad at 50/3 Hz. You run the grid at some frequency that varies slightly around 50Hz. There's always engineering tolerances.
So even if you don't like rational numbers, it doesn't really matter whether you run the railroads at 50/3 +-0.01 Hz, or at 16.66 +-0.01 Hz.
(I don't know how tight the tolerances are in practice here. It doesn't matter for the argument.)
> In practice, just like everything in engineering, you don't run your grid at 50 Hz nor your railroad at 50/3 Hz. You run the grid at some frequency that varies slightly around 50Hz. There's always engineering tolerances.
> So even if you don't like rational numbers, it doesn't really matter whether you run the railroads at 50/3 +-0.01 Hz, or at 16.66 +-0.01 Hz.
In practice the nominal frequency was changed to 16.7 Hz anyway due to some weird edge case created when running motor-generators [1] for prolonged periods of time at exactly the nominal 3:1 frequency conversion ratio. (See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrom#16_2%E2%81%843_Hz_ge... and use an online translator at your own peril if necessary.)
[1] These days, newly built (or probably occasionally re-built) substations prefer to use solid-state frequency converters, which are immune to this particular problem, but there still are enough of the older motor-generator sets around, too. Wikipedia also claims that motor-generator sets are more tolerant against earth faults, which might or might not preclude against getting rid of all of them even long-term.
For hysterical raisins: Before the advent of power electronics, which allowed three phase asynchronous motors to proliferate, commutated series-wound motors were the railway motor because of their beneficial characteristics (quoting Wikipedia: "high starting torque, can run at high speed, and are lightweight and compact").
A classic commutated series-wound motor is a DC machine. The problem with DC power is that without power electronics, you can't really change the voltage (except downwards by wasteful resistors), so your transmission voltage is limited by your maximum motor voltage and you incur relatively high transmission losses and need frequent substations every few kilometres. (Mainline railways can cheat a bit by equipping all of their rolling stock with two (or occasionally more) motors permanently linked together in series, so each motor only gets a fraction of the voltage, but you can take that approach only so far…)
So you want to switch to AC power, which is more efficient because it can be easily transformed up and then down again, because transformers can actually be made small enough to fit into a locomotive.
Fortunately with some adaptations a series-wound motor can be made to work on AC, too, but there are some trade-offs depending on the required amount of power and the frequency. I.e. the motor still works better if your AC current is more "DC-like", i.e. doesn't have too high a frequency.
It turns out that for something more modest like a hoover or a domestic power drill, an AC series-wound motor ("universal motor") will work fine enough even at 50 or 60 Hz, but for railway purposes with their somewhat higher power demands things didn't work so well.
Because at that time power electronics didn't exist or were still in their infancy (e.g. mercury arc rectifiers), there was no possibility of doing anything useful on board of the locomotive, so instead it was decided to reduce the frequency of the railway's power supply system, because at 16 2/3 or perhaps even 25 Hz motors could still be made to work reasonably enough.
Also at that time changing the frequency meant using a motor-generator set, and presumably choosing some simple integer ratio for the two frequencies also simplified things.
By the time other countries started considering switching to AC electrification, usable rectifiers existed that could be used on locomotives, so those countries could electrify at the full 50 or 60 Hz and then rectify the current to DC on board of the locomotive, thereby sidestepping the problems of running a commutated series-wound motor with AC power.
Even later on we then got fully variable voltage and frequency inverters, which finally allowed serious usage of (usually asynchronous) three-phase induction motors.
I am not sure that Western Europe is objectively worse at the safety department than us. Also you can always put a smaller breaker on 240.
The 120V in the US is a 640kb ram should be enough situation. You were first, thought you build the spare capacity, were surprised by the explosive growth and how useful electricity really is.
With modern homes moving to 100% electricity even 240 is not enough. In my flat I have pizza oven (3kw),inducation burner x 2 (3kw each), normal oven, 12000 btu AC x 2, tumble dryer, some other appliances that chug sub 1k... throw in some car charging, electrical water heater... A modern home is using orders of magnitude more electricity. And it is going up.
You seem to be confusing voltage as the unit that dictates electrical load. Voltage x Amps is what dictates how many electrical devices you can use at the same time. Residential voltage is fixed at 120 or 240 with no chance of changing in our lifetimes.
As homes need more power, they are delivered more amps. The common for newer construction in the US is 240V at 200 amp or 400 amp for larger homes. Older homes will have anywhere from 80-150A depending on when they were built or remodeled enough to require replacing the main service panel.
Stove, HVAC, and dryer require their own dedicated 240V circuits.
I have not confused anything. The idea is that powerful applliences require more copper and bigger gauges for lower voltages (not linear). And we have more if them. So by upping the voltage we can save on the wiring.
In eu you don't have to think where to plug 2.5 kw space heater. Any outlet is good enough. In the US you have to. And with home appliances actually becoming bigger and more powerful I think that even the EU baseline will become too constraining eventually. Since usually there are limitation on the gauges that are ran from the main breaker to the sub-breakers (don't know english electric jargon)
Where I live I have a wire that can hold I think 40 amps in the wall from the main breaker to the board where the small breakers terminate the different home circuts. If I want to upgrade it is dig baby dig. 6 floors.
How do you resolve phase imbalances? Most generators are 3 phase. The system is othrewise well designed to use one or two phases when needed. We use one or three phass in Europe.
So it's the same way we do it in Europe with single phase, but I think it's easier to split three phases between single phase loads (most AC loads in a hosehold), rather than three phases between two phase loads (a few AC loads in a household). I still like the 120V plug connector with a key on the hot wire. In Europe I always wire the hot on the right hand side of the Schuko socket, as most standards have it on the right.
> Unless you're in a condo/apartment building where it's often 208V, not 240V.
208V (vs 220/230/240V) has minimal to do with it being a condo and everything to do with the type of incoming power. 208V is from taking two phases of a 120V three phase service. One phase to ground, 120V, phase to phase, 208V. For the alternative voltage (named 220/230/240V depending on context), the incoming power to the transfer is a single phase. The transformer then produces a split phase 220/230/240V where each phase is 180° opposite each other. The only reason you _might_ see it more frequently at a condo/apartment is due to there being a need or desire for 3 phase power.
At least around here, condos/apartments will have big elevator, water pump and HVAC motors and therefore prefer 3ph, so 208V is the "rule" rather than the exception.
Where it gets a little funny is that the Canadian standard for "industrial" power is 600V, not 480V, and that can make it hard to find replacements in some larger buildings with custom requirements.
Probably the least common voltage in Canada. We’ll have some 347V though.
My condo parking spot has a wonderful looking junction box above it labelled “600V”.
But I’ve heard some Canadian factories will still get spec’d with “US Voltage” (ie: 277 and 480) for “standardization”, but probably so they can move the plant to the US without having to find electricians that can speak Canadian.
> Probably the least common voltage in Canada. We’ll have some 347V though.
Yeah, if you don’t have 480V, extremely unlikely you’ll have 277V. 347V has comparable issues to what I was referring to with 277. 480/600 aren’t voltage you’ll normally find wire nut’s in a jbox or behind say a light switch for example, but 277/347 you will. Unlike 120V though, if something were to cause it to arc (or worse, electrocute you), you’re going to have a very bad day! Not tagging off a circuit is always a bad idea, but especially when voltages are 250+.
But for big feeder wires, it’s a different story. Compare:
2 AWG XHHW-2 Al: 0.358 inches OD, 0.081 lbs per ft, $0.90/ft
4 AWG XHHW-2 Cu: 0.33 inches OD, 0.129 lbs per ft, $1.78/ft
I know which one I would pick under most circumstances. And insurance companies are just fine with the aluminum option.