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You can't ask for three phase power in the US? The USA has literally hundreds if not thousands of power companies. So the answer is "it depends". But it's not
by PhantomGremlin 6y ago
You can't ask for three phase power in the US?
The USA has literally hundreds if not thousands of power companies. So the answer is "it depends". But it's not very popular for residential. If for no other reason than it gives you 120V/208V, whereas most high power appliances prefer/need 240V.
In my experience you can get three-phase even in small towns for commercial/industrial. For example, I've seen it for water heaters in on-premises laundry rooms in apartment buildings.
Up until "recently", you could even get DC power in NYC. Here's an article about its demise:
https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1541316 https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1541316
- wolfgang42 6y agoSan Francisco still has a DC grid, and AFAIK no plans to shut it off: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/s...
- PhantomGremlin 6y agoThat's a great article. HN loves to talk about "technical debt", but software problems pale in comparison to supporting power distribution decisions made 141 years ago. Harder to "refactor" copper cables than it is to rearrange lines of code. Still, they seem to have done a good job updating things while maintaining "backward compatibility".