3 ms·

I believe the US is fully standardized on 120V and 60Hz for quite some time. > In the US the weird way they get 110V As a US resident I'm genuinely curious -

• tialaramex 6y ago
  Although the nominal power is standardised, for a variety of reasons the actual voltage of your supply will vary within agreed ranges (and this is true elsewhere). Frequency shouldn't change because it's a problem for the power plants if they can't agree on frequency. Having three phase transmission isn't weird, it's the three pole single phase. There's no reason to do that except it's too late to change it now. The argued upside seems to be that it makes household electrical systems less dangerous (reduced voltage). But if you care about that you'd design the rest of the system to be less dangerous as they did across Europe. For example, obviously the last few millimetres of the live pins of a plug should be insulated, you don't need them to conduct power and a human might touch them, so insulate them. The point wasn't that these higher power sockets aren't standard (the NEMA standard is rubbish but it's a standard) but that they are literally less common.