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"The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we cou

"The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A" Am I the only one who almost spit out his coffee when reading this paragraph? I mean, building a remote home in the middle of a forest is a cool idea, sure. But then end up feeding the whole thing with 400A worth of electricity? And when the current is too high, end up supplementing with a propane generator? Am I missing something? As a European, I'm used to way more modest figures for family homes - maybe 400V @ 25A plus gas for heating.

intrepidhero 5y ago
I'm from the US and I was shocked they needed 400A plus propane. We draw more current then you guys because our voltage is lower but still, 200A services are pretty standard for large rural homes.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  My thought is that power can go out for days at a time after a big storm, so propane is mostly a backup electricity/aux heat source. Maybe they have a heat pump setup which switches to propane when it gets really cold. Wood is there, but somebody needs to feed it. And people inevitably get old or lazy about it and depend more and more on the convenient heat sources available.
- danans 5y ago
  > I was shocked they needed 400A Seconded. I recently completed an all electric high performance remodel, and with 200A service, I can power a heat pump, heat pump water heater, all electric kitchen and laundry, and an EV charger, with Amps to spare. This is in the mild Bay Area, and my heat pump draws about 6A (15A breaker). The largest loads are EV and cooktop/stove. A 3000sqft custom house built to high performance standards (airtight and well insulated) can be space heated in a cold climate with a heat pump that draws no more than 24A (40A breaker) using a heat pump. At that load a modern heat pump will make 40kBTU of heat. There are many examples of this across Canada. I just now read that they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it. > plus propane. Apart from backup water heating when the power goes out, their hot tub will waste huge amounts of energy, so propane might be operationally cheaper than electricity.
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    I'm running a small hot tub in central New Hampshire. I figure it costs me $15 per month in the winter. Edit: Service in the US is generally 200A or 400A. I'd say 400A is overbuilt for what they have, but that doesn't mean they actually use much of that capacity. For example, I average 1000 kWh per month, which is about 1.39 kW 24/7, or 12 amps average on my 200A service. The 200A is to have headroom for peak demands, and we probably never get close to 200A. If I were to rewire my panel (it's full), I'd go for the 400A - it's just heavier copper in the three lines to the entrance panel. That would not increase my monthly power bill right now, but it would provide lots of excess capacity in case I want to switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles. Since we heat with wood and propane and don't use electricity for either and have mostly LED lighting and a gas stove, I do wonder where all the power is going, especially at night. Too many computers, I guess. Add analysis to my to-do list!
    - rhacker 5y ago
      It's funny how removed we are from reality. Even if $15/month might be cheaper than a propane bill, it would be far far more expensive against the planet to heat it with gas/coal burned at a factory 100 miles away, converted to electricity, then converted back to heat inside the spa water heater.
      - wrycoder 5y ago
        I think that an air/water heat pump on the tub, with say a COP of 8, would be less expensive to operate than propane or straight electric. But, I couldn't justify the capital expense. (Small hot tubs are electric.) I like my wood/propane mix for heating, because it's immune to power outages. At some point I'll get too old to cut/split/haul wood, though, and will have to figure something else out. I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system.
        ryukafalz 5y ago
        > I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system. It's that, as well as the fact that having a gas stove means you have a gas hookup in the first place, so you're more likely to also use it for heating. That in turn leads to more emissions than other heating methods produce.
- StillBored 5y ago
  And 100A isn't unusual, particularly for anything built more than 20 years ago.
  - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    My 100 year old house in the US has 100A service- though I'm thinking of upgrading to 200A service to help with Level 2 EV charging.
    - StillBored 5y ago
      It was probably upgraded from ~30A at some point in the past as a requirement of a lender. Presumably it has circuit breakers? Those weren't even a choice in a 100 year old house when it was built AFAIK. I've been curious how well these jobs are generally done, when I was a kid it was a big selling point to have circuit breakers instead of fuses. I've always been curious how through some of those upgrades were, did they replace all the wiring too, does everything have grounds, etc. Or did they just pull a few 240 lines for AC/range/etc? https://www.thespruce.com/service-panels-changed-in-the-1900s-1152732 https://www.thespruce.com/service-panels-changed-in-the-1900... Which says 100A didn't become common until the 1960's.
  - DrPhish 5y ago
    True. For comparison, I have a 60s era 1000sqft house in northern Canada that had a 60A service into a 50A breaker panel up until last year. For insurance, safety and maintenance reasons[0] we upgraded to a 200A service, but for a small house and a 3-4 person family 50A is sufficient provided your hot water heater is natural gas. [0]: The incoming line was aerial and over the legal span length, so it had been attached to an insulator nailed to a tree halfway between the house and mast. Also the mast was deteriorating to the point that it needed to be replaced anyways and insurance was making noise about not allowing a new policy if it wasn't upgraded to at least 120A. We did a customer pole and went underground to the house. Much nicer aesthetics and I can now turn off a breaker on my side of the meter at the pole to do maintenance.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  It's 400A at 240v, so, no, it's not more current than in the EU where most domestic loads are 230v.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- second--shift 5y ago
  as a heads-up, most electrical mains in the USA are 240v; they are wired two circuits in series for most residential applications. But you'll find a 240v plug in most homes; it's the industrial heavy-duty looking plug.
b4st1en 5y ago
I had the same reaction (European too). If it's in Canada the supply voltage is 120V, so roughly half what we have in Europe, apples-to-apples it's comparable to 200A in Europe. Still, it's a very high amount of power (48kW) that would not even be subscriptable in France for a consumer (the max is 36kW).
- EricE 5y ago
  240v is delivered to homes on two legs - the legs are split to make 120v circuits for lighting and wall plugs. 240v circuits with both legs are common for things with a large draw such as HVAC, electric water heaters, electric stoves/ovens, electric dryers, etc. Remember, they didn't want fossil fuels - if you are going all electric, especially for heating (in CANDADA!) you are going to pull some wattage. That big outdoor pool - in CANADA - doesn't help either.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  Supply is 240V in North America. You probably have multiple 240V circuits at your home, typically for electric range, oven, and clothes dryer at least. It is split into two for regular outlets and lighting.
  - perceptronas 5y ago
    Very interesting. Here in EU houses usually have three phases @ ~380V, where each phase is ~220V.
    - quickthrowman 5y ago
      US residential service is split phase 120/240, US commercial service is generally 120/208v three-phase or 277/480v three-phase.
ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> Am I the only one who almost spit out his coffee when reading this paragraph? No, I thought that was a typo and should be 40A (so 120V * 40 A or 400V * 12A).
- desdiv 5y ago
  It's not a typo because 400A is indeed the highest tier residential service BC Hydro currently offers[0]. 400A is also in the right ballpark for the amount of equipment he describes. [0] https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/electrical-connections/charges-fees.html https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/electrical-connecti...
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    Oh, I believe that. The number is, well, unbelievable high, so I dismissed it as wrong without further thinking.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    The copper coming from "something" will be at least 1/2 inch thick, probably more so that it doesn't lose voltage. We're probably talking a 7/0 cable where 4/0 would be bare minimum.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - pinot 5y ago
      Probably larger than that. If they’re 200m from the transformer, 400A service requires (3) 1000kcmil cables per leg. 100m drops it to (3) 350kcmil which is still pretty beefy
antisthenes 5y ago
The amount of cognitive dissonance required to say "we want to limit impact" on one hand, and to run a 400Amp electrical connection to heat your hot tub and pool in Canada, is staggering.
- lazide 5y ago
  If it’s cheap hydro power driven (like much of Canada), it isn’t absurd. A lot of hydro power is ‘use it or lose it’, since the dams also provide flood control and MUST keep extra capacity free to absorb sudden water surges. They can’t just store everything they get.
- Fiahil 5y ago
  "low impact" for North Americans, maybe... No wonder that we're at the begining of a climat change disaster.
  - yongjik 5y ago
    I doubt most North Americans need a 400A connection. (How much wattage is that? 48kW?) I live in an ordinary single house in a boring suburb in the bay area, and on hottest days, if I have to use the A/C, the oven, and the dryer at the same time, maybe it would push it over ~10kW. Maybe once in a year.
    - mholm 5y ago
      > Bay Area Most places in the US experience much harsher seasons than the Bay Area.
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        There are places where we waste energy because we're doing dumb stuff: in northern parts of the country, your house should be well insulated and designed for cold temperatures. Then there are places like Nevada, which are just not suitable for large-scale habitation. "Can we make this monument to our hubris more energy efficient" is kind of missing the point, right?
crowbahr 5y ago
As a European you probably don't have an outdoor heated pool & hot tub in a frigid northern climate. I also think it's ridiculous, for what it's worth. 400A is a wild amount of electricity for a supposedly high efficiency, modern home.
- zrail 5y ago
  My house has 350A split across two meters because we have a ground source heat pump which has a special electric rate. I don't think we ever actually use that much power.
  - skeletal88 5y ago
    Where I live we have to pay to the electric grid for the amps on the main breaker. Because the grid has to be able to provide those, needs to be planned accordingly, needs to have the proper diameter cables and transformers, etc. Even if we don't use them. So having 300A "just in case we need it" would be insanely expensive on the monthly bill. This amount of apmeres is more like for a workshop, small industrial or office building
    - mediaman 5y ago
      Many utilities will do this based not on the amperage to the house but the peak kw used in a billing cycle - a capacity charge. This helps incentivize reduced peak usage. In your scenario it's strange because you have zero incentive to keep your maximum usage below the breaker amount, other than the per-kwh cost.
      - wernerb 5y ago
        I live in the same such country with such rules. They assume rightly that if you request that amperage you will use it and they will plan and bill you to handle it. And yes we then also pay per kWh :) Why would it be harmful to run at the amperage that I'm buying ? What disincentives do I need?
- mips_avatar 5y ago
nostromo 5y ago
A heated pool for a single-family home in the wilderness seems particularly decadent and indulgent. It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  I'm just laughing at a flat roof in Pemberton... It's a pretty ridiculous house.
  - folkrav 5y ago
    Snow removal must be... fun.
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      I can't believe no one at any step of the process gave them a warning about flat roofs, huge glass windows, having a pool, etc. in frigid mountain areas with tons of snow. I feel like there must be a lot more to this story, like cycling through different architects and engineers until one would finally not tell them the idea was bonkers.
      - nostromo 5y ago
        A flat green roof. Which is much worse than just a flat roof. The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.
      - OxO4 5y ago
        Not defending the other design choices, but there are places in snowy mountain areas where (almost) flat roofs are common [0]. [0] https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook/architecture https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook...
lstodd 5y ago
Top-to-bottom windows all over and narrow spaces .. it's actually amazing they fit it in 100KVA. This thing in winter would need about twice that just to not freeze. Hence the propane, and forget the tub and the pool.
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  There are probably other ways to build a modern-style home that don't involve this, but they currently aren't in vogue. To which end, I wonder how long such a home would last, given the upkeep. The bling times come and go. Just look at history.
  - 83 5y ago
    They might not have to worry about longevity, having built a home densely surrounded by trees in a wildfire prone area.
  - lstodd 5y ago
    > I wonder how long such a home would last 3-5 years at most I think. I've seen futile attempts to sell such experiments. After that time it's just easier to bulldoze or burn it, and then build something more sensible.
MisterTea 5y ago
Since our voltage is 120/240 volt split phase or 120/208 open Y service (less common) we tend to need higher currents for main breakers/fuses. The old standard for a home was 100 amps whereas modern homes are built with 200 amp mains. I suppose the low cost of air conditioning and heat pumps has raised this demand. Otherwise our lighting and appliance loads have become more efficient. A 230/400V open Y service at 25 amps is just 10kW which to me sounds like an old standard or mains for a small 1-2br apartment. I'd expect at least a 50-60A service. Though I know some (many?) homes in EU are on actual 3 phase so 25A at 400V 3 phase becomes 17.3kW which is not far from the 24kW a 100A 120/240 service provides. Still anemic but quite a bit of power for a 1-4 person household living modestly. Though in the USA it seems utilities make residential 3 phase difficult or impossible to obtain as you might do commercial stuff with that electric without paying commercial rates or your neighborhood is served by a single phase feeder.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  My impression is that in many European countries much lower supply ratings are normal (like 25A, I think I've even seen 17A on an apartment with A/C!) and it's just sort of accepted that you will trip the main breaker if you run too many things at once. In the US tripping the main breaker would be a pretty crazy occurrence, we seem to always spec in order to make that very difficult to do. I wonder if one difference is the safety margin applied considering the long trip time for breakers in a light overload condition... if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    > if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems. Depends on the trip curve and the age of the overcurrent device. Looking at the trip curve for a Fuji BW250 (125-250 amp frame size), at 150% the device will trip in what looks like 5-30 minutes. Any load over 10x rated current is an instant trip. There was a scandal many years ago where an electrical equipment manufacturer, Federal Pacific, was caught rigging its testing machines to pass faulty or poorly performing circuit breakers. It was found that some of those breakers would carry 150%+ rated current without tripping. They were responsible for quite a few electrical fires and were sued into oblivion.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
As someone who lives in the US, yes, 400A is insane.
- mholm 5y ago
  It's entirely reasonable if they have a tankless water heater + electric heat. The amount of powerdraw that can be required during a shower means I would trip a 200A circuit during the winter. Average powerdraw would certainly be much lower, but you have to prepare for the peaks. Adding in an electric pool heater, more square footage to heat, and probably a fancy electric range, means you could hit 400A somewhat easily if you aren't being careful.
  - thatfrenchguy 5y ago
    In a newly built 2500sqft house you should need a lot less than 200A for this, it should have almost perfect insulation. That, and tankless water heater are stupid, frankly.
  - briHass 5y ago
    Nobody should be running electric heat (resistance heat, COP=1), since we now have heat pump technology that can operate below 0F and do so with COPs of at least 2. Electric tankless WHs are also a terrible idea in almost all cases. A HPWH or standard electric tank would be much better for overall power demand.
- mbrevoort 5y ago
  Using 400A consistently would be insane. Building the capacity to support 400A but using much, much less on average is... prudent, especially when building a house that is remote.
83 5y ago
You aren't missing anything, that's pretty ludicrous. My (midwest USA) house has 100A service, and I weld for fun and run a rack with servers. The welder can make the lights dim which makes me want 200A, but 400A is just insane.
downrightmike 5y ago
There are highly efficient heat pump powered water heaters, going out anywhere remote, these and other heat pump systems should really be used. This is a really great overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=1840s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=1840s
- exhilaration 5y ago
  I knew that was a Technology Connections video before clicking on it :)
mbrevoort 5y ago
Just because you prudently plan for 400A of peak capacity doesn't mean you would actually come anywhere near using it at any given time. Part of building a house in the woods is planning for contingencies.
tejohnso 5y ago
The size and extravagance of this thing is rather off-putting. I was expecting a modest off grid passive house.
- potatolicious 5y ago
  What gets me is that the space doesn't seem to get you very much - it's a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath house. I dunno, maybe my thought is unrealistic - but if I were to splash out a ton of money for a palatial rural manse, I'd shoot for something with a bit more space than a large-ish suburban home. Especially because one of the most common uses of such a property is entertainment - forget having folks stay over unless you make the kids bunk?
  - pixiemagic 5y ago
    Yeah, that bit made no sense to me. I'm not familiar with the location but clearly it's rural and only accessible by car. They also were living in Vancouver which sounds quite far away, and presumably have friends/family there. So how are they going to be entertaining people all the time (they specifically mention entertaining large groups being important to them)? Come over for an evening, except one of you can't drink and has to drive 2 hours back at the end of the night??
    - potatolicious 5y ago
      Yep. My partner and I have had the same thoughts about having a property outside of the city that's large enough to entertain in. We jokingly call it The Compound - but there is something to the name I think in terms of how it needs to be designed to fulfill that need. At a bare minimum it needs to be large enough to have a guest suite - the central socializing spaces like the kitchen and living room also need to be scaled for that use. Ideally (assuming a grand budget) you can have separate structures for guests entirely. But certainly one has to assume that guests are bunking over, given how remote the location is. It seems eminently unreasonable to assume guests are driving several hours at the end of the evening.
obelos 5y ago
I feel downright minimalist now with my 120A/120V grid service.
jeffbee 5y ago
The whole thing is pretend environmentalism. It starts out with some superficially "green" elements like solar power but eventually throws it all out the window when that conflicts with luxury or desire. In the end they've built a huge, inefficient house with enough embodied energy to power Ghana for a year, only accessible with the family's giant gas-guzzling truck, as depicted.
- rland 5y ago
  Pure comedy. > A goal for the build was to limit impact to the site during construction, and then to limit the footprint of the home after completion. In pursuit of this we planned an efficient mechanical design that would feature solar panels for electricity generation tied to the grid, geothermal for heat exchange, and no fossil fuels. Oh, great, sound like you have some good environmental principles! > However, we quickly ran into several problems with this approach. Yeah, it can be a bummer to sacrifice your own comfort. But it is worth it for the environment! > The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A. Wow, that's a lot of electricity. Like, a loooooot. Maybe we can pare it down a little bit -- limiting our impact is important, right? > We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid Right? O-oh. Oh so you're using propane to heat the pool. Yeah.
Tempest1981 5y ago
Maybe they want to supercharge 2 or 3 EVs at once.
- m463 5y ago
  The current tesla wall charger will charge 48A and requires a dedicated 60A circuit. The previous model wall charger would charge 80A and required a 100A circuit. You can limit the charging current but at some point you will have to make compromises on driving. this is all for one car. For multiple cars, the compromises get trickier.
bick_nyers 5y ago
It's 400A peak usage, not average. Different decisions could have been made to lower that peak load considerably. As another commenter mentioned, swapping out the tankless water heater which can trip a standard house's electrical connection all on its own.
petters 5y ago
I have 3*25A in a relatively old, three-story house in Sweden. Heated with a heat pump. I assumed 400A was a typo but apparently not? I guess it makes sense considering the heating of the pool, the large surface area and maybe an EV.
lcvw 5y ago
400A is an absurd number. I live in the northeast have a heated pool, electric water heater, and am putting in heat pumps and it all runs off a 200A. 100A is the standard hookup in my area. I have no idea what this person is doing (are they heating the pool in winter??) but those numbers are absurd. Also a propane pool heater is far cheaper then electric, converting propane to electricity is really crazy when you could just have propane heat, hot water, and pool heater.
- glxxyz 5y ago
  My rural home never uses more than 4kW (and even that's rare), so under 20 amps. I can't imagine needing 400A supply without building a machine shop or something.
  - kerbs 5y ago
    He said he plans a wood shop in the post
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pengaru 5y ago
The house is obscene, but just because one has 400A service doesn't necessarily mean they're being inefficient in doing so. It could just be to handle momentary bursts, and the equipment drawing that power might actually be doing the job more efficiently than something that does it slower, drawing more power cumulatively over a longer period of time.
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kccqzy 5y ago
I also did. Another ridiculous thing was that the article initially claimed no fossil fuels, but the one thing they couldn't live without was wood-burning fireplaces. I mean don't they both generate large amounts of carbon dioxide?
- lazide 5y ago
  Wood is not a fossil fuel unless you’re burning petrified wood or coal (and somehow calling that wood). Fossil fuels are from carbon sources taken out of the normal carbon cycle (aka buried generally)
  - kccqzy 5y ago
    I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they? (This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
    - lazide 5y ago
      If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed. If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same. nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting. So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle. Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed. Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher. Does that help?
nkurz 5y ago
It strikes me as high too, but it's possible that he needed more than a 200A 240V main panel to meet code for his very large solar panel system. In the US (I don't know about Canada where the house is) there is a 120% rule, which limits the amount of electricity that the solar panel is allowed to feed into the panel: https://unboundsolar.com/blog/electrical-panel-requirements-for-solar https://unboundsolar.com/blog/electrical-panel-requirements-.... The idea is that you don't want more energy in the panel than the panel is designed to handle. Practically (if I understand it right) this means that the breaker for the solar panels is limited to 20% of the panel rating. A 200A 240V panel would limit you to a 40A 240V breaker, which (according to the link above) means a maximum of 7.6kW of backfeed solar. In the article, he says he has a 11.6kW solar array, which would require (if I'm calculating right) at least a 60A 240V breaker (maybe plus some required overcapacity?). Since this isn't allowed on a 200A panel, he may have needed to bump up to the next largest size of 400A unless he wanted to go smaller on the solar array. So while it sounds like overkill, it's possible there is more reason for it than just a desire to heat his wife's outdoor pool in the winter.
- m463 5y ago
  I investigated solar and generation requires appropriately sized circuits and capacity, even if the direction is the opposite. so 100A panel + 100A of solar requires a 200A panel A few other things that require high-amp service - on demand electric water heating, and electric car charging (and we're moving towards multiple vehicles). It's also worth mentioning that by far the largest cost of an electrical circuit is the labor, so sizing for 100A, 200A and 400A is not 1x, 2x, 4x. upgrading later is a huge cost.
sxates 5y ago
I had 400A installed at my house (all electric, solar, batteries, the works). It's still overkill. What's shocking to me isn't that they went with a 400a panel, that I can (and obviously did) justify. It's that it WASN'T ENOUGH and they had to add propane as well. I can't imagine what kind of pool heater they have that needs more than that. Cool house though.
JamesAdir 5y ago
Totally agree. I can't warp my head around the effect of this house in environmental impact including using cars all the time, disrupting local fauna and the energy costs.

intrepidhero 5y ago

I'm from the US and I was shocked they needed 400A plus propane. We draw more current then you guys because our voltage is lower but still, 200A services are pretty standard for large rural homes.

Scoundreller 5y ago
My thought is that power can go out for days at a time after a big storm, so propane is mostly a backup electricity/aux heat source. Maybe they have a heat pump setup which switches to propane when it gets really cold. Wood is there, but somebody needs to feed it. And people inevitably get old or lazy about it and depend more and more on the convenient heat sources available.
danans 5y ago
> I was shocked they needed 400A Seconded. I recently completed an all electric high performance remodel, and with 200A service, I can power a heat pump, heat pump water heater, all electric kitchen and laundry, and an EV charger, with Amps to spare. This is in the mild Bay Area, and my heat pump draws about 6A (15A breaker). The largest loads are EV and cooktop/stove. A 3000sqft custom house built to high performance standards (airtight and well insulated) can be space heated in a cold climate with a heat pump that draws no more than 24A (40A breaker) using a heat pump. At that load a modern heat pump will make 40kBTU of heat. There are many examples of this across Canada. I just now read that they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it. > plus propane. Apart from backup water heating when the power goes out, their hot tub will waste huge amounts of energy, so propane might be operationally cheaper than electricity.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  I'm running a small hot tub in central New Hampshire. I figure it costs me $15 per month in the winter. Edit: Service in the US is generally 200A or 400A. I'd say 400A is overbuilt for what they have, but that doesn't mean they actually use much of that capacity. For example, I average 1000 kWh per month, which is about 1.39 kW 24/7, or 12 amps average on my 200A service. The 200A is to have headroom for peak demands, and we probably never get close to 200A. If I were to rewire my panel (it's full), I'd go for the 400A - it's just heavier copper in the three lines to the entrance panel. That would not increase my monthly power bill right now, but it would provide lots of excess capacity in case I want to switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles. Since we heat with wood and propane and don't use electricity for either and have mostly LED lighting and a gas stove, I do wonder where all the power is going, especially at night. Too many computers, I guess. Add analysis to my to-do list!
  - rhacker 5y ago
    It's funny how removed we are from reality. Even if $15/month might be cheaper than a propane bill, it would be far far more expensive against the planet to heat it with gas/coal burned at a factory 100 miles away, converted to electricity, then converted back to heat inside the spa water heater.
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      I think that an air/water heat pump on the tub, with say a COP of 8, would be less expensive to operate than propane or straight electric. But, I couldn't justify the capital expense. (Small hot tubs are electric.) I like my wood/propane mix for heating, because it's immune to power outages. At some point I'll get too old to cut/split/haul wood, though, and will have to figure something else out. I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system.
      - ryukafalz 5y ago
        > I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system. It's that, as well as the fact that having a gas stove means you have a gas hookup in the first place, so you're more likely to also use it for heating. That in turn leads to more emissions than other heating methods produce.
StillBored 5y ago
And 100A isn't unusual, particularly for anything built more than 20 years ago.
- cbm-vic-20 5y ago
  My 100 year old house in the US has 100A service- though I'm thinking of upgrading to 200A service to help with Level 2 EV charging.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    It was probably upgraded from ~30A at some point in the past as a requirement of a lender. Presumably it has circuit breakers? Those weren't even a choice in a 100 year old house when it was built AFAIK. I've been curious how well these jobs are generally done, when I was a kid it was a big selling point to have circuit breakers instead of fuses. I've always been curious how through some of those upgrades were, did they replace all the wiring too, does everything have grounds, etc. Or did they just pull a few 240 lines for AC/range/etc? https://www.thespruce.com/service-panels-changed-in-the-1900s-1152732 https://www.thespruce.com/service-panels-changed-in-the-1900... Which says 100A didn't become common until the 1960's.
- DrPhish 5y ago
  True. For comparison, I have a 60s era 1000sqft house in northern Canada that had a 60A service into a 50A breaker panel up until last year. For insurance, safety and maintenance reasons[0] we upgraded to a 200A service, but for a small house and a 3-4 person family 50A is sufficient provided your hot water heater is natural gas. [0]: The incoming line was aerial and over the legal span length, so it had been attached to an insulator nailed to a tree halfway between the house and mast. Also the mast was deteriorating to the point that it needed to be replaced anyways and insurance was making noise about not allowing a new policy if it wasn't upgraded to at least 120A. We did a customer pole and went underground to the house. Much nicer aesthetics and I can now turn off a breaker on my side of the meter at the pole to do maintenance.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
It's 400A at 240v, so, no, it's not more current than in the EU where most domestic loads are 230v.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
second--shift 5y ago
as a heads-up, most electrical mains in the USA are 240v; they are wired two circuits in series for most residential applications. But you'll find a 240v plug in most homes; it's the industrial heavy-duty looking plug.

b4st1en 5y ago

I had the same reaction (European too). If it's in Canada the supply voltage is 120V, so roughly half what we have in Europe, apples-to-apples it's comparable to 200A in Europe. Still, it's a very high amount of power (48kW) that would not even be subscriptable in France for a consumer (the max is 36kW).

EricE 5y ago
240v is delivered to homes on two legs - the legs are split to make 120v circuits for lighting and wall plugs. 240v circuits with both legs are common for things with a large draw such as HVAC, electric water heaters, electric stoves/ovens, electric dryers, etc. Remember, they didn't want fossil fuels - if you are going all electric, especially for heating (in CANDADA!) you are going to pull some wattage. That big outdoor pool - in CANADA - doesn't help either.
xyzzyz 5y ago
Supply is 240V in North America. You probably have multiple 240V circuits at your home, typically for electric range, oven, and clothes dryer at least. It is split into two for regular outlets and lighting.
- perceptronas 5y ago
  Very interesting. Here in EU houses usually have three phases @ ~380V, where each phase is ~220V.
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    US residential service is split phase 120/240, US commercial service is generally 120/208v three-phase or 277/480v three-phase.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago

> Am I the only one who almost spit out his coffee when reading this paragraph? No, I thought that was a typo and should be 40A (so 120V * 40 A or 400V * 12A).

desdiv 5y ago
It's not a typo because 400A is indeed the highest tier residential service BC Hydro currently offers[0]. 400A is also in the right ballpark for the amount of equipment he describes. [0] https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/electrical-connections/charges-fees.html https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/electrical-connecti...
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  Oh, I believe that. The number is, well, unbelievable high, so I dismissed it as wrong without further thinking.
- rhacker 5y ago
  The copper coming from "something" will be at least 1/2 inch thick, probably more so that it doesn't lose voltage. We're probably talking a 7/0 cable where 4/0 would be bare minimum.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pinot 5y ago
    Probably larger than that. If they’re 200m from the transformer, 400A service requires (3) 1000kcmil cables per leg. 100m drops it to (3) 350kcmil which is still pretty beefy

antisthenes 5y ago

The amount of cognitive dissonance required to say "we want to limit impact" on one hand, and to run a 400Amp electrical connection to heat your hot tub and pool in Canada, is staggering.

lazide 5y ago
If it’s cheap hydro power driven (like much of Canada), it isn’t absurd. A lot of hydro power is ‘use it or lose it’, since the dams also provide flood control and MUST keep extra capacity free to absorb sudden water surges. They can’t just store everything they get.
Fiahil 5y ago
"low impact" for North Americans, maybe... No wonder that we're at the begining of a climat change disaster.
- yongjik 5y ago
  I doubt most North Americans need a 400A connection. (How much wattage is that? 48kW?) I live in an ordinary single house in a boring suburb in the bay area, and on hottest days, if I have to use the A/C, the oven, and the dryer at the same time, maybe it would push it over ~10kW. Maybe once in a year.
  - mholm 5y ago
    > Bay Area Most places in the US experience much harsher seasons than the Bay Area.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      There are places where we waste energy because we're doing dumb stuff: in northern parts of the country, your house should be well insulated and designed for cold temperatures. Then there are places like Nevada, which are just not suitable for large-scale habitation. "Can we make this monument to our hubris more energy efficient" is kind of missing the point, right?

crowbahr 5y ago

As a European you probably don't have an outdoor heated pool & hot tub in a frigid northern climate. I also think it's ridiculous, for what it's worth. 400A is a wild amount of electricity for a supposedly high efficiency, modern home.

zrail 5y ago
My house has 350A split across two meters because we have a ground source heat pump which has a special electric rate. I don't think we ever actually use that much power.
- skeletal88 5y ago
  Where I live we have to pay to the electric grid for the amps on the main breaker. Because the grid has to be able to provide those, needs to be planned accordingly, needs to have the proper diameter cables and transformers, etc. Even if we don't use them. So having 300A "just in case we need it" would be insanely expensive on the monthly bill. This amount of apmeres is more like for a workshop, small industrial or office building
  - mediaman 5y ago
    Many utilities will do this based not on the amperage to the house but the peak kw used in a billing cycle - a capacity charge. This helps incentivize reduced peak usage. In your scenario it's strange because you have zero incentive to keep your maximum usage below the breaker amount, other than the per-kwh cost.
    - wernerb 5y ago
      I live in the same such country with such rules. They assume rightly that if you request that amperage you will use it and they will plan and bill you to handle it. And yes we then also pay per kWh :) Why would it be harmful to run at the amperage that I'm buying ? What disincentives do I need?
mips_avatar 5y ago

nostromo 5y ago

A heated pool for a single-family home in the wilderness seems particularly decadent and indulgent. It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.

Mikeb85 5y ago
I'm just laughing at a flat roof in Pemberton... It's a pretty ridiculous house.
- folkrav 5y ago
  Snow removal must be... fun.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    I can't believe no one at any step of the process gave them a warning about flat roofs, huge glass windows, having a pool, etc. in frigid mountain areas with tons of snow. I feel like there must be a lot more to this story, like cycling through different architects and engineers until one would finally not tell them the idea was bonkers.
    - nostromo 5y ago
      A flat green roof. Which is much worse than just a flat roof. The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.
    - OxO4 5y ago
      Not defending the other design choices, but there are places in snowy mountain areas where (almost) flat roofs are common [0]. [0] https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook/architecture https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook...

lstodd 5y ago

Top-to-bottom windows all over and narrow spaces .. it's actually amazing they fit it in 100KVA. This thing in winter would need about twice that just to not freeze. Hence the propane, and forget the tub and the pool.

lambdasquirrel 5y ago
There are probably other ways to build a modern-style home that don't involve this, but they currently aren't in vogue. To which end, I wonder how long such a home would last, given the upkeep. The bling times come and go. Just look at history.
- 83 5y ago
  They might not have to worry about longevity, having built a home densely surrounded by trees in a wildfire prone area.
- lstodd 5y ago
  > I wonder how long such a home would last 3-5 years at most I think. I've seen futile attempts to sell such experiments. After that time it's just easier to bulldoze or burn it, and then build something more sensible.

MisterTea 5y ago

Since our voltage is 120/240 volt split phase or 120/208 open Y service (less common) we tend to need higher currents for main breakers/fuses. The old standard for a home was 100 amps whereas modern homes are built with 200 amp mains. I suppose the low cost of air conditioning and heat pumps has raised this demand. Otherwise our lighting and appliance loads have become more efficient. A 230/400V open Y service at 25 amps is just 10kW which to me sounds like an old standard or mains for a small 1-2br apartment. I'd expect at least a 50-60A service. Though I know some (many?) homes in EU are on actual 3 phase so 25A at 400V 3 phase becomes 17.3kW which is not far from the 24kW a 100A 120/240 service provides. Still anemic but quite a bit of power for a 1-4 person household living modestly. Though in the USA it seems utilities make residential 3 phase difficult or impossible to obtain as you might do commercial stuff with that electric without paying commercial rates or your neighborhood is served by a single phase feeder.

jcrawfordor 5y ago
My impression is that in many European countries much lower supply ratings are normal (like 25A, I think I've even seen 17A on an apartment with A/C!) and it's just sort of accepted that you will trip the main breaker if you run too many things at once. In the US tripping the main breaker would be a pretty crazy occurrence, we seem to always spec in order to make that very difficult to do. I wonder if one difference is the safety margin applied considering the long trip time for breakers in a light overload condition... if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  > if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems. Depends on the trip curve and the age of the overcurrent device. Looking at the trip curve for a Fuji BW250 (125-250 amp frame size), at 150% the device will trip in what looks like 5-30 minutes. Any load over 10x rated current is an instant trip. There was a scandal many years ago where an electrical equipment manufacturer, Federal Pacific, was caught rigging its testing machines to pass faulty or poorly performing circuit breakers. It was found that some of those breakers would carry 150%+ rated current without tripping. They were responsible for quite a few electrical fires and were sued into oblivion.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

As someone who lives in the US, yes, 400A is insane.

mholm 5y ago
It's entirely reasonable if they have a tankless water heater + electric heat. The amount of powerdraw that can be required during a shower means I would trip a 200A circuit during the winter. Average powerdraw would certainly be much lower, but you have to prepare for the peaks. Adding in an electric pool heater, more square footage to heat, and probably a fancy electric range, means you could hit 400A somewhat easily if you aren't being careful.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  In a newly built 2500sqft house you should need a lot less than 200A for this, it should have almost perfect insulation. That, and tankless water heater are stupid, frankly.
- briHass 5y ago
  Nobody should be running electric heat (resistance heat, COP=1), since we now have heat pump technology that can operate below 0F and do so with COPs of at least 2. Electric tankless WHs are also a terrible idea in almost all cases. A HPWH or standard electric tank would be much better for overall power demand.
mbrevoort 5y ago
Using 400A consistently would be insane. Building the capacity to support 400A but using much, much less on average is... prudent, especially when building a house that is remote.

83 5y ago

You aren't missing anything, that's pretty ludicrous. My (midwest USA) house has 100A service, and I weld for fun and run a rack with servers. The welder can make the lights dim which makes me want 200A, but 400A is just insane.

downrightmike 5y ago

There are highly efficient heat pump powered water heaters, going out anywhere remote, these and other heat pump systems should really be used. This is a really great overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=1840s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=1840s

exhilaration 5y ago
I knew that was a Technology Connections video before clicking on it :)

mbrevoort 5y ago

Just because you prudently plan for 400A of peak capacity doesn't mean you would actually come anywhere near using it at any given time. Part of building a house in the woods is planning for contingencies.

tejohnso 5y ago

The size and extravagance of this thing is rather off-putting. I was expecting a modest off grid passive house.

potatolicious 5y ago
What gets me is that the space doesn't seem to get you very much - it's a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath house. I dunno, maybe my thought is unrealistic - but if I were to splash out a ton of money for a palatial rural manse, I'd shoot for something with a bit more space than a large-ish suburban home. Especially because one of the most common uses of such a property is entertainment - forget having folks stay over unless you make the kids bunk?
- pixiemagic 5y ago
  Yeah, that bit made no sense to me. I'm not familiar with the location but clearly it's rural and only accessible by car. They also were living in Vancouver which sounds quite far away, and presumably have friends/family there. So how are they going to be entertaining people all the time (they specifically mention entertaining large groups being important to them)? Come over for an evening, except one of you can't drink and has to drive 2 hours back at the end of the night??
  - potatolicious 5y ago
    Yep. My partner and I have had the same thoughts about having a property outside of the city that's large enough to entertain in. We jokingly call it The Compound - but there is something to the name I think in terms of how it needs to be designed to fulfill that need. At a bare minimum it needs to be large enough to have a guest suite - the central socializing spaces like the kitchen and living room also need to be scaled for that use. Ideally (assuming a grand budget) you can have separate structures for guests entirely. But certainly one has to assume that guests are bunking over, given how remote the location is. It seems eminently unreasonable to assume guests are driving several hours at the end of the evening.

obelos 5y ago

I feel downright minimalist now with my 120A/120V grid service.

jeffbee 5y ago

The whole thing is pretend environmentalism. It starts out with some superficially "green" elements like solar power but eventually throws it all out the window when that conflicts with luxury or desire. In the end they've built a huge, inefficient house with enough embodied energy to power Ghana for a year, only accessible with the family's giant gas-guzzling truck, as depicted.

rland 5y ago
Pure comedy. > A goal for the build was to limit impact to the site during construction, and then to limit the footprint of the home after completion. In pursuit of this we planned an efficient mechanical design that would feature solar panels for electricity generation tied to the grid, geothermal for heat exchange, and no fossil fuels. Oh, great, sound like you have some good environmental principles! > However, we quickly ran into several problems with this approach. Yeah, it can be a bummer to sacrifice your own comfort. But it is worth it for the environment! > The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A. Wow, that's a lot of electricity. Like, a loooooot. Maybe we can pare it down a little bit -- limiting our impact is important, right? > We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid Right? O-oh. Oh so you're using propane to heat the pool. Yeah.

Tempest1981 5y ago

Maybe they want to supercharge 2 or 3 EVs at once.

m463 5y ago
The current tesla wall charger will charge 48A and requires a dedicated 60A circuit. The previous model wall charger would charge 80A and required a 100A circuit. You can limit the charging current but at some point you will have to make compromises on driving. this is all for one car. For multiple cars, the compromises get trickier.

bick_nyers 5y ago

It's 400A peak usage, not average. Different decisions could have been made to lower that peak load considerably. As another commenter mentioned, swapping out the tankless water heater which can trip a standard house's electrical connection all on its own.

petters 5y ago

I have 3*25A in a relatively old, three-story house in Sweden. Heated with a heat pump. I assumed 400A was a typo but apparently not? I guess it makes sense considering the heating of the pool, the large surface area and maybe an EV.

lcvw 5y ago

400A is an absurd number. I live in the northeast have a heated pool, electric water heater, and am putting in heat pumps and it all runs off a 200A. 100A is the standard hookup in my area. I have no idea what this person is doing (are they heating the pool in winter??) but those numbers are absurd. Also a propane pool heater is far cheaper then electric, converting propane to electricity is really crazy when you could just have propane heat, hot water, and pool heater.

glxxyz 5y ago
My rural home never uses more than 4kW (and even that's rare), so under 20 amps. I can't imagine needing 400A supply without building a machine shop or something.
- kerbs 5y ago
  He said he plans a wood shop in the post

deleted 5y ago

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pengaru 5y ago

The house is obscene, but just because one has 400A service doesn't necessarily mean they're being inefficient in doing so. It could just be to handle momentary bursts, and the equipment drawing that power might actually be doing the job more efficiently than something that does it slower, drawing more power cumulatively over a longer period of time.

deleted 5y ago

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kccqzy 5y ago

I also did. Another ridiculous thing was that the article initially claimed no fossil fuels, but the one thing they couldn't live without was wood-burning fireplaces. I mean don't they both generate large amounts of carbon dioxide?

lazide 5y ago
Wood is not a fossil fuel unless you’re burning petrified wood or coal (and somehow calling that wood). Fossil fuels are from carbon sources taken out of the normal carbon cycle (aka buried generally)
- kccqzy 5y ago
  I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they? (This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
  - lazide 5y ago
    If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed. If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same. nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting. So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle. Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed. Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher. Does that help?

nkurz 5y ago

It strikes me as high too, but it's possible that he needed more than a 200A 240V main panel to meet code for his very large solar panel system. In the US (I don't know about Canada where the house is) there is a 120% rule, which limits the amount of electricity that the solar panel is allowed to feed into the panel: https://unboundsolar.com/blog/electrical-panel-requirements-for-solar https://unboundsolar.com/blog/electrical-panel-requirements-.... The idea is that you don't want more energy in the panel than the panel is designed to handle. Practically (if I understand it right) this means that the breaker for the solar panels is limited to 20% of the panel rating. A 200A 240V panel would limit you to a 40A 240V breaker, which (according to the link above) means a maximum of 7.6kW of backfeed solar. In the article, he says he has a 11.6kW solar array, which would require (if I'm calculating right) at least a 60A 240V breaker (maybe plus some required overcapacity?). Since this isn't allowed on a 200A panel, he may have needed to bump up to the next largest size of 400A unless he wanted to go smaller on the solar array. So while it sounds like overkill, it's possible there is more reason for it than just a desire to heat his wife's outdoor pool in the winter.

m463 5y ago
I investigated solar and generation requires appropriately sized circuits and capacity, even if the direction is the opposite. so 100A panel + 100A of solar requires a 200A panel A few other things that require high-amp service - on demand electric water heating, and electric car charging (and we're moving towards multiple vehicles). It's also worth mentioning that by far the largest cost of an electrical circuit is the labor, so sizing for 100A, 200A and 400A is not 1x, 2x, 4x. upgrading later is a huge cost.

sxates 5y ago

I had 400A installed at my house (all electric, solar, batteries, the works). It's still overkill. What's shocking to me isn't that they went with a 400a panel, that I can (and obviously did) justify. It's that it WASN'T ENOUGH and they had to add propane as well. I can't imagine what kind of pool heater they have that needs more than that. Cool house though.

JamesAdir 5y ago

Totally agree. I can't warp my head around the effect of this house in environmental impact including using cars all the time, disrupting local fauna and the energy costs.