8 ms·

History of the Italian electrical system

lxgr 2y ago
> grids were owned by many small regional power companies; thus, voltages and frequencies (42Hz was quite common) could vary a lot between each other It always amazes me that some countries are still operating on multiple mains voltages and/or frequencies while sharing a common plug standard, such as Brazil or notably Japan (where the 50/60 Hz division apparently runs through a densely populated area)! Fortunately most devices I bring with me when traveling don't care and adapt to whatever, but being able to plug a 110 V hairdryer into a 230 V outlet without any form of adapter sounds scary.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  A difference in frequency is much less of an issue than a difference in voltage, I would have thought. Especially as 50 and 60Hz are fairly close to each other. The only big problems I can think of are devices that use the frequency as a reference, such as motors and clocks. But even then, they wouldn’t break, they’d just run at the wrong speed.
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    > The only big problems I can think of are devices that use the frequency as a reference, such as motors and clocks. This was my March mindfuck: That there are periods every couple weeks when the WHOLE ELECTRICITY GRID of a country is run with higher/lower frequency for a period of time to get your Chinese oven clocks back into sync.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Long-term grid frequency stability is something you take for granted, until it suddenly fails, like in most of Europe back in 2018, due to a political disagreement between Serbia and Kosovo: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N1QP2FF/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N1QP2FF/ I also find it quite funny that our cheap oven clock is probably among the most precise (non-internet connected) ones in our apartment :)
      - Scoundreller 2y ago
        WWVB de-rating has got us all a bit down in North America. Lots of consumer level “atomic clock accuracy” devices just don’t update any more. https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/wwvb-operating-with-reduced-power.5564472/ https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/wwvb-operating-with-reduc...
        toomuchtodo 2y ago
        It’s a shame there aren’t more time tower sites broadcasting in a distributed manner for redundancy.
        Taniwha 2y ago
        Noted my car got time from GPS the other day and it got me thinking, why aren't there unencrypted packets on all wifi that distribute NTP time so my oven/microwave/alarm/etc can grab it from any wifi it can see (even if it's not paired to them) - bonus points if APs also hand out local TZ data
        joha4270 2y ago
        Phone networks can already do this. And its true broadcast, you can decode it passively without ever connecting to the network, so no SIM/transmission required. I have no idea this is actually enabled in networks in practice, but the specification exists.
        cesarb 2y ago
        And in my experience, it's often wrong on some towers. I can't enable the setting on my phone to automatically set the time from the network, because if I do, it gets several minutes out of sync with the real time, which breaks TOTP generation.
        lxgr 2y ago
        Yeah, a large German cell provider had their time off by a couple of minutes some years back, which made the news as it resulted in people's alarms ringing late and them being late to work/school etc. Hopefully modern phones prioritize GPS or NTP derived time and timezone information over NITZ (which is how networks provide it). At least Android has the capability to do so, but it's ultimately up to device manufacturers, as far as I understand [1]. [1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/time https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/time
    - AdamH12113 2y ago
      It's surprisingly hard to keep a clock accurate over time. Typical crystal oscillators can gain or lose seconds per day. If you want to do better than that, you either need internet access (for NTP), a radio receiver of some kind (for atomic clock broadcasts, GPS, etc.), or a significantly more expensive oscillator. Having a frequency reference with perfect long-term accuracy that any electrically-powered clock can use for free is pretty convenient! I've often wondered how hard it would be to make portable battery-powered clocks use 60 Hz noise as a timekeeping source. Maybe I should make a project out of it.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
        > Typical crystal oscillators can gain or lose seconds per day. Are you sure? I only owned a quartz watch when I was a kid, but all sources I find on the web say even the lowest quality quartz watch movements are accurate to +- 20-30 seconds a month. For comparison: my several decades old manual Poljot loses some seconds per day.
        AdamH12113 2y ago
        The Casio G-Shock I got in the 90s was ~66 ppm fast, which worked out to ~5 seconds/day. There are cheap crystals on Digi-Key with ~10 ppm accuracy, which is around 0.86 seconds/day. But crystals drift with age (and a tiny bit with temperature). Perhaps watches have improved since I last looked, but I would want to measure the actual real-world accuracy before believing anything better than 1 second/day.
        crote 2y ago
        Yeah, that sounds about right. Crystal oscillators typically have an accuracy of about 20ppm, which is 1.73 seconds per day. Keep in mind that those number are a guaranteed worst-case performance - real-world performance is often much better.
      - agos 2y ago
        how more expensive is a "more expensive" oscillator?
    - Taniwha 2y ago
      There used to be a local hydro generation that fed the local city, they had 2 clocks on the wall, one on the local grid and one on the national one - some time late at night they'd speed up/slow down the local grid to keep the clocks in sync
  - pezezin 2y ago
    A difference in frequency is not that big of a problem... except for the fact that you can't easily transfer power across the two grids. Japan has some power conversion stations, but when the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 knocked off several powerplants in the 50 Hz half of the country (including Fukushima), they could not transfer enough power from the other side, and the suffered many blackouts, even though the 60 Hz half of the country had power to spare.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      > A difference in frequency is not that big of a problem... except for the fact that you can't easily transfer power across the two grids. And for everything, which uses the frequency as a clock.
      - pezezin 2y ago
        True. Nowadays it is not a problem, but it makes me wonder how they could make 60 Hz television run on a 50 Hz grid.
        lxgr 2y ago
        I've been wondering that too recently, and apparently it wasn't that big of a deal [1] – more recent analog TVs weren't that susceptible to mains interference of the sort that benefited from being synchronized to the frame rate. In other words, the mains frequency was never used as a frequency source for TVs, and the apparent frequency match was only to make interference patterns not wander around the screen. [1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/164249/is-the-design-decision-for-different-frequencies-in-pal-and-ntsc-related-to-the https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/164249/is-th...
  - lxgr 2y ago
    A motor running at 20% higher/16% lower speeds might break some things, I could imagine?
    - quickthrowman 2y ago
      If the motor is designed for it, then no. Many motors these days are built to handle variable frequencies on account of VFDs A variable-frequency drive is a motor controller that adjusts the frequency of the power delivered to a motor to speed it up or slow it down. It could possibly damage a motor that isn’t designed for use with a VFD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-frequency_drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-frequency_drive
- mateus1 2y ago
  Here in Brazil we have voltages in different regions but we also have different voltages inside the home. My washer has its separate 220v circuit while the rest of the home is 110v.
  - coryrc 2y ago
    Didn't know that was done outside north America.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - lxgr 2y ago
    As far as I know that’s usually a split-phase system: You get 110V between either phase and neutral, and 220V between the phases. In a three-phase system (like the ones used in most of Europe), that effect isn’t as pronounced since you usually have at most 120 degrees phase difference instead of 180 and the voltage between two phases is less than double, so less appliances make use of that (I think some stoves do).
    - cesarb 2y ago
      > As far as I know that’s usually a split-phase system: You get 110V between either phase and neutral, and 220V between the phases. We Brazilians tend to call it "110V", but it's often a three-phase system with 127V between phase and neutral and 220V between phases. Or sometimes it's 115V from phase to neutral and 230V from phase to phase (probably a split-phase system like you said). And in that case, us Brazilians would still call the lower voltage "110V", and the higher voltage "220V". You can't trust a Brazilian when they say the voltage is "110V" or "220V". These numbers are only an approximation, which might have been correct for some places a century or two ago. And yes, it's a mess. Check the official list at https://www2.aneel.gov.br/aplicacoes/srd/frmConcessionaria.cfm https://www2.aneel.gov.br/aplicacoes/srd/frmConcessionaria.c... (link found at https://www.gov.br/aneel/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudos/relatorios-e-indicadores/distribuicao https://www.gov.br/aneel/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudos/relator...), which shows which voltages can be found in each city for the whole country. For instance, take a look at the city of São Paulo in the state of São Paulo (yes, it's the same name for the state and its capital city, this is also the case for Rio de Janeiro): - 115V / 230V - 120V / 208V - 127V / 220V - 220V / 380V - 220V / 440V A Brazilian would say "110V" for all these lower voltages between 115V and 127V, and would say "220V" for all these voltages between 208V and 230V. At least the frequency is always 60Hz (unlike the rest of South America, which uses 50Hz; we have to use HVDC links when importing or exporting electricity to the neighboring countries).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
john01dav 2y ago
This is a very interesting topic to me for some reason. I'd enjoy a website full of such explanations for a huge list of countries (I see that this website has some similar things.). Also, I have found myself passively curious before about how far back you could go and find an outlet that you could plug a modern device into and have it work as expected.
- avidiax 2y ago
  Seems like a regular US lightbulb would have worked in 1881: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw And ungrounded US sockets could have worked in the 1910's: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm3.html https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm3.html Definitely give the rest of PlugMuseum a look. There's tons of info there.
GaggiX 2y ago
The article is very comprehensive, and it even reports the rare biphase that some districts in Rome have, the only reason I know it is because many solar inverters works with this biphase, it can cause problems with car chargers (as the article reports) but also to some gas boilers that are very common in Italy.
Arrath 2y ago
This is unreasonably interesting to me. Very neat old trivia. Did other regions do the separate circuits/billing rates thing for lighting vs appliances? That was entirely new to me!
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
There is DC utility service in SF, lagging NYC which decommissioned it in 2007. https://spectrum.ieee.org/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid https://spectrum.ieee.org/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid http://www.jaygarmon.net/2010/11/in-what-year-did-last-of-new-yorks-dc.html http://www.jaygarmon.net/2010/11/in-what-year-did-last-of-ne...
- gumby 2y ago
  DC “service” is run as a special tariff (for legacy elevators) and is actually provided by an on-site DC rectifier of some sort attached by PG&E to AC service. I’m not really sure why it is tariffed and why the building doesn’t simply buy the equipment.
  - flyinghamster 2y ago
    There were some buildings in downtown Chicago that had DC service even to the wall sockets. My grandfather had an office in such a building in the 1950s and had to make sure that any equipment (desk fans, radios, etc.) could run on DC.
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    Congratulations, you also read the IEEE article. At one point, it wasn't. The problems are cost and value. Building owners probably can't afford to switch over or don't want to spend the money without getting something of value out of it.
davidw 2y ago
Those Type L plugs are pretty convenient for things like power strips where you want to plug in several things on the same strip. Schuko plugs are big and clunky and take up a lot of space, making for longer, bulkier power strips.
- mariuolo 2y ago
  A problem arises when Schuko and Type L are used promiscuously in multi-standard sockets, since the former has slightly thicker prongs and it tends to loosen the contacts inside. But then I suppose Europlug suffers from the same problem when used in CEE 7 type sockets.
dreamcompiler 2y ago
As an American I find it difficult to buy power adaptors for travel to Italy. You can buy them in the US but once you're in Italy you discover they don't fit about half the outlets. The best solution is to visit a hardware store in Italy and buy some adapters and power strips. These usually work.
- graton 2y ago
  From what I have read Italy uses a mixture of Type C, Type F, and Type L. Ouch! And when I went to Italy I also stopped in a store to buy an adapter when my Europe adapter didn't work.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    Type C plugs are compatible with both Type F and Type L sockets, it's just a more compact plug for when you have no need for ground. There are no Type C sockets. So it's a mix of type F and Type L. Modern homes typically use combo sockets that accept both, or two sockets (one of each type) side by side in at least some of the fixtures. Italy uses a very cool modular system for electrical fixtures[1] which makes it easy to combine multiple plugs, or plugs and switches as well. For those appliances that need to move a lot around the home (e.g., vacuum cleaners) to places where there could be no type F socket installed, you keep an F->L adaptor on the plug and basically never use it elsewhere. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=frutto+bticino+living+now https://www.google.com/search?q=frutto+bticino+living+now
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - N19PEDL2 2y ago
    Basically you can find 3 types of outlet in Italy: - Type L 10A-only: can fit Type L 10A and Type C [0] - Bipasso: can fit Type L (both 10A and 16A) and Type C [1, left] - Bipasso + Schuko: can fit Type L (both 10A and 16A), Type C and Type F (and even type E, but without earthing) [1, right]. Edit: added pictures. [0] https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity-type-L-socket-single-199x300.jpg https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity... [1] https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity-type-L-bipasso-socket-300x223.jpg https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity...
usr1106 2y ago
Slightly (un)related also railways in Northern Italy used biphase supply until the 1970s. There is a nice Youtube video, let's see whether I remember to dig out the link a bit later and edit this comment.
- usr1106 2y ago
  Sorry, I forgot. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/QnUgsd1SiT4 https://youtu.be/QnUgsd1SiT4
undebuggable 2y ago
My personal experience is that when you go to US or UK you need an adapter. When you go to Italy you need a lot of adapters.
mdrzn 2y ago
TIL why we have the Bipasso sockets! And why I have to bestemmiare a lot whenever I have to purchase a multipresa ciabatta. Thanks for sharing.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
What’s exactly the deal with Brazil’s multitude of standards?
mercurialuser 2y ago
I live in that part of Rome where we have 2 phases and no neutral. I discovered being electrocuted and I could not understand why. Fortunately heat pumps, "stupid" car chargers and other appliances work with no problems. But an installer told me that I could have had problems with smart car chargers and he refused to do the work. Also Shelleys seem to work.

lxgr 2y ago

> grids were owned by many small regional power companies; thus, voltages and frequencies (42Hz was quite common) could vary a lot between each other It always amazes me that some countries are still operating on multiple mains voltages and/or frequencies while sharing a common plug standard, such as Brazil or notably Japan (where the 50/60 Hz division apparently runs through a densely populated area)! Fortunately most devices I bring with me when traveling don't care and adapt to whatever, but being able to plug a 110 V hairdryer into a 230 V outlet without any form of adapter sounds scary.

LeoPanthera 2y ago
A difference in frequency is much less of an issue than a difference in voltage, I would have thought. Especially as 50 and 60Hz are fairly close to each other. The only big problems I can think of are devices that use the frequency as a reference, such as motors and clocks. But even then, they wouldn’t break, they’d just run at the wrong speed.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > The only big problems I can think of are devices that use the frequency as a reference, such as motors and clocks. This was my March mindfuck: That there are periods every couple weeks when the WHOLE ELECTRICITY GRID of a country is run with higher/lower frequency for a period of time to get your Chinese oven clocks back into sync.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Long-term grid frequency stability is something you take for granted, until it suddenly fails, like in most of Europe back in 2018, due to a political disagreement between Serbia and Kosovo: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N1QP2FF/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N1QP2FF/ I also find it quite funny that our cheap oven clock is probably among the most precise (non-internet connected) ones in our apartment :)
    - Scoundreller 2y ago
      WWVB de-rating has got us all a bit down in North America. Lots of consumer level “atomic clock accuracy” devices just don’t update any more. https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/wwvb-operating-with-reduced-power.5564472/ https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/wwvb-operating-with-reduc...
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        It’s a shame there aren’t more time tower sites broadcasting in a distributed manner for redundancy.
        Taniwha 2y ago
        Noted my car got time from GPS the other day and it got me thinking, why aren't there unencrypted packets on all wifi that distribute NTP time so my oven/microwave/alarm/etc can grab it from any wifi it can see (even if it's not paired to them) - bonus points if APs also hand out local TZ data
        joha4270 2y ago
        Phone networks can already do this. And its true broadcast, you can decode it passively without ever connecting to the network, so no SIM/transmission required. I have no idea this is actually enabled in networks in practice, but the specification exists.
        cesarb 2y ago
        And in my experience, it's often wrong on some towers. I can't enable the setting on my phone to automatically set the time from the network, because if I do, it gets several minutes out of sync with the real time, which breaks TOTP generation.
        lxgr 2y ago
        Yeah, a large German cell provider had their time off by a couple of minutes some years back, which made the news as it resulted in people's alarms ringing late and them being late to work/school etc. Hopefully modern phones prioritize GPS or NTP derived time and timezone information over NITZ (which is how networks provide it). At least Android has the capability to do so, but it's ultimately up to device manufacturers, as far as I understand [1]. [1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/time https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/time
  - AdamH12113 2y ago
    It's surprisingly hard to keep a clock accurate over time. Typical crystal oscillators can gain or lose seconds per day. If you want to do better than that, you either need internet access (for NTP), a radio receiver of some kind (for atomic clock broadcasts, GPS, etc.), or a significantly more expensive oscillator. Having a frequency reference with perfect long-term accuracy that any electrically-powered clock can use for free is pretty convenient! I've often wondered how hard it would be to make portable battery-powered clocks use 60 Hz noise as a timekeeping source. Maybe I should make a project out of it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      > Typical crystal oscillators can gain or lose seconds per day. Are you sure? I only owned a quartz watch when I was a kid, but all sources I find on the web say even the lowest quality quartz watch movements are accurate to +- 20-30 seconds a month. For comparison: my several decades old manual Poljot loses some seconds per day.
      - AdamH12113 2y ago
        The Casio G-Shock I got in the 90s was ~66 ppm fast, which worked out to ~5 seconds/day. There are cheap crystals on Digi-Key with ~10 ppm accuracy, which is around 0.86 seconds/day. But crystals drift with age (and a tiny bit with temperature). Perhaps watches have improved since I last looked, but I would want to measure the actual real-world accuracy before believing anything better than 1 second/day.
      - crote 2y ago
        Yeah, that sounds about right. Crystal oscillators typically have an accuracy of about 20ppm, which is 1.73 seconds per day. Keep in mind that those number are a guaranteed worst-case performance - real-world performance is often much better.
    - agos 2y ago
      how more expensive is a "more expensive" oscillator?
  - Taniwha 2y ago
    There used to be a local hydro generation that fed the local city, they had 2 clocks on the wall, one on the local grid and one on the national one - some time late at night they'd speed up/slow down the local grid to keep the clocks in sync
- pezezin 2y ago
  A difference in frequency is not that big of a problem... except for the fact that you can't easily transfer power across the two grids. Japan has some power conversion stations, but when the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 knocked off several powerplants in the 50 Hz half of the country (including Fukushima), they could not transfer enough power from the other side, and the suffered many blackouts, even though the 60 Hz half of the country had power to spare.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    > A difference in frequency is not that big of a problem... except for the fact that you can't easily transfer power across the two grids. And for everything, which uses the frequency as a clock.
    - pezezin 2y ago
      True. Nowadays it is not a problem, but it makes me wonder how they could make 60 Hz television run on a 50 Hz grid.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        I've been wondering that too recently, and apparently it wasn't that big of a deal [1] – more recent analog TVs weren't that susceptible to mains interference of the sort that benefited from being synchronized to the frame rate. In other words, the mains frequency was never used as a frequency source for TVs, and the apparent frequency match was only to make interference patterns not wander around the screen. [1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/164249/is-the-design-decision-for-different-frequencies-in-pal-and-ntsc-related-to-the https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/164249/is-th...
- lxgr 2y ago
  A motor running at 20% higher/16% lower speeds might break some things, I could imagine?
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    If the motor is designed for it, then no. Many motors these days are built to handle variable frequencies on account of VFDs A variable-frequency drive is a motor controller that adjusts the frequency of the power delivered to a motor to speed it up or slow it down. It could possibly damage a motor that isn’t designed for use with a VFD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-frequency_drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-frequency_drive
mateus1 2y ago
Here in Brazil we have voltages in different regions but we also have different voltages inside the home. My washer has its separate 220v circuit while the rest of the home is 110v.
- coryrc 2y ago
  Didn't know that was done outside north America.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- lxgr 2y ago
  As far as I know that’s usually a split-phase system: You get 110V between either phase and neutral, and 220V between the phases. In a three-phase system (like the ones used in most of Europe), that effect isn’t as pronounced since you usually have at most 120 degrees phase difference instead of 180 and the voltage between two phases is less than double, so less appliances make use of that (I think some stoves do).
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > As far as I know that’s usually a split-phase system: You get 110V between either phase and neutral, and 220V between the phases. We Brazilians tend to call it "110V", but it's often a three-phase system with 127V between phase and neutral and 220V between phases. Or sometimes it's 115V from phase to neutral and 230V from phase to phase (probably a split-phase system like you said). And in that case, us Brazilians would still call the lower voltage "110V", and the higher voltage "220V". You can't trust a Brazilian when they say the voltage is "110V" or "220V". These numbers are only an approximation, which might have been correct for some places a century or two ago. And yes, it's a mess. Check the official list at https://www2.aneel.gov.br/aplicacoes/srd/frmConcessionaria.cfm https://www2.aneel.gov.br/aplicacoes/srd/frmConcessionaria.c... (link found at https://www.gov.br/aneel/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudos/relatorios-e-indicadores/distribuicao https://www.gov.br/aneel/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudos/relator...), which shows which voltages can be found in each city for the whole country. For instance, take a look at the city of São Paulo in the state of São Paulo (yes, it's the same name for the state and its capital city, this is also the case for Rio de Janeiro): - 115V / 230V - 120V / 208V - 127V / 220V - 220V / 380V - 220V / 440V A Brazilian would say "110V" for all these lower voltages between 115V and 127V, and would say "220V" for all these voltages between 208V and 230V. At least the frequency is always 60Hz (unlike the rest of South America, which uses 50Hz; we have to use HVDC links when importing or exporting electricity to the neighboring countries).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

john01dav 2y ago

This is a very interesting topic to me for some reason. I'd enjoy a website full of such explanations for a huge list of countries (I see that this website has some similar things.). Also, I have found myself passively curious before about how far back you could go and find an outlet that you could plug a modern device into and have it work as expected.

avidiax 2y ago
Seems like a regular US lightbulb would have worked in 1881: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw And ungrounded US sockets could have worked in the 1910's: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm3.html https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm3.html Definitely give the rest of PlugMuseum a look. There's tons of info there.

GaggiX 2y ago

The article is very comprehensive, and it even reports the rare biphase that some districts in Rome have, the only reason I know it is because many solar inverters works with this biphase, it can cause problems with car chargers (as the article reports) but also to some gas boilers that are very common in Italy.

Arrath 2y ago

This is unreasonably interesting to me. Very neat old trivia. Did other regions do the separate circuits/billing rates thing for lighting vs appliances? That was entirely new to me!

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

There is DC utility service in SF, lagging NYC which decommissioned it in 2007. https://spectrum.ieee.org/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid https://spectrum.ieee.org/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid http://www.jaygarmon.net/2010/11/in-what-year-did-last-of-new-yorks-dc.html http://www.jaygarmon.net/2010/11/in-what-year-did-last-of-ne...

gumby 2y ago
DC “service” is run as a special tariff (for legacy elevators) and is actually provided by an on-site DC rectifier of some sort attached by PG&E to AC service. I’m not really sure why it is tariffed and why the building doesn’t simply buy the equipment.
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  There were some buildings in downtown Chicago that had DC service even to the wall sockets. My grandfather had an office in such a building in the 1950s and had to make sure that any equipment (desk fans, radios, etc.) could run on DC.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Congratulations, you also read the IEEE article. At one point, it wasn't. The problems are cost and value. Building owners probably can't afford to switch over or don't want to spend the money without getting something of value out of it.

davidw 2y ago

Those Type L plugs are pretty convenient for things like power strips where you want to plug in several things on the same strip. Schuko plugs are big and clunky and take up a lot of space, making for longer, bulkier power strips.

mariuolo 2y ago
A problem arises when Schuko and Type L are used promiscuously in multi-standard sockets, since the former has slightly thicker prongs and it tends to loosen the contacts inside. But then I suppose Europlug suffers from the same problem when used in CEE 7 type sockets.

dreamcompiler 2y ago

As an American I find it difficult to buy power adaptors for travel to Italy. You can buy them in the US but once you're in Italy you discover they don't fit about half the outlets. The best solution is to visit a hardware store in Italy and buy some adapters and power strips. These usually work.

graton 2y ago
From what I have read Italy uses a mixture of Type C, Type F, and Type L. Ouch! And when I went to Italy I also stopped in a store to buy an adapter when my Europe adapter didn't work.
- bonzini 2y ago
  Type C plugs are compatible with both Type F and Type L sockets, it's just a more compact plug for when you have no need for ground. There are no Type C sockets. So it's a mix of type F and Type L. Modern homes typically use combo sockets that accept both, or two sockets (one of each type) side by side in at least some of the fixtures. Italy uses a very cool modular system for electrical fixtures[1] which makes it easy to combine multiple plugs, or plugs and switches as well. For those appliances that need to move a lot around the home (e.g., vacuum cleaners) to places where there could be no type F socket installed, you keep an F->L adaptor on the plug and basically never use it elsewhere. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=frutto+bticino+living+now https://www.google.com/search?q=frutto+bticino+living+now
  - deleted 2y ago
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- N19PEDL2 2y ago
  Basically you can find 3 types of outlet in Italy: - Type L 10A-only: can fit Type L 10A and Type C [0] - Bipasso: can fit Type L (both 10A and 16A) and Type C [1, left] - Bipasso + Schuko: can fit Type L (both 10A and 16A), Type C and Type F (and even type E, but without earthing) [1, right]. Edit: added pictures. [0] https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity-type-L-socket-single-199x300.jpg https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity... [1] https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity-type-L-bipasso-socket-300x223.jpg https://www.worldstandards.eu/wp-content/uploads/electricity...

usr1106 2y ago

Slightly (un)related also railways in Northern Italy used biphase supply until the 1970s. There is a nice Youtube video, let's see whether I remember to dig out the link a bit later and edit this comment.

usr1106 2y ago
Sorry, I forgot. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/QnUgsd1SiT4 https://youtu.be/QnUgsd1SiT4

undebuggable 2y ago

My personal experience is that when you go to US or UK you need an adapter. When you go to Italy you need a lot of adapters.

mdrzn 2y ago

TIL why we have the Bipasso sockets! And why I have to bestemmiare a lot whenever I have to purchase a multipresa ciabatta. Thanks for sharing.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

What’s exactly the deal with Brazil’s multitude of standards?

mercurialuser 2y ago

I live in that part of Rome where we have 2 phases and no neutral. I discovered being electrocuted and I could not understand why. Fortunately heat pumps, "stupid" car chargers and other appliances work with no problems. But an installer told me that I could have had problems with smart car chargers and he refused to do the work. Also Shelleys seem to work.