On Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 4:44 PM <e...@tucsonev.com> wrote: > Today, almost no homes receive 3 phase, it has to be requested by the home > owner and he has to have a valid reason for 3 phase. There is also an > upcharge for 3 phase installation, it also makes wiring the house much more > difficult and expensive because there are 2 systems since many of the > electrical appliances run on 1 phase only. And 3 phase is considered to be > more 'dangerous' than 1 phase.
Hi Rush, Are you talking about the situation in Europe? Let me tell you my experience how I converted a home to 3-phase without touching any wiring in the home itself, just the fuse box: Every home that I lived in, in The Netherlands as well as homes of family members, has ALWAYS been provided 3-phase (400V = 3x 230V) from the distribution transformer, through the street (there are no overhead wires since ~25 years ago) and into the meter closet. Default the meter installed is single phase and so all circuits in the home are single phase 230V. When I moved into a rental (!) single family home over 30 years ago, we brought an electric cooktop that, while possible to run from 2 single phase circuits, would ideally get 3-phase power to avoid the hassle and continuous cost of a larger grid connection, which means: changing the utility side fuse (next to the meter) from 25 to 35A so we could use the cooktop without crippling it. The cheapest option for me was to request the utility to swap the 25A single phase meter with 25A 3-phase. This was a one-time free, after which I had no additional charges and due to that, the landlord also had no issues with it. What I did (instructed by the engineer from the utility company) was to install an additional 3-fuse enclosure next to the 5-fuse box that was running the whole house, to pull 3-phase wiring from the outlet in the kitchen that I installed over the empty conduit (which is a common feature in the houses, since the walls are *concrete* so you need some flexibility to reach rooms with new wiring) to the metering closet (where ALL empty conduits as well as all wiring from all rooms terminates) and prepare the meter-side of the now 8 fuse circuits by dividing those in 3 groups with 3 wires capable of carrying 25A each and temporarily terminating them all on the single phase output of the meter so the whole house still had power. The next day the utility company came, pulled the 1-phase meter, plugged in the 3-phase meter (as I said, the 3-phase wiring is already present from the street up to the meter in the utility closet), they installed 2 additional 25A fuses in the utility side fuse box (not accessible by residents), measured the wiring that I installed for correct phase and Neutral locations on the kitchen outlet and powered the house back up now with 3 phase power. I did not touch any wiring and every room in the house still had the same 230V 16A power, fused utiliy side by 25A, only the kitchen now had the 400V 16A outlet that allowed us to cook without limits on how many burners we could turn on. hope this clarifies, Cor. _______________________________________________ Address messages to ev@lists.evdl.org No other addresses in TO and CC fields HELP: http://www.evdl.org/help/
