ElectroBOOM posted a new video where he tries to find a 240V hookup in his house. He ends up plugging a hair dryer into an electric stovetop that's tapped into the 240V line after removing the heating element and turning on the stove. Sooo... @Rob43, can I get you to build an electric stovetop to EVSE adapter?
Quite funny, though I didn't know that some apartments units branched off 3-phase, putting different plugs of the same 120V outlet on different phases.
OMG! And I thought our household is eccentric. Mrs. Bear's family used to live in Switzerland and had a heavy transformer to step-down European 240-volt power to use with their U.S. 120-volt appliances. When they returned to the U.S., the transformer could be used backwards so that it would step-up U.S. voltage to power their 240-volt appliances. Mrs. Bear still has her mother's 240-volt Swiss raclette maker which is a device used to melt partial wheels of cheese for use in a very traditional Swiss meal. For many years, she used the transformer, but it was a chore to tote the thing from it's storage location -- and it was far from elegant when hosting a raclette dinner party. When we remodeled our kitchen, I added a 240-volt European-style outlet with GFCI to our island counter. International Configurations in Enfield, Connecticut sells this wiring device which is designed to fit into a standard U.S. 4x4 double-gang outlet box: Given the cost of the outlet and related wiring, we're going to have to host a lot more raclette parties to break-even compared with the cost of just buying a new 120-volt raclette maker. But it's fun to be able to use the "family heirloom" appliance (with all its related stories of dinner parties in the Alps) and it's cool to have a European outlet in the kitchen.
That reminds me of my years as an industrial electrician in Ohio. We'd have these big Christmas potluck dinners and the electricians would bring out one of our big 480/120 transformers so people could plug in all the crock pots. One gal was pretty gullible. I had her convinced that she needed to plug in the crockpots the right way or the food would get chilled rather than warmed.
That's what happens when you plug things in backwards. You reverse the polarity and now it's a cooling pot.
Yup. I plugged my old analog alarm clock in backwards once. I woke up when the alarm went off (on old analog alarm clocks it just trips when the hand passes the red alarm stop - doesn't matter which direction the gears go), went to work and met myself the previous day. Took days to figure that one out. Luckily, these days the spade on one side of the plug and outlet is wider, so that doesn't happen anymore.
Gives new meaning to the term "D.C. Comics." Of course, those pesky Europeans settled on 50hz as their alternating current standard rather than the U.S. 60hz standard. The result is that synchronous motors -- like in clocks and audio turntables -- made for the U.S. will run slower if one attempts to use them in Europe even with a voltage step-down transformer. Some stereo equipment like tape decks and turntables can be adapted by replacing a capstan or a belt drive pulley. Just one of the petty annoyances of international living. In the mid-1980s, Mrs. Bear and I acquired a digital audio tape deck while on a trip to Japan. (DAT was an amazing recording medium before the advent of CD-R disks and other digital media.) The helpful salesperson in Tokyo's Akiabara electronics district was smart enough to provide us with a small 120-volt to 100-volt step-down transformer to allow the hardware, made for Japan's 100-volt household voltage, to function without damage when plugged into our 120-volt U.S. outlets. Genesis 11:1-8 tells the biblical story of the Tower of Babel without once mentioning the electricians involved in the project. C'est la vie.
Another little thing to watch out for with international electricity: When I was in Honduras, our voltage was all over the place. Radio equipment can sometimes be touchy about that stuff. The previous engineer was enamored of all things European, so he got a line conditioner from there for our 240V 2kW AM transmitter. I discovered its European origins one day when, in the process of doing some troubleshooting, I noticed that the circuit breaker built into the line conditioner only opened one leg of the power since in Europe it's 240V from neutral. Ours is 240V leg-to-leg and 120 from neutral. So, if someone had flipped that breaker thinking they were shutting off the power, they could have been rudely surprised. I changed out the breaker to a 2-pole one. Thankfully, the "neutral" was not connected to the line conditioner's frame or case. But I suppose if it had been connected the engineer who installed it would have found out about it pretty quickly in a scene that would have fit right in with the video that started this thread.
*I hear some electric hissing and arcs* <water dripping onto exposed wiring causing short> ElectroBOOM reminds me of my formative experiences with electrical systems.
