Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at
11:51:44 on Sat, 4 Apr 2015, remarked:
They're more common than reported. We had one round the corner a few
months back in a suburban street. One theory is that the profusion of
electrical gadgets in homes, computer system in offices etc, are
overloading the cables, that in many cases are often old and cannot take the
current fluctuations.
And people seriously expect to be able to charge up more than a trivial
number of electric cars, on top of all that lot???
Not many people -- sales of pure EVs are still derisory. It's more a case
of the government and certain car companies pushing them at us. Also, I
think the expectation is that EVs would be charging mainly in the off-peak.
There's certainly a lot more gadgets in use, but I don't see why
fluctuations would stress cables. In any case, many of those devices are
drawing a tiny current when they're "off", waiting to be turned on with a
remote control, or charging phone/tablet batteries. Surely that load is
less than the electric heating load that used to be common before most
people switched to gas?