Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

But that was not a "terrible poverty".

Most modern units here are double use.

Heat pumps depend on where you are at. I live in the middle of NC. My total power bill is less than $ 200 per month. Laet 3 bills were just under $ 140 per month.

The heat pump is about 12 years old. It does have the resistive heating strips for emergency heat and may come on during the defrost cycle.

They work well to about 30 deg F. Then below about 25 deg F the efficency goes to about what electric strip heaters would be. Here we do not normally have very many days below 25 deg.

I lived in a smaller house that was heated with natural gas about 15 years ago and the gas bill alone for heat and hot water was more than my total electric bill is now .Hate to see what the natural gas would cost now.

Hard to say. I live in Michigan. Last February's gas bill was $107 for heating, hot water, and cooking. Subtracting off a month in which there was no heating, I got about $70 for heating in the coldest month of the year.

This is a high-efficiency forced-air gas furnace installed in 2002.

OTOH, I spend a bundle in the summer on air-conditioning. A ground-loop heat pump might be worth it for the savings on cooling.

UK geology is sufficiently complicated that even the fracking experts think it is a lost cause (and that is before the Nimby's get started).

One Tory politician famously said in parliament that we (that is the UK) should "Frack the desolate North". s/ra/u an you won't be too far out.

Lucky you don't live next door to me. I have 19 parrots. I moved two to the garage and I can still hear them inside my house with all the windows closed! I think he's retarded. He wants my attention 100% of the time, yet he's not tame enough to let me pick him up.

Well yeah, I don't think any country has laws that stupid.

Somebody blocked my drive once. Fortunately for them they were nearby, and just as I was reversing my Range Rover into it, they ran over and moved it. She claimed she didn't know she was blocking me, since me and my next door neighbour have no fence between our drives, so we can drive round any obstruction. But she had visitors who were blocking hers!

Better than having incompetant fools trying to parallel park.

Me too. This is near here:

Oh, I agree the idea of a device-specific fuse right in the plug is a wonderful idea, along with insulating the part of the blade that's accessible if the plug isn't all the way inserted. I've seen a few occasions of that in the USA (fuses at least) but we're too cheap and lazy to do it universally.

Only the cat's head.

Air to air heat pumps obviously don't need that.

What is DHW? And whatever it is, why can't the heatpump do it?

I don't bother with stuff like that, I don't put safety first, and in the UK we don't have this dual voltage malarkey.

No, your computers were not fried. I've put 415V into 240V computers. You will have blown 1 or 2 50 cent bulk capacitors in the power supply. Of course I did claim on the builder's insurance for our 20 computers (at my place of work during electrical work on the building extension), new for old, then bought 20 50 cent capacitors. That'll teach them to confuse black neutral with black live since the EU invaded the UK and changed all the colours. Mmmm extra computer room.

A surge protector I'd fitted onto a projector I'd installed actually melted into a blob. I didn't bother claiming for that, they're a fiver.

Because it isn't dangerous, in fact it can be safer since you jump away from it.

But yours have double the current, so more fires.

Anyway, since you have those nancy boy GFIs, you might aswell have 5000V.

I made a typographical error, you f****it.

What's wrong with it? I assume you mean the EU plug which is similar to the UK plug, which is robust and sensible, unlike the stick two thin slivers of unshielded metal into a hole in the wall you get in the US. No wonder they think 240V is dangerous.

You have to add number 74 to the list of NEMA plug designs. In the UK we have two.

If your input is '120 degrees apart', it's two of three phases PLUS a wye-style neutral. Between two of three phases, there's only ONE well-defined phase, you need that neutral to define a second phase. If your utility runs three-phase through the neighborhood, it would tap two of three phases into the primary of a pole pig, and take a centertapped secondary for split phase, grounding the centertap at the delivery site (meter).

The law requires, among other things, some limits on how badly a power factor can be off of unity. The Twente study (2017) has guided the makers of meters and you can be assured that it's not applicable to the meters sold today.

Yeah, but your bill doesn't represent the worst-case that Twente study was looking at. The sampling of currents had a bandwidth issue that only mattered on really bad power-factor power use; most of your home's appliances aren't in that category (none of the recent designs are).

No it is not. It makes a lot more sense to have the device specific fuse in the device itself. That's why the whole of the rest of the world does it that way and now that so little is actually made in the UK anymore, there is no sense in having the fuse in the plug as well anymore.