Most British people are aware that the national grid used to spend a lot of time making sure they had the power available to draw during the commercial breaks of mass-media TV events (series finales, half time in a cup match etc) purely for the nation boiling water with electric kettles en masse.
Great intersection of hard science (energy necessary to boil water + extremely efficient energy transfer) and everyperson knowledge. Good journalism!
Edit: I would love to see some sort of hybrid 110/220 V residential wiring/plug standard take hold in the US. It would require more expensive cable in the walls (since you need one additional conductor) and plugs, but it's totally doable. Most electrical products and appliances made these days are easily converted between 110/220, or run just fine on either.
Any sort of outlet upgrade would need a really good plan for how to make it viable, because even if 100% of new construction used the new outlet, it would be decades before you could sell devices that relied on it.
However, I doubt it'd pass inspection if they were easily accessible from the counter-top.
If you're going to flout building codes anyway, it'd probably be easier/more practical to just run circuits with foreign outlets instead. Also, it might be easier to find appropriate GFCI breakers.
Thanks!
I'm not sure about the phase alignment but that may be an issue as well. US is split phase, but Europe has 220 on a single conductor?
Also, I boil my water on an induction stove plugged into 50 amps at 220 volts. I'm not waiting around, to put it mildly.
That's only 7.35kW of power. Do you have significantly more powerful cookers?
If you don’t have these amounts of energy available, the temperature your instant water heater can reach or the speed with which you can cook obviously suffers (which I suspect is one of the reasons why americans prefer gas stoves so much).
You can have upgrade your domestic supply to three phrase, but AFAICT it's uncommon. Perhaps with electric cars and induction hobs replacing natural gas and petrol, it will become more common.
TL,DR: you probably don't want to be shocked by a big Tesla coil, even though it won't kill you.
Perhaps it's because all houses have residual current devices which trigger much faster than fuses if current leaks to earth (eg through a person).
Similarly, in most of continental Europe phase-to-phase is 400V but most outlets are 230V. E.g. in my apartment only the stove has a 400V three-phase (4-wire) connection.
You're almost always better off with higher voltage and less current, when given a choice. An obvious exception being when you get shocked. :-P Or when corona losses come into the picture.