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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. ...

The British and their penchant for tea...

Tell someone how many watts/kWh/etc, and they'll maybe have an inclination of what that means to them. Tell them something in a way they can relate by referencing something they do multiple times in a day, then they can understand.

Doesn't seem like a mystery on why the reference was used.

It was a joke

Don't quit your day job

Did the British go with 240V because it makes tea faster? I don't know the history... but I want to believe.

Nice idea, but I believe it was due to lack of lawyers.

I think you mean 230V, but it was picked because it's more efficient and cheaper (you can use smaller wires for the same output).

But the size of those wall plugs tho...

They are mostly that size for safety. You can't electrocute yourself nearly as easily in the UK.

IMO they are not meaningfully larger than US plugs (I'm British, but have travelled to the US several times, as well as many other countries), but they are safer.

They're definitely much bigger. Look at a British power strip vs an American one. The same length but twice as many plugs on the American one.

They're definitely larger, but as I said in a sibling comment they're not directly a result of the higher voltage specifically.

German Schuko is also 230V and even safer (in countries that use it), yet still significantly smaller than British plugs.

Other European countries use ~230V as well and have smaller plugs than the UK.

The UK has fuses in their plugs, which if I recall correctly had something to do with copper shortage during the war constraining the electrical cabling for houses, but I don't want to accidentally put wrong information out, so better look it up yourself.

Well, yeah, but 300V allows smaller wires still, and 1000V even smaller, and so on. Hell, you could just wire distribution voltage straight to the socket, make the wires tiny, and eliminate the need for a zillion transformers! Of course, we don't do that for safety reasons, so the choice of socket voltage represents a compromise between safety and efficiency/power. The US and Britain made different tradeoffs, which probably means the constraints were slightly different. I could see "brews tea faster" as a significant factor in a country that once spent 10% of its GDP on tea. That would be a fun fact, if true. But maybe it isn't, and the whole thing is dumb luck and poor coordination around transformer tapping. Shrug.

The UK used to be 240V and many countries in Europe were 220V. The compromise was for everybody to use 230V

But what I've heard is that the voltages staid the same, but 240V is still within spec of 230V with tolerances.

I think it used to be 240V-ish (back then, IIRC they allowed larger fluctuations) but we slipped to 230V for compatibility with EU?

This corroborates that enough that I'm not checking their sources: https://www2.theiet.org/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=2... moved from 240±6% to 230 +10%/-6%.

They went with it because their Rock music sounds better:

"110v vs 220v amp tone" https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/110v-vs-...

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