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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

> The utility is in charge of taking the power from the grid and delivering 110/220V to end customers, i.e. homes and businesses.

Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services. There are some old existing 240/120V three-phase high-leg delta (aka bastard leg) delta services. [0] Delta-wye transformers are the most common type today, that’s where you get the 208/120 and 480/277 services from. [1]

Larger commercial/industrial customers can have their own medium/high voltage substations and premises wiring/distribution.

Medium voltage is 2.4kV to 70kV with 4160V and 13800V being the most common for commercial/industrial applications. High voltage is roughly 100kV to 1mV.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-leg_delta

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-wye_transformer

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> Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services.

Sorry to be pedantic, but define “business”. As someone who’s worked on many job sites doing commercial electrical work, it’s not as common as you imply that there’s three phase service running to a business. Do a lot have it, yes, most, no. Literally everything else you said I’m aligned with.

Basically just factories yah? And like large hotels. Your random strip mall business is very happy with a standard 200 amp 240V service.

It's more than just factories and large hotels by far, but still not "most" businesses (which implies greater than 50%).

I sell and run commercial electrical work and I can think of maybe a handful of places I’ve sent electricians that have a single phase service. I live in a large metro area of 4M people, virtually every commercial building over 4-5k sq ft has a three-phase service where I live. Banks, fast food restaurants, gas stations, etc.

What sorts of commercial projects have you worked on that don’t have three phase electrical that are located on commercial or industrial zoned property? Virtually every single multitenant office or light commercial building I’ve ever been in has three-phase.

I guess you could count Jeff’s welding shop in his pole building on his residential property a business, but it’s not commercially zoned property.

I’m skeptical about your claim, I’d wager that more commercial/industrial zoned properties have three-phase than not, based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of customers.

Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.

> Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.

Ding ding ding... so are they businesses or not? I didn't comment on whether you could make money as an electrician on them, but to imply the hundreds of thousands of businesses like what you just described above aren't _businesses_ especially considering they are on commercially zoned property is just silly.

> Sorry to be pedantic

Why apologize. You're in the right place for pedantry ;)

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