OT: Re: Audiophilia

I think you're probably right. I don't know whether your dryers are more energy-efficient than ours or what, but over here, that isn't enough power. A typical mains outlet circuit is rated 15A 115V, whereas a dryer is four times that: double the current and double the voltage (I just checked mine and the breaker is rated 30A, and it's fed both phases and thus is what we call a 230V circuit - sometimes called 220V or 240V, depending on whether you think of single-phase voltage as 110, 115, or 120 volts).

My stove has 40A breakers and it too uses both mains phases. I don't know to what extent the breakers are typically rated higher than they need to be; in my case, they are not overestimates at all. I just now tried each one, putting an ammeter on the wire and then turning the thing on, and in each case max draw was, within measurement error, equal to the rating of the breaker. Ah. Over here I would expect that to be wired in. I don't know whether the electrical code requires it or not (indeed, it might depend on jurisdiction; there's a lot of commonality aomng electrical codes, but there are differences, sometimes surprising differences). Yes, that does appear to be what West Pondian calls a `stove'. One of the things, rather, since the same word is sometimes used for a wood-burning device whose primary purpose is heating rooms, not food. (I suspect this is a historical artifact, a holdover from the days when room heat and cooking typically used the same thing.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B