OT: american vs european 220 (Tony Duell)

Are you sure? 16A 3 phase is only 11kW, 25A 18kW. I would expect 60A or 100A fuses. Back in the 1970s and '80s - oil expensive, gas not everywhere - there were a number of electric heating installations in the UK. You either had storage heaters (basically, lots of bricks with coils of nichrome wire running through them) or electric central heating - a tank of water with one or two 9.6kW immersion heaters, and radiators like any other central heating system. In the latter case, they would run two of the three phases to the house, and put one heater on each. Both immersion heaters came on during the off-peak period at night, and you could switch one of them on during the day (very expensively) if you needed extra heat. My parents' house (re-wired in 1978) has storage heaters. Lots of them. One winter we clocked the meter at 36kW during the brief period between the start of off peak and our bed time... If you haven't done the arithmetic in your heads already, that would have been 150A had we only a single phase supply. But we have three phases, with 100A fuses on the incomers. Incidentally, in some rural installations, only 2 phases of the 11kV circuit are taken to a remote village or farm. The local (usually pole mounted) transformer connects accross the two phases and gives 230V single phase, or, in very rare cases, 460V centre tapped to earth. Philip.