In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, electricity is not something one should take for granted, although it is more reliable than India. In recent months, I have installed a massive diesel electric generator for days when we go without power. But even when we had power, we were limited.
Our power supply was not enough for all of our computers and air conditioners and hot water heaters and water pumps. So every time I would have a shower during business hours, the fuse would blow and all our machines would start beeping, indicating they were on their UPS backups with minutes to live. We could not even use some of our rooms because we did not have the capacity to install air conditioning in them. I am sure this is pretty typical in the third world, but nonetheless, it was holding us back.
After about a year of effort, I finally got a higher capacity connection to the power mains. I am sure many of my gentle readers are wondering how such a simple thing could take so long. First of all, it took a long time to find someone who was willing to do the work. I also had to let go of my dream of having grounded power -- we still get mild electric shocks when we touch metal appliances without wearing rubber soled shoes. Then we needed approval from the government to use more power. Ultimately, we cut a few corners by paying a $600 "fee" to bring new higher capacity wiring into the house.
When we finally got power, we seem to have got really good power. As far as I can tell, we have our own personal power line running to our house, not shared by anyone around us, and running directly into a new main fuse and 3-phase 4 wire meter for the house providing 3 x 380/330 volts and 3 x 50/100 amps. And it is beautiful. All the other lines are a boring black. Ours consists of three additional thick lines, each as big as the single one we used to have, and in bright red, yellow, and blue, resulting in a total of four wires feeding us from the city mains. It looks like we have commercial grade three-phase wiring, which is more or less unheard of for residential purposes. As far as I can tell, everything just works now. All the computers are fine, the motors turn, and we can use as much power as we want and the fuse never blows.
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