Electrical Chat

 My wife (German in nature) and I got into a chat this week over a house around the corner, which is undergoing renovation.

The house built in the mid-1960s....is going to require a major electrical upgrade (top to bottom).  It's the first real renovation done since it was built.  

So the topic of electrical use came up.

If you walked into the typical 'new' house in 1968 in West Germany....the kitchen was likely the only room in  the house to have multiple plugs on the walls.  People still made coffee the old 'drip' way.  Other than the stove, and the refrigerator....there just weren't other appliances.

For the rest of the house?  There might have been one single outlet in the entry hallway, just for the use of the vacuum cleaner.  The bedroom?  Maybe just one to two outlets....with your clock likely to be a wind-up type.  The living room?  Maybe one to two outlets (one for a lamp, and the other for the TV or radio).  

I sat there counting the number of electrical items now in the house....the end-result being near forty-five items that need some type of connection (eight being rechargeable battery type).  

When our house was renovated twenty years ago....the massive addition of plugs was planned in the process.  

All of this leading to a higher consumption of power than thirty years ago?  No doubt.  There may be lesser power drawn upon the grid, but the number of devices increases year by year.