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by samus
84 days ago
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Things like washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, air conditioners, or fridges spend a lot of energy by running powerful electrical motors, which should benefit from AC. Everything else I can think of in a typical household is basically a mere heater that in principle works equally well with AC and DC of the correct voltage. Even computers can be said to mostly care about the correct voltage since AC->DC conversion is vastly easier than voltage conversion. |
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No, they don't, not at all.
Most modern appliances have variable-speed motors these days. You can't do that by just connecting AC to a motor; you need a control board to generate the waveforms necessary to make the motor turn at the speed and direction you want. That control board has to be fed with DC power. (Source: I used to design BLDC motor control systems)
Only really simple appliances, like old-fashioned horribly-inefficient clothes dryers, still use AC induction motors, and those are mostly being phased out. (Bathroom fans also need AC; they're usually cheap synchronous reluctance motors.)
So it really doesn't matter much whether the incoming power is AC or DC these days, unless you have a bunch of ancient appliances that still use induction motors. If it's AC, it's going to be rectified and fed into a DC-to-DC converter to create the lower DC voltages needed. If it's a higher DC voltage, we can skip the rectification step and not worry much about ripple.