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by lillecarl 89 days ago
We live on societies, switching from AC to DC because your low-power home appliances doesn't need AC makes no sense. Home power usage is dominated by heating and cooling not by your 45w laptop charger.

DC infrastucture makes sense in highly specialised environments.... Like new gigawatt AI farms

1 comments

Large home appliances probably mostly need DC power these days too. Look at clothes washers: they all have variable-speed reversing motors, so they're probably using brushless DC motors (which use motor drives that are fed with DC, and output variable-frequency and variable-amplitude sinusoidal waves to drive the motor). HVAC seems to be similar, with variable-speed motors and compressors.

I don't think that much stuff is left which actually needs AC power (usually to run an AC induction motor).

[HVAC] true for the fans and controllers but surely you wouldn't DC feed a compressor.
Aren't compressors these days usually variable-speed?