I can fully see the point about not bothering with the washing machine if you do not have water.

In my case of course being East Yorkshire, there was no shortage of water,  both mains for drinks and collected rainwater, much softer, for hair washing.

Oddly my great grandparents, maternal, who I never met, were already in their 60s when mains water came to their farm, in the late 1940s, and having used  their own well and pump forever, they could see no use for it. But the man from Yorkshire Water insisted, and in the end as a compromise, to get rid of him,  the lead pipe and a single tap was tolerated as far as  the pantry. However, apparently it did not see much use until after their deaths in the early 1960s. (and they lived most of their lives pre NHS as well)

Parts of the UK were not well served not that many decades ago, even some town councils provided bucket collection sanitation into the 1960s and 70s. We quickly take the latest miracles for granted, but the other side is that when modernisation occurs, it happens at a cracking pace and the transient halfway house solutions do not reign for long.

Mike

The elephant in the room is why are some countries so far behind?

Great set of questions. 

There is of course a difference between what people need (and what they say they need and what others say they need) and what they want.

What people everywhere need is (a) adequate and safe water; (b) adequately nutritious and safe food; c) a certain level of primary health care. Electricity is an energy source. The question is how energy can contribute to (a), (b) and c) (I don't write the left bracket because the phrase is turned into a copyright sign. An partial answer is that (b) and c) do depend on local cooling below ambient temperature, and this is currently only achievable through using energy. That may well be true of (a) also; I don't know. 

But (b) also depends upon social interactions that are facilitated through communication and indeed commerce. Commerce is now possible through the introduction of cell-phone payment systems; and through the communication which makes remote negotiation with remote suppliers possible. If it takes two days to reach you, you can only get enough safe meat and veg if you can negotiate it remotely and have it delivered once a week, say, in a truck. The truck uses energy, and some of that can be used for cooling; but when it gets to you you need to cool it for the next week until the next shipment arrives. 

Such distribution systems are likely the only way people can avoid the pervasive use of bushmeat and thereby exposure to zoonotic disease such as Ebola, and whatever is coming down the pike ahead of us.

But then there is the question of the resilience of these systems (raised by others). Roger Kemp ran a workshop for the RAEng on “Living Without Electricity” (available from their WWW site), about the Lancaster Christmas outage a few years ago. He pointed out that we were much more resilient concerning such events 50 years ago. You lost lighting, and TV, but everything else worked. But now, everything seems to depend on a reliable electricity supply. 

Gotta go. But glad to be part of this conversation

I was recently reading a ‘home handyman’ book, basically a DIY book from 1931. It was interesting reading about the electricity supplies provided to houses where they had in effect two incoming mains supplies and meters, one for lighting charged at 1d per kWh and the other for power charged at 8d per kWh (1931 prices, roughly £2 today). Also explains why my grandparents had one of those adapters which plugged into a light socket which you could run an iron from.

Would it be an idea to consider a similar approach today to domestic wiring in new properties? Have totally separate lighting and power supplies with a low voltage DC system for lighting and electronic appliances (phones, laptops etc) and a mains AC system for heavier loads such as heating, washing machines, A/C etc. It would be fairly simple to have the DC side run from solar panels/wind turbines/whatever with battery backup and possibly a mains charger for those few times when there is insufficient input to keep up with demand.

To some extent it would also be fairly simple to convert/upgrade the existing housing stock, at least with regard to LV lighting circuits and maybe adding some LV outlets for phones etc, and would give some protection against being left in the dark due to failures of the grid or too many people plugging in their electric cars to charge!

Following on from Andy's comments, for many years I have wondered about the considerable energy losses built into our current homes.  For almost every device in the home these days we use transformers - either internal or external to the device - to convert our mains AC into LV DC that the electronic circuits in our TVs, PCs and just about anything else that doesn't use a motor need to run on.  

We would need a common electrical DC supply standard but once we have that, manufacturers can produce products that can take an AC or DC input.  This would allow supply straight from home solar PV & battery systems without the need for the existing DC to AC to DC power conversion (and in-built power losses).  I lack the knowledge to compare likely domestic DC line losses compared to existing AC line losses within a household but guess that removal of transformer losses must lead to a reduction in total energy usage.

Turning back to 3rd world villages, it would surely lead to greater availability of domestic products suitable for their micro-grid systems, enhancing their quality of life?  Any thoughts, positive or negative, welcome.

Andy C you are talking my language! I'm flat out at the moment but will be posting on this subject soon . . .

 

Andy C: 
 

I was recently reading a ‘home handyman’ book, basically a DIY book from 1931. It was interesting reading about the electricity supplies provided to houses where they had in effect two incoming mains supplies and meters, one for lighting charged at 1d per kWh and the other for power charged at 8d per kWh (1931 prices, roughly £2 today). Also explains why my grandparents had one of those adapters which plugged into a light socket which you could run an iron from.

Would it be an idea to consider a similar approach today to domestic wiring in new properties? Have totally separate lighting and power supplies with a low voltage DC system for lighting and electronic appliances (phones, laptops etc) and a mains AC system for heavier loads such as heating, washing machines, A/C etc. It would be fairly simple to have the DC side run from solar panels/wind turbines/whatever with battery backup and possibly a mains charger for those few times when there is insufficient input to keep up with demand.

To some extent it would also be fairly simple to convert/upgrade the existing housing stock, at least with regard to LV lighting circuits and maybe adding some LV outlets for phones etc, and would give some protection against being left in the dark due to failures of the grid or too many people plugging in their electric cars to charge!

Andy C: 

To some extent it would also be fairly simple to convert/upgrade the existing housing stock, 

Actually not, it turns out, for general reasons. Keeping even existing installations in developed countries up to date is a major issue. I have a set of slides from the German electricians' professional association ZVEI on this, from 2012.

As a rule of thumb, housing electrical systems in Germany are supposed to last 30-35 years. As of 2012, 70% of building electrical installations are older. 

A Master's thesis by a student of mine looked inter alia at this question for his small town of residence. Only a quarter had modernised their installations in the last twenty years, and only a half in the last forty years.  In France, the situation seems to be even more concerning. 

It does concern the electricians' association (which in Germany is different from the electrical engineer's professional association VDE) that there is heavily increased use of electrical appliances over the last forty years, a situation which most existing installations were not designed to accommodate. A third of all building fires have electrical-system origin (figures from 2010), and building fires cause ~600 deaths (and - the pyramid again - 6,000 bad injuries and 60,000 light injuries) per year. So we are (were, in 2010) looking at 200 deaths per year because of electrical fires. This is an order of magnitude greater than deaths by electrocution (and quite a few of those are people clambering around on wagons in rail sidings who get too close to the overhead lines). 

This is likely going to get more problematic. PV+battery systems are attractive. PV cells have some flammable parts which can ignite when insulation is degraded and spot temperatures occur which can be achieved in installations in some warmer climes (I understand this has happened more than once). You really don't want a fire in the PV cells on your roof. Not only that, but what happens to the Powerwall in your basement when your house is hit by lightning? And what happens to your basement in consequence? I am not sure that we have got to grips safety-wise with all this yet.

Sadly, the life-expectancy of hi-tech electronics in equatorial countries is pitifully short.  Grid electricity distribution has big transformers, heavy cables, and often works for twenty years or more with minimal attention.  In comparison, the average life of an electronic product in Ghana (where we attempted to measure it) seems to be around six months.  

I am emphatically not using this as an argument to stick with grid electricity - rather I am saying that the electronics industry must really raise its game, and implement the same rigorous environmental testing for consumer electronics destined for hot (and particularly humid) countries that they do for automobile systems - since the environment is at least as challenging.  

…And when equipment DOES fail, they should remember that spares supply chains are largely non-existent, tools and diagnostic equipment are likely to be very poor, and documentation lost or non-existent - so repairability is an absolute requirement.  

Even in the UK, it is our experience that the newer something is, the less likely it is to be repairable.  This is to my mind something that our industry (yes, I'm part of it) should be deeply ashamed of.  

A Victorian railway engineer would be scandalised by our designing products that can't be repaired.

(A reply to AndyC)

FYI, as part of an Open University research project, I am looking in detail at how we might set about providing a DC electrical ecosystem, as an alternative to our familiar AC one.  There are several alternatives - but neither technical excellence nor energy efficiency will be enough to justify a competing system, with all its attendant incompatibilities, adapters and converters, etc etc.  However, there is an acute problem which may: We need to increase the capacity of the final mile, to support large-scale Electric Vehicle use, the switch to heat pumps, and to take full advantage of the increasing use of batteries with solar systems.  DC is an attractive option for this - but should it be implemented with a parallel final-mile network (very disruptive), or by some other method?

I am very interested in your information from 1931.  I have been trying to find out which voltages were available where and when in the UK (and whether they were AC or DC), but this doesn't seem to have been documented anywhere I can find.  I am however, aware that there were some DC households (I think at +200VDC), at least until the early 1960's.  (They were fed from the grid by substation mercury arc rectifiers.)  Can anyone suggest a source of detailed information?