World's Fastest Internet™ in Canadaland

Wed Jul 8 13:46:52 UTC 2015

On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 07:56:03AM +1000, Mark Andrews wrote:
> You don't think about the size of power lines coming into a house
> as they are overkill for just about anything you will do in the
> house.
> 
> You don't think about the size of water pipes coming into a house
> as they are overkill for just about anything you will do in the
> house.  Very occasionally you will want to connect directly to the
> mains (filling a pool) but otherwise the pipe is more that sufficient.

Water pipes are sized by pressure drop. You do not want your shower to
have fluctuating water pressure if the washer is on while you're there.
If you hook up a hose that is the same size as your water main, you can
get quite a lot of water at an unacceptable pressure drop, but this may
erode the pipe long-term and certainly makes it impossible to shower
while you're doing it.

Power cables are sized by voltage drop. If the power company sized the wires
like they are usually done in houses (just big enough to not overheat
and no more) your lights would dim every time you turn any appliance on
and you would find it unacceptable. But you could get more power without
the cable catching fire if you replaced the main breaker with a bigger
one, just watch out for undervoltage and an upset power company.

For some reason, it seems some people have problems grasping the idea of
having an uncongested path to the Internet even though some of your
devices are downloading updates and someone in your family is watching
netflix.

I wonder if these people leave the tap dripping overnight into a bucket
so they can shower while not using more than a few liters per hour? Who
would possibly ever need more? And I assume they need to store city gas
in a bag to light up their cooker, too. And Tesla's home battery must be
the greatest thing since sliced bread. Who would possibly need more than
1-2kW of power per person?

	Jussi