I have a very limited knowledge of electrical engineering that almost entirely revolves around music equipment. From everything that I’ve seen, music equipment ends up converting the AC power to DC power right at the power entry point (or at least soon after). It appears they’re converting AC power to a higher voltage and current DC power. Is the only real advantage of AC power to pump more power over a line to where devices will then manipulate it to what they need in DC? Are there any common household items that actually fully operate off of AC power or does everything convert to DC at some point?
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Household items that will likely operate off AC:
* Anything with big motors – fans, washer and dryer, leaf blower, power tools, etc.; it’s simple enough to design motors to operate with AC magnetic fields inside the motor, rather than DC magnetic fields.
* Heaters – any sort of power (AC or DC) passing through a thin wire will heat it up, no need to convert to get heat out of electricity.
Household items that will very likely operate off DC:
* Electronics in general, and audio equipment in particular, the AC frequencies can introduce unwanted “noise” into the circuitry, so DC must be used. Power line AC has a frequency of 50 or 60 Hz (depending on country), and humans can hear as low as 16-20 Hz so for audio equipment it literally is noise that must be filtered out.
* Sensors usually convert temperature to voltage, weight to voltage, humidity to voltage, etc., so DC is a requirement for the sensor to function. And also, typically the sensors are attached to electronics that interprets the sensor data, and the electronics typically use DC anyway.
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