I recently read that the three phase power supply was used to meet increasing power demand.I understand that by using three phases of current that are offseted slightly, allow you to get a near to peak voltage most of time.
Shouldnt all the devices then be connected to all three phases instead of one phase to achieve this?
In: Engineering
Three phase power (phases 120° apart) is more efficient to generate and more efficient to power motors. Power plants generate it and factories use it.
A house doesn’t (normally) have any motors powerful enough to require three phase power, so only one of the three phases from the transmission lines is stepped down to household voltage and sent to your house. The same transformer will also split the power into two phases (180° apart) so your house actually has two-phase power.
Different houses (or at least different neighborhoods) will run off of different phases of the three-phase transmission lines.
It’s much more efficient for the transmission of power. Because normally you’d need two wires to transmit single phase power anyways, using 3 phase power means you get 3x the power for the cost of one extra wire.
For each house it’s irrelevant, since they need to turn it back to single phase power for the appliances (single phase power is much easier to work with and so makes the appliances cheaper)
https://www.vertiv.com/en-emea/about/news-and-insights/articles/educational-articles/three-phase-power-what-it-is-and-the-benefits-it-brings/
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