Low voltage DC at home

dynamick · 04-05-2011 02:43AM #1

Most of the device in my house seem to run on low voltage DC (5-20V) They all have ac/dc powerpacks that step up to 240V AC, so that they can plug into the mains.

So why not have a home network at say 20V DC and let me plug in my mobile phone, laptop, TV, PC, LED lamps without power packs?

I know I must be missing something here. Is it that DC/DC voltage step down would be required which is inefficient?

Michael Collins · 06-05-2011 03:59PM

It would be good if that is the way it was alright. You could get rid of all those annoying bulky plugs. It has just never been done is the answer, probably because there's no standard voltage or polarity used on all those devices.

So, as you say, you'd have to use DC-DC converters on some devices which would kind of defeat the purpose a bit - not that they're inefficient, actually they can be very efficient, often 95% or higher.

A technical difficulty might arise if there were a lot of devices plugged into this lower voltage network as the current draw might be quite large, meaning you would need fairly hefty cables or suffer more I²R losses.

Low voltage DC at home

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