Infrastructure as Raclette: Why I Installed a Dedicated 20A Circuit for Melting Cheese
A software engineer's tale of over-engineering his house: a dedicated 20A floor outlet for raclette machines, eight fibres to a garden office, and 5G6 electrical feeds. The lesson: in buildings, retrofitting is expensive, so provision the hard-to-change layer generously upfront. It's infrastructure engineering, but with a cheese icon on the electrical diagram.
It’s the same principle we apply in infrastructure engineering, except Terraform can’t fix your floor.
- sokoloff
> didn’t systematically leave redundant pull strings
I don’t leave redundant pull strings and rarely even pre-pull the first one. Only if the conduit is going underground do I pre-pull (before it takes on water).
Install the first with a shop vac and a “mouse” made of thin shopping bag.
When I use a pull string, I pull a replacement one in. In a conduit I expect to get repeated changes, I might install one twice as long plus about 12 feet (4 meters) and tie it off at both ends.
- grebc
As a teenager over 20 years ago, I had my parents put in ethernet after the house was built and I wanted to game in my bedroom haha. At least it was CAT 5E and not just CAT 5 like the electrician wanted to put in.
Overprovisioning when building a home is like the prepper saying: two is one and one is none.
- comrade1234
I'm so embarrassed now, thinking about how we have to use an extension cord for our Raclette grill... we have an 8-tray Raclette Grill and our neighbors have a 12 tray grill which also made us feel inadequate but at least they have to use an extension cord too.
Writer is in Belgium. I didn't realize that they ate Raclette way up there.