3 Phase Charging - At Home

It very much depends on what's on the street outside your house. A lot of urban areas are wired for 3 phase, with each house taking one phase + neutral, and they split the load across the phases that way. It would still require running new wiring from your house to the connection point, which might be expensive or might not be depending on the state of ducts, what's overhead and so on.

Rural areas often have low-medium voltage distribution at 10kV or 20kV that was just two wire single phase, with transformers on poles at the scattered houses. Those kinds of locations are extremely expensive to get 3-phase to.

Most of continental Europe (but not all, France is also an exception to this in most installations, other than where there's electric space heating) tends to install 3 phase to anything other than the smallest installations, but their single phase hook ups are usually very low rated compared to ours. They're often limited to about 20 amps. As a result, 3-phase is more widely available.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. Ireland and the UK tend to have opted to avoid bringing 400V into homes where avoidable as the shock hazards were considered serious. With modern RCDs across phases, the risks are a lot lower, but the design principles were more conservative than some places. Other jurisdictions concluded that large single phase connections were riskier for various reasons around overcurrent risks, but I think in both cases when they're done to code, there's really such a vanishingly small risk that it's not even worth discussing. The stats for electric shock deaths and injuries in domestic premises or similar in Ireland and most of Northern Europe are so low that they're up there with being struck by a meteor in terms of risks. Most of our electric shock fatalities (and there are very few) seem to be in construction / contact with the network.

Other than the ESB toying around with All Electric Homes, there wasn't really that much demand for domestic electric heating here as the costs are generally way out of line with gas, oil or other fossil fuels, and until recently our electric grid was mostly supplied by burning fossil fuel anyway, so there wasn't really any significant advantage until lots of wind power started being added, and that's only very recent.

With the advent of heat pumps and EVs and the push to renewables on the grid, there's suddenly an advantage to having 3-phase available, but we have large capacity single phase that most of the continent doesn't, so it's not all that big a deal in many respects.

However, we probably should look at moving towards 3-phase installations in newer homes, particularly for coping with EVs and heat pumps better and it's more in-line with EU-wide practices, so would open up more products to people for home heating / car charging etc.

Yeah, the 'Gold Shield' homes weren't great. Although, they did do some playing around with heat pumps in the 1980s too but it never really went anywhere. I think the technology was a bit expensive and rudimentary at that point.

Not sure why they'd have been using Neozed fuses in the 1980s. It seems like there was a serious reluctance here to use MCBs by some designers in that era here. It's a bit bizarre.

Also, yeah I've seen some of those old storage heating controller - they were absolutely awful!

Electricaire was a storage heating system - they sold it under various names Creda, Dimplex etc .. not sure why that was the case.

Seems they had a multiple 1.643kW heaters which ranged from 4 to 9 installed.

6.572kW to 14.787kW

I'd say if anything they'd have undersized it in the 1970s. People didn't have high expectations of heat and a lot of those all-electric-home systems weren't that warm.