The trade-off between, say, one (relatively) high voltage DC bus throughout the home vs many branches with lower discrete voltages is indeed a problem. With AC, we took the bus approach, running 120v everywhere (in the U.S., higher elsewhere). I’m inclined to say we should keep doing that for flexibility and predictability. But it’s a trade off, like you said. It would obviously help if regulatory and standards bodies came out with official recommendations.
Everything else I can think of in a typical household is basically a mere heater that in principle works equally well with AC and DC of the correct voltage. Even computers can be said to mostly care about the correct voltage since AC->DC conversion is vastly easier than voltage conversion.
Indeed. And that’s quite normal. Our electrical system should serve our modern needs.
> but you can't run that through a home
5V might be too low for that length of wire. But you could most definitely have a low voltage line in your house that we could design around, maybe 12V. Electric vehicles are moving towards 48V for accessories. It seems like lack of a standard is holding us back more than anything else.
Or we could just keep doing 120V in the walls, with a DC supply. Modern DC-to-DC voltage converters are very efficient and small. But maybe I’m wrong. A lot of people seem to believe they are still not good enough yet for such a change to make sense.
> If you're going to have AC and DC then you might as well just have AC.
I arrive at the opposite conclusion. Most things are natively DC. So therefore, power in the walls should be DC and we should covert it to AC near the endpoint where necessary.