>>107022650
>I'm not an electrician. what's wrong with 240v?
Nothing. And it's what sane parts of the world - i.e. Europe et al - actually use for a single phase.
European homes typically receive three phases of 240V each whereas US homes only receive two phases of 120V each.
As a consequence, In Europe one can have much heavier appliances running concurently without blowing a fuse.
>additionally why do they have 220v and 230v as separate systems?
They don't. It's a sliding scale of "somewhere between 220V and 230V" and actually that metric is about a decade and a half behind the times.
Europe largely pushed itself to 220V - 240V instead.
The US standardizes on 120 V at 60 Hz and offers two phases, combining to 240V maximum consumption if you have a fuse box wired correctly such that an appliance can bundle both phases. Combining phases in this system is shitty though and much MUCH more prone to failure and blown fuses than in the European three-phase system.
The European system standardized originally on 220V at 50 Hz over three phases, which upscaled slowly to 240V at 50 Hz over time combining to ~520V maximum consumption due to partially overlapping phases but leveling out load a bit and making the entire system more resilient against blown fuses if appliances have decent enough power train to load-level across phases,
The reason Europe went for higher voltage and lower frequency is it suffers less from the skin effect, i.e. less actual power loss during transmission over time.
The reason the US went for 60Hz is because it allows transformers to be physically smaller and use cheaper parts and less resources. As is usual with these things, the US went with short term gain over long term gain.
