Infrastructure as Raclette

I possess a dedicated 20A electrical circuit specifically for the purpose of melting cheese.

This isn't located in the kitchen. Instead, it is a specialized outlet embedded directly into my living room floor—precisely where the tables are positioned during social gatherings. Remarkably, the official electrical blueprints for the house even feature a dedicated cheese icon for this circuit.

The Origin of a "Reasonable" Problem

When designing the house, I anticipated the logistics of hosting guests. The typical routine involves:

1. Moving tables into the living room.
2. Deploying several raclette machines.
3. Running a chaotic web of extension cords across the floor.
4. Overloading whatever random outlet is within reach with high-wattage heating elements.

Since the floors were open and the electrical panel was currently being installed, the marginal cost of adding one more circuit was negligible. I requested a 20A floor outlet at the exact coordinates of the raclette setup.

The Technicals

Using the formula for electrical power: $P = V \times I$ At $230\text{V} \times 20\text{A}$, the capacity is approximately $4.6\text{kW}$. This allows for three or four raclette machines to operate at maximum capacity simultaneously.

The electrician found the request so amusing that he labeled it Prise Raclette on the official diagram (Section C.3), sandwiched between the general living room sockets and the lighting.

The Unexpected Success

Initially, guests find the floor outlet hilarious. However, once the party starts, the benefits become clear:

• No extension cords.
• No power strips.
• No tripping hazards.

You simply deploy the tables, flip open the floor hatch, plug in, and melt cheese. The system was so effective that my neighbor eventually installed a mirroring setup in his own home.

The Philosophy: Proactive Provisioning

In my professional life, I manage cloud infrastructure where maintaining optionality is trivial. However, physical infrastructure is different. If you realize five years too late that you needed a conduit under your garden, the "migration" requires a shovel and a lot of sweat.

I adopted a guiding principle for the house and my detached garden office:

If a feature is inexpensive to implement during construction but prohibitively expensive to retrofit later, implement it now.

Case Study: The Garden Office

The office is a modest $12.5\text{m}^2$ space for a desk, chair, and laptop. Despite its size, its "backbone" is massive:

A Systemic Pattern of Over-Engineering

Looking at the rest of the residence, this isn't an isolated incident. The house is essentially a data center that happens to have bedrooms:

• Power: $3 \times 400\text{V} + \text{N}$ supply, separating professional and private loads.
• Networking: Cat6 cabling throughout, multiple APs, and security cameras.
• Energy: 23 solar panels paired with $20\text{kWh}$ of battery storage.
• Data: 16TB of redundant local storage with dual-cloud backups.
• Cheese: One 20A circuit with a cheese icon.

Capacity Planning vs. Utilization

I generally dislike wasting resources. Most of this infrastructure is dramatically underutilized. The office power feed mostly supports a laptop; the raclette circuit is dormant $99.9\%$ of the year.

However, I am not optimizing for utilization; I am optimizing for the cost of change.

• Cheap: An extra conduit while the trench is open.
• Expensive: Digging a new trench through a finished garden.
• Cheap: An extra circuit during framing.
• Expensive: Ripping up three living room tiles for a retrofit.

I learned this the hard way with my $35\text{mm}$ conduits. I didn't take enough photos or leave enough redundant pull strings. I discovered that "adequate" and "future-proof" are entirely different engineering goals.

Infrastructure Checklist

• Oversized conduits
• Redundant pull strings
• High-capacity power feeds
• Extreme fiber counts

Conclusion: Infrastructure as Raclette

My home is objectively over-engineered. But the lesson isn't that everything should be oversized. Rather, it's that physical buildings have a drastically different cost-of-change curve than software.

When a component is buried in a wall or under a floor, optionality has intrinsic value. Provision the rigid layers generously, and decide how to use that capacity later.

It is a standard principle of infrastructure engineering—the only difference is that you can't use a config file to fix a floor.

# If only we could do this to the living room
resource "home_floor_outlet" "raclette" {
  circuit_ampere = 20
  icon           = "cheese"
  location      = "living_room_center"
  purpose       = "melt_cheese_with_friends"
}