I have a dedicated 20A circuit for raclette. Not in the kitchen: a dedicated outlet embedded in the floor of my living room, exactly where we put the tables when we have people over. It even has its own cheese icon on the official electrical diagram. I can explain.

It started with a perfectly reasonable problem. When we were building the house, I thought about what happens when we have people over. We move the tables into the living room, we get out a few raclette machines, and then we do what everyone does: run extension cords across the room and connect an unreasonable amount of heating equipment to whatever outlet happens to be nearby. That seemed stupid. The floor was open, the electrical panel was being installed, and adding another circuit cost almost nothing. Fixing it afterward would mean breaking tiles. So I asked the electrician to put a 20A outlet in the floor, right where the raclette tables go. At 230 V that is about 4.6 kW, or three to four raclette machines running flat out. He found it hilarious enough that “Prise Raclette” ended up on the official electrical diagram. With a cheese icon.

The annoying thing is that it worked. People laugh when they first see it. Then we have a raclette, and there are no extension cords, no power strips, no cables crossing the room. My neighbour liked it enough that he eventually installed one too. Except his house was already finished. He had to break three tiles.

Infrastructure is cheap before you need it. In the cloud, keeping options open is easy. Buildings are not software-defined. If you discover five years later that you should have installed another conduit across your garden, the migration procedure involves a shovel. I ended up applying a simple rule: If something is cheap to provision now and expensive to retrofit later, provision it now.