Rio electrics

Some outlets in the apartment are white, and some red.  I'd heard Rio used both 127V and 220V.  This is indeed it:

I plugged the kettle into the 220V, red, one, because I thought: it's a high-power appliance, so this way, it needs less current, so the kettle's cable will get less hot.

I was wrong.  The kettle stopped working a few days later.  The light still came on, but no heating element.  The airbnb host kindly replaced it, and said only plug it in the 127V, white, outlet.  At this point I looked more closely, and the old and new kettle did indeed both specify 127V:

Note the power ratings for both kettles are 1200W, which is tiny.  It's amazing anyone ever has cup of tea at that rate.

The one that broke was the Unitermi one.

How does the dual-voltage thing work?  Does the owner get two bills, one for each voltage?  Are there parallel infrastructures from substation to outlet?  Or is there one transformer per apartment building, or per apartment?

Elsewhere, at an electrical street vendor table, I spotted a scary-looking mains multiway adapter:

That cable looked thin.  At half the voltage, you need twice the current for the same power, and it's current that melts wires, so I was expecting thicker wires not thinner.  I thought maybe it's for people who just charge a couple of phones from it?  

Here it is next to my keyboard cable and mouse cable.  It looks like each core is the same thickness as the mouse cable, and thinner than the keyboard cable:

but that's the deceptive thing.  The keyboard and mouse cables have several thin wires inside, each wrapped in plastic, and then wrapped together in a larger plastic sheath, so this isn't comparable.  A lot of the bulk of a 13A mains cable, likewise, is from having three wrapped wires, with the three circular cross-sections packing as they do, wrapped again.  Here we have just two cores, wrapped, with the plastic fused, but not re-wrapped.  Going by the packaging, each is 0.75 mm^2 (18 AWG), whereas a 13A cable is normally 16 AWG / 1.5 mm^2.  So our ones here do indeed have half the cross-section of a normal mains wire, but that's less of a deficiency than I judged it by eye initially.

The packaging also claims 2200 W at 220V or 1270W at 127V.  They don't print the current but this is 10A.  A quick search suggests such wire is rated for 6A, so yeah, this one is pretty thin.

 

But it does seem to be the standard.  This three-core unit has 3 * .75 mm^2 wires, but all wrapped up in the larger overall sheath, and almost looks normal:

 

It also claims it's good for 10A.

Continuing the tour, we come across this:

The above two sockets are different.  The lower has thicker holes.  The coffee machine fits in the lower one but not the upper one.  It took a while to work out why it wouldn't plug in.

The good news is that two-pin europlugs fit in any of them, and all the modern chargers are switched-mode power supplies, so they work with either voltage.