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Plug vs. Plug — Which Nation's Socket Is Best?
CNETNate writes "Is the American mains socket really so much worse than the Italian design? And does the Italian socket fail at rivaling the sockets in British homes? This feature explores, in a not-at-all-parodic-and-anecdotal fashion, the designs, strengths and weaknesses of Earth's mains adapters. There is only one conclusion, and you're likely not to agree if you live in France. Or Italy. Or in fact most places." (For more plug pics and details, check out Wikipedia's list of the ones in current use.)
I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.
My work here is dung.
They also completely failed to mention sheer size. British mains plugs are fucking enormous. That might be fine for AC blowers and electric kettles, which are big anyway and draw a fair bit of current; but it is annoying and ridiculous for the ever growing crop of little tiny switchmode adapters that power the gizmos and gadgets of modern life.
Article summary (score out of 10):
10- UK
9 - Denmark
8 - Italy
2 - Australia
1 - USA (no surprise)
1 - Japan (surprise)
0 - EU
I suspect bias. I also suspect this article was meant to be humourous. BTW an American plug can handle 15 amps easily; it's how I run my spare heater.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And you know what? The number of times the average American has been shocked by his plugs: 0.
I read the internet for the articles.
The British people are strangely proud of the ungainly BS 1363 plug. No surprise at all that it won the comparison.
What is it with the Americans on here? The British people are not proud of their plugs, the British people take plugs for granted. It's not like there was a national vote on what plugs to use or anything.
To warp this into a issue of national pride is just wrong.
Well, OK, maybe we Brits are a little over-proud of our plugs. A Polish engineer I know called them "an insult to electrical engineers".
But seriously, where is someone explaining why some other plug is superior? In my experience US plugs get bent pins, can be woefully insecure in their sockets (literally dropping out) and the ground-nonground mixing that goes on on powerstrips seems clearly dangerous.
So (excluding British plugs) which plug would you choose to champion? Any?
I know it's not comfortable to admit that the US version of X is not the best in the world, but if you had another option that you preferred, I'd be more convinced.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
I was going to just copy and paste in my older post titled "The UK plug is the nanny state run wild", but I can't find the damned thing.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers, it's unplugged. No partially insulated pins or other wacky design contrivances are needed.
The UK plug appears to have originally been designed by someone who was laboring under the misunderstanding that they were designing a connector for welding equipment, not domestic appliances. It can safely carry 100A of current, if you replace the fuse with a solid link. Why? The plug contains a maximum 13A fuse and the ring main circuit in a UK home is limited to about 40A if I remember correctly. Why a 100A connector when it can only ever be supplied with 40A?
Shutters on the sockets are a very recent development in the US, and a probably just being copied from the UK for no other reason than shutter envy. There's no real demand for them, because Americans are somehow able to resist the temptation that apparently so often overcomes their British counterparts to stick things in the socket other than a plug.
When my family moved from the UK to the USA back in 1982, I thought the US plug was flimsy compared to the UK plugs I was used to. But, really, a Honda Civic looks flimsy compared to a Caterpillar bulldozer, but I know which one I'd buy to drive every day. (Yes, I have to get a car analogy in.)
A major advantage of the USA plug is that it's smaller - you can plug six appliances into a power strip and not have the power strip be the size of a house. If you have a laptop bag, the USA plug isn't some great big lump in the bag. The US plug is designed for its intended use, not designed to be safe even if being used by newborn babies to plug in their industrial welding equipment.
You might say, well, the US plug can't carry as much current for heavy loads. It's true that you can't get as much power through a single US plug as you can through a UK 13A plug, but that's because the voltage is higher. The US plug can carry 15A at 125V all day long. My wire feed welder works just fine plugged into a normal US 15A outlet - the plug doesn't even get warm.
Putting moderation advice in your
They do have the convenient habit of only coming in "flat surface mount" variety though, so the cord is already against the wall. Or at least, the cord sticks no further from the wall than the plug itself does. Most US plus for some reason think it is a great idea to stick far further out from the wall than even the huge British plug due to plugging in perpendicular. You can get the smaller "flush mount" plugs for some things in the US (usually extension cords, sometimes computer power cables) but they're then next to impossible to remove because they become so flat (a bonus for the larger British plug).
I also don't recall the British plugs having the "plug falls out of the wall due to the weight of the cord" problem that FAR TOO MANY US sockets do. It could just be the house we lived in when we were in England had new enough sockets that wasn't a problem -- I don't know for sure. I do know I've experienced the plug-falls-out problem in many, many houses and apartments in the US.
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I'd rather have the option than even more regulation.
How can you object to something that improves safety and comes with no inconvenience whatsoever?
Maybe it's just me, but at a certain point I WANT the plug to come out of the socket. I know I can't be the only person in the world who's tripped over a cord sometime over another, and the plug just yanking out of the socket is a lot better than the actual wire popping or the outlet coming out of the wall. It's the real-world equivalent of a fuse - when something is obviously wrong make the system break at the safest and most convenient point rather than somewhere random.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The falling out of the wall problem isn't the most alarming issue with US plugs. The falling slightly out, just far enough that the connection is still (poorly) made and you get sparks flying when you turn the device on problem is. How anyone could defend this design is beyond me.
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Fuse? Who needs that when the entire house is wired with circuit breakers. Fast enough to save your life if you drop the hairdryer into the bathtub.
Because the fuse trips at 2 to 13 amps and the circuit breaker will be way higher?
Then how is it that Americans created Mac OS X while a Finn created Linux?
A computer scientist created Mac OS X and a computer scientist created Linux. That fact that one is a Finnish and one is an American had nothing to do with it.
I like useless articles like this sometimes. This one gets the electrical nuts out of the woodwork and I start learning things that I'd normally have no reason to go out and look, but are interesting nonetheless.
He's American.
1) The European socket has a plastic outside cone for insulation. If the cable is partially unplugged, you cannot touch it with your fingers. The British version has nothing.
Except Insulated pins
2) The European socket allows you to plug the cables upside down (which is extremely helpful in certain situations).
I've never need to do this. I don't think I've ever seen a European plug inverted either. Can't be that useful.
Honestly, the european plug is fine. So's the UK style. The article was stupid, but it's equally stupid getting upset over it.
That "current UK tech" *is* from 50 years ago - that's how our plugs have been for a very long time - since 1946 in fact. So 63 years.
We also have RCDs on our circuits in addition to fuses - Even the ancient house I live in has an RCD protecting the mains sockets and the light circuits.
So (excluding British plugs) which plug would you choose to champion? Any?
Of those that I've used personally - Soviet, Euro, Australian/NZ, and North American - I liked the southern one most, strictly on the basis of convenience. It has 3 asymmetric pins, so you can grab it and plug it in correctly in one try without even looking at it, a feat I couldn't repeat with any other design. Plus, having a power switch on every plug is both handy and a good safety feature (and the switches normally also glow when turned on, so if you keep one that way you can find it in the dark).
Looking at pictures for British plug, it seems that its 3 pins are in a similar configuration, but there's no switch or glowing LED.
From the stats I can find, UK deaths by electrical outlets are .486 per 100,000 and US rates are .015 per 100,000, more than an order of magnitude safer, even without massive numbers of safety features.
Does that include death by fires stared by electrical faults? I don't know the statistics, but anecdotally, household fires are alarmingly more common in the US than anywhere else I've lived.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Symmetrical
But the live is more dangerous than the neutral. UK plugs must have the fuse right after the live pin, and appliances must have the power switch in the live wire (nowadays probably both wires).
if the spring wears out
The only times I've seen broken UK sockets is when they've been abused, e.g. the ones in the back row of a school science lab. House sockets from the 1960s still work.
I don't see the advantage to fusing the plug versus a device with a replaceable fuse.
It protects the wire between the socket and the appliance. The maximum current from a UK circuit is 30A, but that requires a bulky cable (like the one in the wall). You don't want that bulky cable on a desk lamp, so you put a fuse in the plug. The desk lamp will typically have a 1 or 3A fuse in the plug.
Unfortunately, the 3, 5 and 13A fuses are the same size, so it's possible to make the desk lamp unsafe by replacing the 3A fuse with a 13A one. People sometimes do this if the fuse keeps blowing (the lamp is probably faulty...) and end up with an unsafe appliance.