UK’s uniquely substandard wiring.
Care to elaborate on this? Imo it does sounds like a win if that’s the case.
Comment on British plugs
Horsecook@sh.itjust.works 15 hours agoBest plug+receptor design in the world for electrical safety.
That’s debatable. The plug safety features only exist because of the UK’s uniquely substandard wiring.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
Post-war reconstruction, they had a massive copper shortage. The wiring standards they adopted allowed for using as little copper as possible. That meant fewer, high-amperage circuits, rather than many low-amperage circuits. They used “ring circuit” topology instead of “branch circuits” to allow them to use undersized wiring.
Basically, all the shortcuts they took in their household wiring introduce considerably greater risks than exist elsewhere, including North America. Their household wiring is overloaded relative to most of the rest of the world. They mitigated the risks of their household wiring with stricter standards on their appliance wiring. Which is why they need a plug for their phone charger comparable to the plugs we use on a welder.
It’s a good plug A damn good plug. It’s just complete overkill for electric systems outside of the UK.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
That makes sense, but imo for those country that follow UK standard with 220v/240v power everywhere in the house, it better be overkill than not. But then i guess that’s why EU also have this two pin plug for low power application that come with partially insulated pin, and won’t hurt your feet when step on. Best of both world!
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 9 hours ago
It’s not just the voltage It’s also the allowable current per circuit. UK circuits allow much higher power (wattage) than single household circuits in the rest of the world. That’s why they need those big-ass plugs on each of their appliances.
Devial@discuss.online 14 hours ago
No it isn’t. It’s debatable if the safety features are still necessary with modern wiring, but it is objectively safer than any other plug design there is.
And the design of these features wasn’t because of “substandard” wiring. It is because the UK used to use ring circuits in old houses, which are unsuitable to be protected by central fuses/breakers, necessitating fuses in the plugs. That doesn’t make the system any less safe. As long as a fuse is present, and the circuits are adequately sized, where precisely on the circuit a fuse is located is irrelevant.
Also, the fuse inside the plug provides an utterly unique advantage that no other country has: The fuse can be used to protect the external wire from over current. Centralised fuses are exclusively designed to prevent over current on the main, internal circuit, they don’t give a crap what happens on the other side of an outlet. A central fuse will do nothing to stop you from pulling 15Amps thought a 3 amp cable. A fuse inside the plug, appropriately sized for those 3 Amps, will in fact protect the cable itself.
devedeset@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
The USA approach to this is to mandate a comical number of outlets everywhere (to prevent extension cord usage), mandate a large number of individual circuits (especially for things that draw a large amount of power), and more recently some combo of AFCI/GFCI/CAFCI breakers (to provide some level of sensing things going wrong and shutting off power).
The stats are not great for the USA in terms of number of fires. I haven’t done deep research. From personal experience, most homes built after modern US electrical code was fleshed out are generally fine. Modern homes (or ones upgraded to modern code) seem very safe - the “smart” breakers tend to actually work.
My anecdote here is that my relatively small hometown area (15,000 people, largely built up between 1860-1940) still has frequent fires relating to electrical and heating systems and the current city I live in (95,000 people mostly built up starting in ~1960) has very few fires ever. I spend 2 weeks a year around Christmas back in my hometown. 3 of the last 7 years had a structure loss fire while I was there. In the same period of time there have been 2 structure loss fires in my current city total.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
So you’re not saying it’s because the wiring is substandard, but because it’s ring circuits, which are not up to the same standard as if they used a breaker panel.
Isn’t that the same thing?
Devial@discuss.online 12 hours ago
No, because the rest of the world isn’t America.
Those ring circuits WERE up to UK standard, and perfectly safe when they were constructed, and nowadays are either still covered by the standard, or grandfathered in.
The reason other counties don’t use ring circuits isn’t because they’re less safe. It’s because they’re less convenient. It’s easier and more convenient to make and use, and easier in terms of individual steps, to make seperate fused circuits instead of a ring circuit.
The reason the UK used ring circuits was because they use much less copper conduit, and given the ~copper~ everything shortage during and after WWII, the convenience of modern circuits simply wasn’t worth it.
Horsecook@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Yes. That is the reason.
If a ring circuit suffers a break in the live wire anywhere along its length, it fails dangerous. It will appear to be functioning properly right up until the wiring in the wall catches fire.
The only way that ring circuits could be considered somewhat safe is if they were clearly labeled and regularly tested for continuity.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
The standards the UK adopted pass higher voltages and higher currents per household circuit than pretty much anywhere else. They adopted standards that allow them to use use less wiring, less copper to provide the same energy. They can plug in many space heaters on one circuit, where two or three would blow a breaker on a US circuit.
That higher voltage and higher current makes their household circuits inherently more dangerous than household circuits outside the UK. A fault in a UK circuit passes a lot more energy than a similar fault elsewhere, before tripping a current-limiting device. The exact same fault in a UK circuit is far more dangerous than in a circuit pretty much anywhere else in the world. The standards for household wiring in the rest of the world are a lot more restrictive than the standards adopted in the UK.
UK plugs on Japanese appliance in Japanese houses (for example) are overkill. The safety provided by the UK plugs is built into the Japanese breaker panel and wiring. Putting the UK plug/socket into a Japanese circuit provides no significant additional safety benefit. The Japanese plug/socket on a UK circuit would be extraordinarily dangerous.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 12 hours ago
And Europe doesn’t have old houses with the same difficulty in wiring?