On 05/04/17 18:03, mm0fmf wrote:
> On 04/04/2017 20:13, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 04/04/17 17:55, rickman wrote:
>>> Why are people obsessed with having an earth pin on power connectors.
>>> Most of the appliances don't have anything to ground!  Why have an earth
>>> pin if the product has no metal parts on the outside?  That's what
>>> double insulation is about.
>>
>> You must be very young. I remember the electric fire that tingled when
>> we touched its metal case
>>
>>
> His world and environment is perfect and only contains new items and he
> wouldn't do anything stupid. Therefore nobody else needs protecting. :-)
>
> The UK plug design is 70+ years old and when it appeared many houses in
> the UK were just being wired. My parent's house was not wired till 1947
> despite living in a large city. In those days you may only have 1 socket
> in a room and few items to plug in, the size of the plug was not an
> issue. Now we have many items and the size is an issue. However, unlike
> US and European plugs, you cannot easily pull a UK plug out of the
> socket by the cable removing a possible failure mode. The fused plug is
> to prevent cable issues to the device as the use of a ring main circuit
> means that circuit may be able to provide 30A.
>
> Modern ELCB and RCD render some of the 70 year old concepts moot. But
> they were a royal pain in the arse when incandescent lamps were used.
> Normally a failing lamp filament going OC would trip out the whole
> consumer unit rather than just the circuit involved. I've seen this
> happen on several consumer units. The move to CFL and LED bulbs means
> when they fail, the whole house supply isn't dumped and I don't have to
> reboot and recover half a dozen computers.

Its also often possible to rewire your house to many standards -s IN S
Africa, which I know well, you can have Swedish, German, UK sockets on
the wall...in the same house! Where immigrants or returning expats have
brought kit back with them!

--
The New Left are the people they warned you about.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05