On 4/5/2017 1:03 PM, 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. :-)

I don't know about the UK, but here the old appliances don't have ground
pins.  So protecting people with old equipment is not the issue.

I don't know what stupid things you want to do with your appliances.
The ones I have make it pretty hard to do stupid things with, other than
the fork in the toaster.


> 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.

That is another smart thing the UK does.  In the US circuits are
typically 15 amps which can safely be carried over 16 gauge wire.  So
every device that plugs into an AC outlet uses 16 gauge wire even if it
only draws less than an amp.

--

Rick C

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