Why Every Country Has a Different Plug (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Why Every Country Has a Different Plug (2009)

gizmodo.com

48 pointsJacobAldridge57 comments

I don't understand why Brazil in that map is shown as having plugs of type either K or I (the purple one). I have never seen these here.

Now, as for the special local mess that we love, types A and B are sort of "legacy" ones and you would find them mostly in power extensions cords and such so people could use imported American electronics in the past. It wasn't even unusual for people to take the ground pin out of type B plugs so they would be compatible with other "regular" A plugs.

Pretty much everyone has used (or still uses) types C, E and F in Brazil. I would dare to call these de facto standards here. But as the article says we have officially adopted IEC 60906 and as such every new building, house or whatever that has been built in the last few years have this plug everywhere. Not everybody likes them (engineers!) but I think most of the folks in the country simple don't give a shit.

The thing is that some places [1] mention this standard is type N, but I have been to Switzerland and all my Brazilian IEC 60906 plugs worked 100% in every single try across the country so I would like to know how compatibles are types J and IEC 60906 (well, type N?). They seemed absolutely compatible in every way to me.

PS: I have never seen type O in Thailand myself, but perhaps in touristic areas they simply use worldwide known plugs instead or just leave some adapters around? IIRC most of the time I would find the European types of plugs there.

[1] http://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/

Type I used to be common in washing machines and air conditioning (in Brazil). Now they are using the new one.

Just got back from Brazil this morning.

Didn't see any 'K' or 'I'

Having moved to the UK a few years ago, I have to say that, bulky though they may be, I've grown quite fond of the British plugs. Switches on the sockets, fuses on the plugs, sockets that mechanically require the ground pin to make contact (in theory, anyway. You can have a plastic ground pin...) before the live pins enter the socket. There's actually a fairly large amount of security built into them!

Sure, but the cost in terms of wasted space is enormous. In the U.S. I can fit a USB power adapter in my pocket. In the U.K. such an adapter will often be larger than the device it's powering.

They're not so bad: http://www.ebellking.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image...

They can even get a bit cleverer: http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MGRL2B/A/apple-5w-usb-p...

For USB there's always a MU - very compact folded up: http://www.themu.co.uk/

Cool. Now how do I charge my laptop? And my camera battery?

They'll be USB soon :P

I don't feel safe plugging things in anywhere else. Those funny little plugs that don't say in the sockets - I hate them.

Last time I went to America, the illusion of boundless wealth was rapidly shattered when I went to plug something in and was confronted by a little bit of plastic with two thing on the end, and couple of slots in the wall. I plugged the thing in, and it fell out. There were sparks. This is how I imagine things to be in North Korea.

You must simply have encountered a defective socket. The experience you describe is not typical.

I have also experienced sparks in a US socket. How glad I was to come back to the civilisation of semi-insulated prongs and switches.

I think you can have sparks in any system while plugging in a large enough load. My 85W Macbook adapter sparks in honest-to-god German engineering sockets.

Sure, but in the UK the live and neutral prongs are half insulated[0] so the sparks stay inside the socket. And if a socket or device is known to be iffy, just switch it off at the wall before plugging anything in.

[0] http://i01.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/149/635/934/934635149_988.jpg

In the article, it mentions why the UK plugs have more features, not to mention being designed 50-100 years later, and also why other plugs aren't being replaced. I don't have any problems with American or Euro plugs, however I may have learned how to avoid them.

Still I think there is room for improvement, perhaps something like a larger lightning/usbc plug with some of those safety features.

The prongs may be insulated, but lots of people wind up putting plugs on wires themselves, so there are a lot of grotty plugs out there with 240v Sparks in them.

Here in the UK we don't dare use a German-style socket for anything heavier-duty than an electric toothbrush.

This is due to relentless cost-cutting by manufacturers supplying sockets to the large home improvement stores. When you can buy duplex receptacles for less than $1, this is what you get. If you invest in a Hubbell, Eagle, or other reputable brand, the plugs will stay in the sockets.

The drawbacks to the American NEMA 5-15 plug are that it is still a shock hazard as the pins aren't sheathed with insulating material. Also, the pins get bent easily and are a bit undersized for 15A in my opinion.

Plugs in hotel rooms probably aren't in the best shape anyway.

This was in Las Vegas and the cheap- and flimsy-looking plug sockets just struck me as a funny counterpoint to the unhinged level of excess that was on display everywhere else.

That's Vegas for you, shinny on outside, grotty on the inside

After living in North America for 9 years, it still confuses the heck out of the me that I can plug everything in either way around. Sometimes it will spark one way and not the other, and it just makes me feel uncomfortable when I do that.

Newer style NEMA 5-15 plugs are polarized. The neutral pin is larger than the live pin. You must have some very old 2 pin plugs, or you got hold of a plug made in China. The Chinese plugs have pins of the same size and are even more dangerous.

Also chances are the sparking isn't due to the way the plug is inserted in the socket. It's more likely due to the fact you have connected a capacitive load such as a computer power supply, and the fact the the mating parts of the receptacle are very close to the front making a spark more visible.

> You must have some very old 2 pin plugs, or you got hold of a plug made in China.

I just looked at the plug on my mac book air, it's identical and goes in easily either way around. It sparked when I unplugged it and plugged it back in again, both ways :)

Any twin blade plug made in China will probably have pins of the same size. The reason is North America is the only one using the twin blade polarized plugs, all bets are off in the rest of the world. Also, the pins may be the same size so you won't run into problems when you travel internationally.

Sparking will happen regardless of the way you insert the plug into the socket. This is probably due to a lack of inrush current limiting in the notebook power supply. When you plug it in, the discharged capacitors appear as a short across the AC line momentarily as they charge up. This is what causes the sparking.

...and when you live in an apartment, they repair everything with the lowest-cost thing from said home improvement stores, so many people have no choice but to live with whatever garbage they make.

I once rented an apartment that had nothing but those loose falling out sockets. The first thing I did was call maintenance to have them come replace all of them. Thankfully they didn't give me any hassle about it.

*I'm sorry if I am using the wrong terminology.

In my opinion the European CEE 7 plugs and sockets are about as much safe as British plugs and achieve that essentially only by mechanical construction of the socket (while on the British plug the isolated sections on live pins are required for safety).

Fuses in British plugs do not have much of a purpose. The idea is that the wiring in a wall has higher power rating than the cord itself and thus there is fuse on the boundary, but same effect can be achieved by placing the fuse inside the appliance (as is done everywhere else).

That fuse is absolutely required. Plugs are daisy-chained in a loop with a 32A breaker (The so-called "ring-main").

Removing the fuse will cause lead burn up if there's a short circuit in the device. If you look at the leads on some UK plugs the sizes of the wires can be very small. They can get away with this due to the fuses in the plugs.

My point is that the same thing holds for appliance leads anywhere else. Only difference is in the use of 32A circuit breakers for the rings which then necessitates lower fault impedance to reliably trip the breaker. There is essentially no technical reason why the breaker has so large current rating as in Europe one 16A breaker for all sockets in whole flat typically suffices.

While the article suggests that preferred practice in continental Europe is to have one (typically 16A) breaker per socket, it's not required and usually considered redundant.

Another reason (and probably more relevant) for the fuses in the plug I can see is that when wire that is part of the ring circuit gets broken, the safe current handling capacity of the circuit gets halved and the fuses then offer at least some protection from over-current.

It seems to me that whoever come up with the ring circuit idea understood that it's fundamentally unsafe and thus designed in additional protection measures so the thing at least looks safer.

I'm not familiar with continental Europe's wiring practices, but here in the states, we use 15A and 20A breakers. The maximum number of outlets per circuit depends on what the circuit is servicing. The electrical code has gotten stricter in this area over time. The smallest appliance wiring gauge is typically 18 AWG (about 0.8230mm^2). Given the size of our breakers, I suppose if the 18 AWG cable were overloaded with a constant current greater than 7A, the insulation may melt and cause a fire. I haven't seen it happen personally. I do know (from when I was a kid), that a dead short on an 18 AWG appliance lead will cause the circuit breaker to trip.

Circuit breakers are unsuitable for protecting against long-term (near-)overloads, depending on circuit breaker rating they reliably trip only at overcurrents several times their rated current (with two times the rated current being the lowest and quite rare rating). I've seen three phase 25A circuit breaker catch fire from being run at slight overload for few weeks.

For home/office installations in 230V systems, almost any dead short is enough to trip circuit breaker (and probably several of them in the current path), regardless of wire cross sections involved, as the fault loop impedance will still be small enough to cause >100A of fault current.

Common cords with CEE 7/7 plug on one end and IEC C13 on the other have 0.75mm^2 conductors, which seems to be sufficient for the 10A/70C rating. Two wire lamp cords (and Europlug->C7 cables) are also 0.75m^2. Normal three wire extension cords are 1.0mm^2 or 1.5mm^2 depending on length and (trustworthiness of) manufacturer. Recently, there are also two wire extension cords (CEE 7/17 -> CEE 7/17 "socket" for things like lawnmowers and Europlug -> Europlug socket for who knows what), these usually are 0.75mm^2.

In Czech republic, copper wiring in walls for sockets and lighting tends to be almost universally 1.5mm^2 with 2.5mm^2 used for long runs or industrial installations. It's my understanding that current Czech wiring standards essentially removed any ampacity->crosssection tables and derating factors and only specify allowed resistance of the wire run and it's temperature rise under load. I assume that something similar is also true across rest of the EU.

That's the difference between regulations made to protect companies and regulations made to protect citizens.

Plugs in Japan are like the american ones and they look really scary to me. Specially because here most of the houses are made of wood.

It's easy enough to change over -- just

1. Mandate that everyone in the country install universal (or dual-interface) plugs. Fairly low-cost, and pretty safe.

2. After 50 years, when all plug sockets will probably have been replaced, pick a plug standard and use that.

Like user pdpi, I've fallen in love with the UK sockets since moving here, with the Au/NZ sockets coming in a distant second place. I've never had any trouble with either sort falling out of the socket, something I can't say about the American or European standards.

How does a European Schuko plug fall out? The only time I can remember such a thing happening in 30 years of living in Norway is with obsolete non-grounded sockets. My usual problem is that there is really very little to grab hold of on the Schuko/CEE plugs so that they can be hard to pull out.

Luckily USB Power Delivery will provide up to 100W, standard across the world, that's enough for everything that's not a heater/motor.

This! USB is the only hope for a universal standard. It's already there for all personal items.

That's what I think the end game will be. Either this or some later standard will catch on worldwide for consumer electronics, and at that point it'll be a lot cheaper to standardize the higher-wattage.

Wasn't that the consensus was that many countries (especially after WW1, and WW2) adopted different plugs to control the import of appliances? When plugs weren't easily replaceable with kettle type cables and where you couldn't just buy a plug in any home depot and change it yourself it seemed like it was a very good tactic to restrict the grey/black import market.

Japanese and USA plugs are similar but in actual application they are somewhat different. 3 prong plugs (for example the kind on every desktop computer and monitor in the USA) are not very common. My computers and monitors, fridge, oven, didn't have 3 prong plugs. The computers and monitors instead the came with a 3rd cable you can optionally attach for ground.

http://www.aim-ele.co.jp/products/power-cable/images/powerca...

Most extension cords and power strips only have 2 slots (not 3).

http://www.yodobashi.com/%E3%83%91%E3%82%BD%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B...

Some of them lock the plug in. You insert the plug about 30 degrees off and then twist and the plug gets locked in which solves the fall out problem people complain about in the USA.

http://www.askul.co.jp/p/8430652/

I like the UK ones best

Technically South Africa has also switched to the newer IEC 60906/Type N/Brazil plug. Going to be years and years until any sizeable number of houses have it as standard, and since appliance makers need to target the majority of the market (who are still on the old plug) you don't see them switch either.

Plus, those darned oversized three prongs in ZA. I've only seen those in ZA and Namibia. It's confusing since the Indian ones look the same from a distance but the ZA ones have a fatter third prong.

Don't walk barefoot in a dark room with BS1363 plugs prongs up on the floor.

As a computer guy, I was always a fan of the 3-in-a-row Italian ones, because you could attach a lot of them to a power strip without too much hassle.

Interesting. I'd like something similar but more compact, like a lightning/usbc port, can be inserted in either direction.

I'd love to see the EU tackle harmonizing this one. If nothing else for the amusement value.

It's already pretty harmonized in continental Europe. And some of the differences are handled by the plugs/sockets themselves (eg. Type F plugs with both ground contacts on the sides and a hole for Type E sockets).

Well, there's the UK.

And Denmark. A few years ago I was in Copenhagen and realized I had forgotten my mac charger somewhere. Went to some mac store and bought a charger that surprisingly had a monstrosity attached to it that resembled this:

http://www.internationalconfig.com/prod_shot/78140-BLK.jpg

With the exception of the UK the EU standard (2 prong) non-grounded plug should fit any socket within the EU and the grounded ones fit pretty much all of them with the exception of Italy/UK.

Is there any research on the net cost of this confusion? Or is it just one of those things where we can easily quantify the switching costs, so we don't bother with the cost of the status quo?

It's like right hand drive cars, which seems like an easy win to get rid of, but are so wrapped up in culture that we are pretty much stuck with them.

It's certainly a PITA if you move around the wrong places in Europe. We had to buy a bunch of new cords when we moved between Italy and Austria.

as someone who used the IEC standard in brazil: it is complete rubish.

you end up with almost 7 variations of the damn thing. it is the only country where you need adapters in the same house!

also, it got 'adopted' without any consideration for the people. suddenly, the standard changed. everyone was pissed, but nobody wanted to get fines in new buildings.

and more ironically, the OLD standard, was compatible with europe and USA and japan! it was the perfect standard for IEC to adopt, not the other way around.

China is striped to show them as using two different standards. Only time I've ever been to China, was last year I spent a week in Shenzhen, and all the plugs I saw looked like upside-down Australian. I know there are some slight differences in pin length and so on, but my Australian laptop and phone adapters worked fine. So if one colour is type I, what is the other colour?

It's non-polarized two pin type A as in US, used for everything which does not need a ground pin.

The multi outlet is pretty common, at least in hotels and offices in major cities.

http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/60186449669_1/Saipwell_Inte...

Yes, now I remember that in my hotel in Shenzhen. Have seen the same thing in South Korea too.

When I was in Thailand I saw sockets that could take both type A/B and type C/E/F plugs, they had holes that were cut out to allow both to fit in.

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