Perhaps an ignorant question, but given that when I travel I have to bring a seemingly endless array of plug adapters, which power standard is the "best" and how do we get rid of the rest?
Not sure what's 'best', but getting rid of the 'rest' is likely to be expensive in terms of capital investment and for a comparatively minimal benefit. To put it from a US perspective, I have a house built in 1940, and while most of it's been rewired to more modern standards, there are still a number of places where it has the original 80 year old wiring. What this means is that I have devices I can't plug into all sockets in the house, and even this inconvenience hasn't been worth the thousands of dollars and personal disruption it would cost to upgrade those circuits. There are cheaper workarounds and more pressing uses for the time and money it would take to make the change.
It's this sort of reasoning that makes me hesitant to think that a unified global power standard is ever likely to happen, and that's even before considering some of of the infrastructure costs of making a change.
That said, modern flexible power supplies and dual voltage appliances seem like they go at least a large chunk of the way to make the situation at least a little better.
As far as voltage is concerned, there's a very good reason why most of the world uses about 240 volts for "normal" outlets. The American 120 volt system is fine for things like TVs, clocks, computers, ect, but it's horrible for things like space heaters and electric cars. When I see videos from countries with higher voltages, I see much larger space heaters than we can handle on our outlets. Also, electric cars charge twice as fast from an ordinary European outlet than a normal American outlet.
The cost of copper even starts to make high voltages look better. In my house I have extremely thick (expensive) wires running to my heat pump, but if I had higher voltages these wires could be smaller (and cheaper.)
Your phone charger might have a transformer operating at something like 1 MHz. As a result, it can be made very, very small.
Even the most basic RC oscillator outperforms it by orders of magnitude.
Yeah but that doesn't mean people don't do it. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/european-grid-di...
More recently, with our larger power grid, it is more efficient to deviate from 60 Hz. I do not understand the exact reasons, but for some reason the 5184000 cycle/day guarantee turns out to come with some cost when you have a hundred gigawatts of power spread across a thousand miles. There have been two petitions in North America to remove TEC and allow synchronous clocks to accumulate error, I believe this is going forward but not yet implemented.
See the section "Time Error Correction": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency
See the section "Accuracy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_clock
If North America would ever decide to start using 240V for appliances (through a transition period), what style of plug should be used? UK-style (Type G)? Europlug? Other?
* https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/
I've always wanted an international standard with notches that indicate the voltage and frequency. A device that accepts all voltages and frequencies will accept any notch, a more selective device would block a notch for the frequency / voltage it can't handle.
(And the plug would need to fully cover the pins once they have current. That's the big problem with the NEMA and Europlugs, the pins are still exposed when they're live.)
Europlugs are specifically designed so that no live parts are ever exposed. That is why they have only conductive tips on insulated shafts.
Assuming you read the article, the difference is that they have two hot prongs instead of a single hot pong. The 4-prong outlets, like a standard dryer outlet, allow a device to use both 120v and 240v. Sometimes appliances take advantage of this by using a 240v heating coil and a 120v motor.
Adopting EU-style plugs is more problematic. There's the two hot prong problem, instead of one hot and one neutral. The other problem is frequency, as we use 60hz instead of 50hz.
https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/...
But you can easily connect to both phases and get 240 volts, and this is quite common for appliances such as ovens, clothes dryers, and now EV chargers.
NEMA already provides a selection of connectors for high volt/amp connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NEMA_simplified_pins.svg
Although slowly the US does seem to be coalescing around the NEMA 14-50 socket.
The plug is an asymmetric triangle shape, with a well-defined orientation that is "forever" polarised. The earth pin (at the top) makes contact first, as it is longer and physically larger. In the process of doing so, it opens two shutters on live ("hot") and neutral within the socket. The live and neutral pins themselves are insulated from the base of the plug to a distance slightly more than the extent by which the earth pin sticks out. Therefore, it's impossible to make contact with a live exposed pin, even if you drop a pin in the gap between the plug and the socket. Each plug is individually fused, with an amount that varies by each device. Cable strain relief is integral, and the wire lengths are designed such that if someone pulled the cable out incredibly hard, live breaks first, followed by neutral, followed by earth. The plastic is designed to char and not melt if burnt, and a standard 13 A (240 V) plug can take around 50 A at 240 VAC or instantaneous kV before coming a-cropper. The contact forces on the pins are far higher than a US plug. This means that a plug is very unlikely to arc in its socket, leading to less wear and tear and longer lasting plugs and sockets. I like the fact that each socket is individually switched, which further ameliorates the above. Because of the higher voltage, the maximum commonly used residential current, 13 A, delivers ~3 kW of power as opposed to the US maximum of ~1.6 kW, so you don't need a further set of incompatible plugs.
Still hurts like hell if you tread on one barefoot though.
It's fairly compact, sockets always have ground, you can't plug it in upside down and swap live/neuteral with the two pin version (used for double insulated equipment), and it has a sensible scheme for 10, 15 and 20 amp sockets (the ground pin is bigger for 15 amps and all the pins bigger for 20 (I think) so you can plug a 10 amp plug into anything but can't put a 15 amp plug in a 10 amp socket or a 20 amp in a 15 amp socket).
Not great to stand on, however
This is another reason I'm a fan of TRUE1: the moving parts are in the plug, not the socket.
Every time I use a U.S. plug/socket is scares the bejesus out of me, having grown up with 1363.
However it has significant practical drawbacks. Many devices are class 2 and thus down need earthing. A flat two-pronged europlug allows a far higher desnsity socket, and much smaller footprint cables.
Edit: Beat me to it on the compactness part.
[0] https://cpc.farnell.com/pro-elec/9518-5a-black/uk-mains-plug...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#/media/File:...
I'm not convinced that a fuse belongs in a plug, either, especially if it's invisible, and the plug has to be completely disassembled with a screwdriver to access it. Put the fuse in the device, which certainly has much more space for it, and probably a mechanism to make it easy to access.
As far as the physical structure goes, BS 1363 looks like it was designed in the 1940's ... because it was designed in the 1940's. I'd much rather have something modern and ergonomic like TRUE1. It's small and round, it locks, it's basically impossible to shock yourself with it, and it's IP rated.
I'm not alone here. There's many videos on YouTube of people hacking the Edison plugs off their power tools to replace them with powerCON or TRUE1, but I have yet to find anyone in the world who wants to replace their Edison plug with BS 1363!
Moulded plugs generally use a clip-in fuseholder that can be opened with any pointed object; rewireable plugs can be opened to replace the fuse by loosening one captive combination Philips/flat screw. It's usually far easier than replacing a fuse in the appliance, which is often on a PCB-mounted holder buried within the guts of the appliance.
https://www.esfi.org/resource/what-is-a-tamper-resistant-rec...
Only plugs that double as caltrops, if necessary. I like to think that it's a feature :)
In the real world V is a constant outside your control (120 in the US, 220 elsewhere), and A is limited by local wiring conventions (which means realistically the amount of watts you can get is different - but this is not a factor of voltage). The only factor you can change is R, which turns out to be easy enough (in this application).
That isn't to say you are wrong, just that it doesn't matter.
A is in practice the same across regions.
V is the only factor that ends up mattering.
Unfortunately, while you may have the voltage for a faster coffee maker, you may not have the wiring in your kitchen and I don't suppose you can find a UL-approved coffee-maker for that set-up, which has two live wires (though maybe they are made for restaurant and institutional kitchens?)
That's exactly right... this sort of split phase approach is common, at least in the US. Larger consumers can have 240V available to them and everything else is 120V. (Larger consumers can mean things like ovens, ranges, wall AC's, normal AC's, larger shop tools... the list goes on and on.)
Split-phase also has a couple interesting failure modes. A few years ago, we had a case where a 120V heater would cause fans in other parts of the house to speed up when it switched on. What was happening was that the neutral wasn't fully grounded, so when the heater switched on one phase, it pulled the neutral's voltage in a way that caused the other phase's voltage to go up. Once the electrician figured that one out, it was fixed with the quickness. (Not safe or good for electronics at all.)
Anyways, where the fun comes in, is if for some reason the neutral gets disconnected before the branch split. You now are effectively running the appliances on one branch in series with those on the other. Depending on the particular appliances involved, this means you could see up to 240 V on one leg of the circuit. This is, of course, very bad.
Our neighbor's (poorly-attached) service mast came down a few weeks ago, causing a short that burned out the shared wires that connect both them and us to the transformer. After the initial event (complete with loud pops, sparks, flames...), our power actually came back on; but I insisted on keeping our main breakers turned off until the power company made their repairs. Turned out to be a wise move, as we indeed had a floating neutral.
Once I stopped destroying expensive equipment, it did amazing things for my circular saw. (Probably not good for that, either, and fortunately we promptly moved out.)
I hope you got this checked out! There could be something wrong with the phase going to those breakers (if your box is of the kind that has phases split by side which I am unfamiliar with).
In a wall outlet the size of a European single socket (outlet?), the Swiss one gets three sockets.
The UK one is supposedly safer, but it's enormous...
It's simple, you just refuse to produce anything with an alternative standard, perhaps even banning the export of other standards citing safety concerns, then as more countries find themselves using largely your products with adapters they will eventually realise it's easier to adopt it and use adapters for their native legacy standard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfP1OKKz_Q
Sure there is bias there, but the reasoning is pretty compelling. Of course getting any country to switch is nigh-on impossible.
Europlug has no protective ground wire.
It is starting to have some success here in Italy this new kind of socket:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#Ita...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#/me...
https://www.wikiwand.com/it/Spina_elettrica
Where you can put either three Europlugs or 1 Europlug + 2 of either S11 or S17 OR a single Schuko (and it fits in 2 modules, like a "normal" schuko or schuko multistandard)