"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article BNjhi.51$DM4.37@trndny06,
James Sweet wrote:
There's about 3 different types of receptacles you'll find in a US
residence, the rest on that list are either industrial stuff or obsolete
things you might find in the occasional 1950s or earlier house.
Generally you'll find mostly 15A 120V grounded types, then the clothes
dryer will have a 30A 240V receptacle and the kitchen stove will have a
50A 240V receptacle. Other high powered items like an electric furnace,
water heater, spa, etc will be hard wired. Sometimes you'll find a 15
or 20A 240V receptacle in the garage for something like an air
compressor or small arc welder but these are generally added by the
homeowner. It's really not very complicated.

I know the UK has a number of plugs and receptacles in the same
category, I've got a small pile of various oddballs from over there
right here.

Not really. In a domestic environment anything that can't be plugged into
a 13 amp outlet will be hard wired. Including cookers, water heaters,
showers, etc. A very posh home workshop may use BS 4343 industrial types
though as some machine tools on single phase may need more than 13 amps.
Three phase domestic supplies are pretty unusual.


Well that's not much different than here, only difference I see is that we
have 30 and 50A 240V plugs to allow cook stoves and clothes dryers to be
high power yet not hard wired. Standard clothes dryer here is 4KW, kitchen
range is 12KW. I had a Creda dryer for a while from the UK, it was a nice
unit, but tiny and took forever to dry.

Looking through the box here... There's an IP44 plug, not even sure what
it's for, but I've never seen anything like it, looks very heavy duty, a
round pin 2 amp plug that says it's for table lamps which oddly enough has
three prongs just like the big clunky plugs, got a few of those, hmm, could
swear I had another type as well.

I like the quality of the parts overall, but these junction boxes are
*teeny*, it must be a real pain to wire them. I like the BC light sockets as
well, though they don't hold large heavy bulbs very straight.