"Martin Brown" wrote in message
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It primarily effects motors.
Many will run faster on 60Hz than 50Hz so sometimes causing overload.

A motor designed for 50Hz will run faster but with less torque on 60Hz. It
seldom has any problematic effect except on turntables and clocks.

A motor designed for 60Hz and cut to the bone on price (like some US kit
often is) will die horribly on 50Hz mains since the magnetic cores wil
saturate at around 18ms and become a restive load for 10% of the cycle.

US mains razors are particularly cheap and nasty designed only for 60Hz.

That's a good point. Equipment sold in Europe is more multi-standard than US
equipment. My sister bought a multi-standard VCR (capable of recording as
well as playing in both NTSC and PAL) before she left to live in the US for
a while, because she'd found that multi-standard equipment is a lot harder
to obtain over there. She wanted to be able to watch tapes of her favourite
programmes that we sent her from the UK as well as to record US programmes.