In article ,
Roger Mills wrote:
On 09/04/2021 19:29, Owain Lastname wrote:


There is a secondary purpose to the fuse - it limits 13A sockets to 13A max load, thus reducing high point loads which would unbalance the ring. With unfused plugs a naughty person would be able to plug their cooker into the ring circuit. In the unfused round-pin days there were hosts of adapters allowing table lamps to be plugged into 15A sockets without fusing. For some reason BS1363 doesn't require 2-way adapters to be fused, and used not to require 3-way adapters to be fused either but this has now been changed.


I remember when the sockets in the workshop at the place where I worked
were converted from 15A to 13A to bring them up to date and make them
compatible with more kit. They were still on individual radial circuits
rather than a ring.

We had a problem with an arc welder which had been fine with an unfused
15A plug but kept blowing fuses in its 13A plug - until some bright
spark had the idea of turning up a solid brass "fuse" on the lathe. we
didn't have any more problems then! [*And* it was no less safe than the
earlier arrangement apart perhaps for the risk that the plug would
overheat because square pins into metal strips are nothing like as
robust as round pins into close-fitting round tubes.]

just cut the correct length off a metal potentiometer spindle. They were
the right diameter

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England
"I'd rather die of exhaustion than die of boredom" Thomas Carlyle