Well Europe seems to be a mess of different plugs and ad hoc installed extra
bits all over the place.
I bet there are standards, but whether there is compliance is a whole other
thing.

Brian

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"Clive Page" wrote in message
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I just watched another of Tim Hunkin's excellent videos - this one is on
connectors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q43tZ6DjuIE

One of the connectors he deals with is the UK 13A power plug. He claims
that it was introduced in about 1947 because of the copper shortage. The
reasoning is that there was a post-war housing boom - I expect that a lot
of existing houses also needed re-wiring - but that the conventional way
of doing this by running a cable from the fuse-box to each separate mains
socket was deemed wasteful of copper. So someone invented the ring-main
which generally used less cable. The problem was that the ring-main fuses
had to be larger and so the system wasn't as safe. The solution was to
put a fuse in each plug-top and this made them much larger. Does that
sound a reasonable explanation?

In fact I can just recall the old 15 amp 3-pin plugs which preceded them
and I don't think they were all that much smaller even though they were
fuse-less. In North America they don't seem to worry much about safety
given their lower mains voltage, but what about mainland Europe - do they
use ring mains with their fuse-less plugs or does each socket have a
separate run back to the fuse-box? I have never thought to enquire.


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Clive Page