"Plug ugly"

[bellinghman]

When it comes to mains plugs, the British Type G is probably the gold standard. Three pin so you can't insert it the wrong way, with socket shutters so kiddies can't poke into the live socket hole, part insulated shafts so you can't get a shock from the pins, fused so a short in the wire can't start a fire, it's been built with a safety-first attitude. It says "Yes, this electricity stuff is powerful and dangerous, and we need tiger bars to keep it contained".

You can also swing one on a cable as an effective anti-burglar weapon.

And that's its problem: it's bloody massive. On our recent trip, we had a bunch of universal plug adaptors with us, and for one item we took the Euro mains lead, because it was lighter than the UK plug lead and we'd be able to use it anyway.

So it was with some interest that we encountered the Australian socket for the first time. For our adaptors, using a .au socket meant bringing out the US two blade section, and gently twisting the blades so they were angled apart. And into the socket and hey - unlike the US case itself, where the weight of the adaptor would pull the whole thing down, these stayed where put.

The downside was that on a double socket, we couldn't get two in - the sockets are set much closer together. Happily, there were enough sockets around we could always make use of three adaptors.

(As for HK - they use the Type G - so we used the adaptors for that Euro lead).

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

That's about the size of it, in fact. After WWII Britain was effectively broke. We had given the US all our money to buy weapons, fuel, food etc. to fight the Germans and because of that we couldn't afford to buy enough copper to wire houses properly for electricity supply. The ring mains system we adopted was designed to use less copper wire for the same current capacity but that meant fusing each device separately rather than running a single length of three-core wire between the fusebox and each socket. If you want to blame anyone, blame Mean Mr. Moustache, it's his fault.

Since a lot of devices already in use didn't have fuses fitted it was decided to put a fuse in the plug -- that allowed for low-current devices like lamps to have a low-rated 1A or 2A fuse and things like 3kW heaters to have a max-rated fuse of 13A; the fuse rating matched the device rather than having a 30A fuse (nowadays a GFCI aka RCD) at the fusebox as the only safety backstop.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

"rather than running a single length of three-core wire between the fusebox and each socket"

The upside is that it ends up being a lot easier to add extra sockets or light fittings with a bus format.