With that being said, I would be delighted with CEE, BS or almost anything other than NEMA anything.
The 120v plugs aren't the worst thing since they usually have some good gripping points, and the 50 amp plugs usually have a handle on the back, but the 30 amp plugs typically have no finger indentation at all for gripping and I feel like my fingers are going to slip over and around every time I pull one out.
But I often find sockets that have a loose grip on heavier plugs, like a phone charger, or a NEMA-CEE adaptor.
(Half my experience is in Central and South America, where maintenance is probably worse — though in Africa old CEE or UK sockets are usually OK.)
They suck. Like you said, eventually everything starts sagging in the sockets.
Recently there's been a trend to switch to 220v based appliances here so modern homes have European plugs instead or alongside NEMA plugs.
It's safer on so many levels. NEMA being 110v means generally higher currents compared to 220v. Then the socket being absolute shit makes it so you often, thanks to gravity, get a situation where you're passing too much current through pins that aren't making enough contact. Followed by fire.
Video illustrating the much better device you get for $1.50 more: https://youtu.be/JoL7TzGhMt0
Hospital grade receptacles have extra strong contacts which make it more difficult to remove a plug, but I wouldn’t use them in a home.
Spec grade tends to go the other direction with that: A lot of these are self-grounding. What that means is that there's a deliberate conductive path between the ground terminals and the mounting points. When properly fastened to a grounded metal box, it can become unnecessary to use the ground screw on the back of the outlet.
Both grip things that are plugged in about the same, in my experience. It seems likely that they share many of the same components inside.
And yeah: Cheap outlets (including "contractor grade") are junk. They take longer to install, they loosen up over time, and they do everything worse. If an house has 50 cheap outlets instead of 50 decent outlets, then someone saved $75 on materials -- but probably paid more than that in additional labor hours. They're reprehensibly stupid.
Denmark made installing CEE (the French version) sockets legal in 2011, but the only place I've seen one is a friend's house — he's German and swapped the sockets when he bought it.
¹ Hong Kong also uses British plugs, and this seems to have led some Chinese manufacturers to make non-compliant, unsafe plugs which fit — and nowadays with Amazon, AliExpress etc selling any old rubbish they are sometimes seen in Britain.
Setting aside the fuse the socket is safer than prevented European ones (which aren’t the only European sockets going)
Not a fan of the protection through a sleeve, as it encourages meddling with the socket with a screwer to use unearthed plugs.
That said, I would like Shukos with fuses, and Shuko plugs unable to plug in unearthed sockets.
Are they objectively good? No. Do they regularly fail, cause fires, or shock people? No.
Even my kids when young understood how to grip the plug without touching the metal contacts and to this day still have not been shocked. In theory can something fall and hit the pins just right to cause a short? Sure. You could also get struck by lightning. In practice it just doesn't happen very often.
For the US/North American NEMA style there are some improvements and some clever things about them. Modern receptacles have shutter doors that stop you from putting anything into the holes unless the ground pin or neutral pin unlocks it first. Many plugs also cover the rear part of the hot/neutral with plastic so if the plug is not fully inserted there is no exposed metal.
The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Similarly the 240v version of this plug (6-15/6-20) has the same property: 15amp and 20amp versions. The 15 amp is two horizontal blades. The 20 amp is one horizontal + 1 vertical but swapped places compared to the 120v version. I do wish more builders installed the 240v receptacles in kitchens in the US. There is no technical reason we can't have higher power kettles and whatnot. If code required these in garages and kitchens more appliances would be available for them.
(I find it insane that Brazil continues to be dual exclusive voltage; all of North America is dual concurrent voltage. Every home/office has 120v and 240v available. In Brazil it depends on what state/city you live in - some get 120v, some get 240v. Even worse they use the same standard plug design for both so you'd better hope the plug is the right color or has the right sticker. And you can't be sure you can take electrical appliances from one city to the next! At least they should have adopted different plugs for different voltages.)
The huge advantage of these plugs is compatibility. We already have them. The cost to change designs is massive. The benefit extremely small. It just isn't worth doing.
Note: The 240v NEMA plugs I am referencing are not "dryer plugs" which are physically much* larger and designed for much higher amp loads in the 30-60 range. The 6-15/6-20 are literally identical to the standard 120v plugs but with different blade orientations. They were designed to support 240v appliances in everyday use since all of North America is dual voltage. In practice 240v is only ever used for large appliances like ovens so the 6 series doesn't get much use which is a bit of a shame.
Alternatively you can just run everything at 230V and then you don't need a million different plugs as any wall socket can provide up to 3.5 kW, enough for any home appliance except for the most power hungry ovens and IH stoves.
Sure and everyone can just stop using Python 2.x tomorrow right?
Backwards compatibility is a big deal. Even moreso when it involves physical infrastructure. who wants to pay billions upon billions of dollars to make the change? How long will it take to roll trucks on all those linemen and electricians to convert/retrofit everything? Does the customer pay? The government?
And at the end of it everything is just the same as it was before. There's no huge benefit to be had for doing it.
That's why I said I wished we had more use of the 240v NEMA plugs. So we could begin supporting higher power appliances over time without some huge switchover expense.
For that matter I wish 3-phase was more available. I have a small machine shop in my garage that would greatly benefit from it.
(But changing the voltage is easy compared to changing the mains frequency. Japan still has to live with 50Hz in one half of the country, and 60Hz in the other.)
US 240v is a bit different than the way the rest of the world usually does it, where they have 1 leg of 240v and 1 neutral, but AFAICT that detail is not a big deal for the stuff that actually uses electricity.
The wire itself, broadly-speaking, is fine.
Suppose we decided that tomorrow at noon to begin the move to 240v.
We just refactor our breaker panels and update to some new objectively-good whiz-bang outlet format (because we would certainly never borrow existing designs from anywhere else on the planet; we in the States have a big problem with Not Invented Here when it comes to policy), and finally get rid of twist-in Edison light bulb sockets, and that part is done.
But then all kinds of stuff doesn't work anymore.
Fridges, garage door openers, microwaves, light bulbs, clock radios, natural gas furnaces, and anything else that doesn't work with 240v: That stuff is dead in the water without converting back down to 120v using an autoformer or something.
Sure, we'll eventually get things updated; when we don't count survivorship bias examples, it's plain to see that stuff just doesn't last all that long anyway (and never actually did).
But for a time: There literal mountains of stuff that just won't work without help. And that's a tough pill to swallow.
---
What we could start doing is embrace our existing dual-voltage home wiring methods, and putting 240v sockets in some places where it's actually beneficial. Places like kitchens (for heating water and food), say. But broadly speaking: Nobody does this because nobody sells safety-approved residential appliances for the US domestic market, so it's a lot of money to spend to get it done for no benefit. It's a catch-22.
Brazil no longer uses US style plugs (though you'll still find them in older installations), it nowadays uses a much safer EU-derived style.
> I find it insane that Brazil continues to be dual exclusive voltage; all of North America is dual concurrent voltage. Every home/office has 120v and 240v available. In Brazil it depends on what state/city you live in - some get 120v, some get 240v.
This is wrong; it's very common to have for instance both 127V and 220V in the same building, sometimes even side by side in the same wall faceplate; 127V is phase to neutral, 220V is phase to phase (on the common 3-phase system). Yes, it does depend on the city, some cities use 220V exclusively, and there are a few other variations, but AFAIK the 127V/220V 3-phase combo is the most common.
> Even worse they use the same standard plug design for both so you'd better hope the plug is the right color or has the right sticker. And you can't be sure you can take electrical appliances from one city to the next! At least they should have adopted different plugs for different voltages.
Yeah, at least it's better than the confusing mix of legacy sockets we had before (which already were mixed voltage - and yeah, we already used the "120V 5-15 NEMA plug" aka "computer plug" even for 220V).
That's good news. I'm glad my info is out of date!
If we had more 240v circuits in garages and on the outside of the house you could use electric motors for more yard tasks. Batteries and gasoline is used often in the US because our branch circuits provide about half the power of a 240v branch circuit. You can buy electric mulchers that are powerful enough to grind tree limbs but they can’t run on a 120v circuits.
We get 3 phases to each home, phase to neutral is 127v, and that's the standard voltage, so loads are divided over the 3 phases.
230v we get through phase to phase connections. We also balance those for the 220v loads, but it's kinda risky due to the nature of our grid, being an island.
Whenever there's a fault they disconnect the zone affected but sometimes in the process we get VERY short but massive overvoltage events.
Since everybody generally uses 127v, as the system trips the 127v line voltage increases for a bit, often within spec but because we take 230v from between the phases it spikes to heights beyond spec and burns the devices.
Most small-to-medium homes/businesses have two hot legs coming off each side of the transformer coil. The neutral is connected to the center of the coil and bonded to earth/ground so it becomes a 0v reference. Each hot leg to neutral is 120v. Between hot legs gives 240v. That neatly supports both voltages in a backwards-compatible way. Typically clothes dryers, hot water heaters, ovens/stoves, etc are 240v appliances. Lamps, USB chargers, and other small day-to-day stuff is 120v.
There are two failure modes that can happen but they are rare and usually only affect the customers attached to the affected transformer or a single customer.
1. Floating neutral. If the neutral becomes disconnected that causes floating voltages as the electricity backs up across the neutral and returns via the opposing hot leg. This presents as randomly fluctuating high/low voltages to 120v appliances but most 240v appliances don't use then neutral and don't care.
2. Damaged hot leg. One hot leg partially arcs to ground or is otherwise damaged. This causes half the 120v appliances to flicker/brown out. 240v appliances will see random low voltages.
Three phase is often delivered as wild leg/high leg delta so a neutral can be derived. It is usually setup so one phase (eg A/C) is center-tapped to make the neutral and two hot legs. This gives three phase power per normal and the same setup as a normal home would have: A/C forms two 120v legs wrt the center tap neutral. However you get 208v between the other phases and neutral so for high density housing you also need to balance the phases resulting in some apartments having 208v power rather than 240v. Thus most 240v appliances also support 208v here but unless you've lived in an apartment or worked on commercial/restaurant systems you'd never see that voltage.
Our breaker panels have 3-phase variants. You'd usually install both: a 240/120 panel for "normal" loads and a 3-phase panel for 3-phase and 240v split phase loads. Breaker design is the same: 3-pole takes up three slots and the bus bars alternate by 3 so every third point is on a different phase.
There are Chinese suicide receptacles with T-slots on both sides allowing you to intermix all NEMA-5 and NEMA-6 variants.
For example the plug shown on the main page is very non-typical - it's a re-wireable one which you very rarely see (because it's generally only if a plug has been damaged and had to be replaced) - almost all the plugs normal people will ever use in Australia will actually be fully moulded.
Secondly it's right-angle, which is not incredibly rare but not the default - normally you'd only see that on some power-boards (what the US I think calls 'power strips') or some extension cables. Appliances usually have straight plugs, the right angle one you do see on them sometimes but not as much (maybe 5-10%).
When you click in to the Australia page, the back side of the plug is also shown as piggy-back which is also quite rare (usually only on extension cords - such as in figure 10, that one is fairly normal).
Figures 5, 6, 7 and 8 and 9 are also things you'll almost never see (it does say in the case of figure 9 that a rewirable piggy-back as shown is now disallowed by our wiring standards).
Some of the example pictures would be better to be changed to something more normal, and the detailed page could probably be broken up into typical, specialist and rare/obsolete sections because it's confusing having it all together.
Right angle plugs may well be less common (in your experience) but they're essential for, say, getting power from the wall to a breakout strip (for TV + games consoles, NAS, media box, etc. corners) when the wall plug is behind a low cabinet / cupboard.
In any case it's a museum, a catalog, intended to show a range of things that do exist, even if a good number may not encounter them frequently.
Just that not having any pictures of the plug that you see on 90% of cords in normal use is an odd choice.
(I, for instance, like the uncommon Italian design of plugs without pins.)
I grew up with the famous British Plug, and while people make lots of comments about the safety-centric design and the fuse in the plug few people care about the switch.
I like to be able to turn off power to the TV when I'm not using it for a few weeks, etc, and that's something I genuinely missed when I moved to Finland with the EU-sockets.
There are currently 15 types of domestic electrical outlet plugs in use worldwide, each of which has been assigned a letter by the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration (ITA), starting with A and moving through the alphabet. These letters are completely arbitrary: they don't actually mandate anything -- https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/
How Japan Made Their Outlet Safe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqClY6PDCW0
I guess if you were to take a fork to an outlet, in Denmark you would definitely think twice.
It installed correctly they can carry around 15kg, which is enough to most lamps. When you have a wife who constantly wants lamps moved around they are really handy.
Annoyingly people surprisingly often ask me to help with their lamps, not once have I encounter them having something as sensible as a ceiling socket, that apparently only exist in my house.
https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/UnknownSpecimen.html https://www.artlebedev.com/rozetkus/1/
Is there any reason to prefer the bulky Schuko to the leaner Swiss/Italian plug style?
EDIT: meant plug, not socket
Any Dutch people here able to say why that is?
Look for green marked groups or groups with test buttons. Those are the ones that are the most safe to use.
But do check behind your sockets, there is a chance you may have the ground wires already pulled in and they just saved on the sockets.
I have the opposite problem here: I have all of my outlets on GFIs and there are ground wires everywhere. But the system is sensitive enough that I can't use my 10KA spotwelder because the phase lag is such that the system thinks there is a leak when there really isn't.
I'll pull an outlet out and have a look for an Earth wire.
Technically that's illegal but I doubt there is a house in NL that doesn't have at least one or two of those.
Also, when there's a light circuit involved, there may be a black wire. In very old wiring situations, you may also encounter red/white/green wires, with green being the live wire rather than the ground!
====
Important message
Due to health issues, no updates to the Plugs and Sockets website are expected in the coming months. Email contact may also be affected. For the time being, please do not send any material that might be interesting to add to the website. Next year, I shall make a decision about the future of the collection and website. Wait and see. August 2025
====
https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/DK/DK_socket_standard.jpg
This one looks a bit hungover though LOL
In our houses, there are circuit breakers. They don't protect you or devices, they can only protect wires in the wall, those who installed the wires knew how much current they can take and installed appropriate circuit breakers.
When you plug the plug in the wall socket, the circuit breaker has no idea what you plugged in so it cannot protect it, so there has to be a fuse in the plug, like in the UK plug. Whoever chose the wires for this device choose appropriate fuse.
There is one more case possible, the wire is not permanently attached to the device but via another socket, for example C14 socket like in PC. In that case manufacturer of the PC should know what kind of currents it is capable of handling and should put fuse inside it.
Now everything is protected (at least for over-current, if you touch live and neutral with two hands, 30mA through heart is enough to kill you but that's something that cannot be avoided, not even GFCI can do it).
The correct spot for the fuse is the appliance itself. Fuses used to be easily replaceable, often with fuse holders [1]. I have, however, never seen a computer with one.
[1] https://uk.farnell.com/productimages/large/en_US/4578676.jpg
The exception would be a device that sends mains more-or-less directly to a user device, then a fuse would be protecting against a fault in the user device and should be replaceable. A lamp that takes a regular light bulb would be a good example of this.
Many older appliances did expect the user to put some external bits in that would be across mains, or maybe across a transformer to mains, and in that case the fuse was just as replaceable as the user-provided part.
But really the value of having the fuse in the plug is that if it blows, the live wire in the cable is definitely disconnected all the way to the wall, so whatever has happened you know as best you can that it's not in a state where it could still get worse.
I know because many moons ago I blew one, in the era when PSUs had a toggle between 120V and 230V, and I set it to 120V in a country that runs at 230V...
My country has never had a fuse in the plug and we generally have a very safe electrical system (much stricter earthing rules than the US for example). Adding an extra fuse doesn't really seem to add much, it really doesn't seem to be any kind of significant risk.
So the regulations had to allow one 50A (for example, I don’t know the actual numbers) fuse supplying an unknown number of outlets and devices, rather than requiring one circuit per small area. Such a large fuse will happily let your radio malfunction and start on fire, so local, smaller fuses are necessary.
In other areas a 10A fuse (for example) on a circuit that only goes to one room or one appliance is enough to protect from overloading the circuit as well as most dangerous malfunctions of one device.
I suppose that a device that suddenly starts to consume far more current than normal under normal voltage is likely broken / fried inside, and it's too late to save it by blowing a fuse. The fuse just prevents a fire, but an automatic circuit breaker in a socket would likely do the same.
There is the case of overvoltage due e.g. to nearby lightning strikes. I suppose a fuse is unlikely to save your computer in such a case, it's too slow. Fast-acting power line protectors exist though, and are cheap and ubiquitous.
I was amazed that a socket couldn't be installed for the purpose of LED mirror that is a meter away from shower, but they seem to be fine at running water heater inside shower in UK.
These detect an imbalance of current flow betwixt the two current-carrying conductors and shut off when that imbalance exceeds a threshold, which does reduce the risk of shocks -- particularly in wet environments. The imbalance is evidence of a leak, possibly through a person -- so their intent is to halt that situation when it happens.
But our GFCI outlets have nothing at all to do with what is usually referred to, in the US, as a circuit breaker.
Regular circuit breakers are very different. They only detect overcurrent conditions and switch off -- much a fuse does, but with a reset function. They primarily protect the wiring of the home, and they do not give a fuck if you're being shocked. (Human factors and leakage current are not part of their purvey.)
GFCIs and fuses/circuit breakers are similar in that they both break circuits, but they're different in every other way.
---
Meanwhile, in UK wiring, bathrooms do not have GFCI outlets. Instead, they have a shaver socket. That's a lower-voltage socket that also has a built-in transformer.
The transformer provides galvanic isolation. Galvanic isolation means the current imbalance that a GFCI is meant to detect and shut down can't happen in the first place, so it's safer in that way than a GFCI is.
With a shaver socket: Shaver in one wet hand, other wet hand touching metal water pipe? Perfectly safe: There's no opportunity for current to flow from one hand to the other. It's isolated.
---
Meanwhile: Fuses. British electrical widgets generally use fused plugs. The fuse is to protect the wiring of the device being plugged in.
Why? Because homes are sometimes wired with what is called a ring circuit. This can increase ampacity while using less wire. A ring circuit with 2.5mm wire is typically be fused at 32 amps, which is way spicier than common 2.5mm wire can safely handle, much less a device being plugged in.
But it's OK, because it runs in a ring -- each outlet has 4 current-carrying wires, and they each feed eachother within that ring. The ring (all 4 wires of it) extends all the way to the box where the fuse/MCB [maybe with an RCD], or RCBO live. (In American terms, an MCB is like out central circuit breakers. The RCBO is a combination device that detects and protects against leakage current and overcurrent conditions, like the central GFCI breakers that some homes have for some circuits.)
Rings safe as long as both legs of the ring remain contiguous and are never fucked with improperly.
For the history: The UK does use ring circuits because they had a fuck of a bad time rebuilding after WWII, and they decided that this would save them money and let it gone quicker. They were probably right about this, for them at that time.
But that means their plugs need fuses. So it be.
We don't use ring circuits in the States, because we've never had a post-electrification war here and the opportunity to broadly start over has never forced itself.
We don't usually use fused plugs, either -- our unfused pluggy-inny things are supposed to be able to trip our common 15 or 20a breakers without much drama. (Except when their design doesn't allow that. In those cases, they're supposed to have their own protection devices -- which is why Christmas lights have fused plugs in the US. Their tiny little wires can't carry enough current to trip the branch circuit's breaker in the event of a dead short. We got to choose between using bigger wires for the lights themselves, or fusing the plugs, or having houses burn down. We chose fuses. We were probably right about this, for us.)
---
Two different countries, two different pathways. Both paths work well-enough, but they're not the same.
And it's fine. :)
The characteristic curve shows that the 10A fuse is expected to blow after about 4s at 20A. Of course there's sample-to-sample variation and different ambient conditions etc, but how do those four seconds become "an hour to blow or not blow at all"?
[1] https://docs.rs-online.com/bc0e/0900766b81585c97.pdf
Dave Jones of EEVBlog fame did some experiments with this several years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG11rVcMOnY
(I'm not arguing for or against any concept here; I'm just presenting some non-datasheet data.)
My bedside lamp has a 1mm (or thinner) wire. If it faulted out and drew 10a the RCD won’t blow, but the wire will melt. Not immediately, but after a while.
The 3A fuse will melt long before the wire though.