The following image shows an example of what I found in my hotel room at the Holiday Inn in Bensalem, PA.

Makes a lot of sense because no one in housekeeping spoke english.

I checked a few of the panelboards in the hotel, and found many directories that did not meet with the rules in Article 110 and 408!

That's another story of my life as a road warrior!

What symbols and messages could we use to identify the branch circuits?

Quick shift of gears here:

I love how the Spanish translations in that chart include two different words for some items - for whatever your regionalisms are (kind of like Hoagie, Grinder, Sub, etc.). Good attention to detail by whoever made that up!!

- ex: for the "light bulb," you see "bombillo" or "foco" and for the "ashtray with matches" you get either "fosforos" or "cerillos"

OK. Back to first gear.

Great point, Mr. Tedesco.

As a side note, I have seen pages on the web that show international traffic symbols, which most of us (in the USA) would not recognize. Imagine cruising along at 100MPH (oops, kmPH) and seeing this:


Back to the issue at hand, though I meant some of this to be tongue-in-cheek, there may be something to it after all.


Have a look at your leisure!

ThinkGood — you raise an interesting point. I’ve had to work with all too many electrical drawings that should have been stamped:

Maybe you have too?

Many domestic panels sold in the U.K. now come with a sheet of stick-on labels for the breakers which use symbols.

The main problem with the use of symbols as I see it is that the symbols must be obvious and clear. The increasing use of symbols over plain English (or any other language) in the world today is supposed to help those who don't understand the language, but in some cases the proliferation of symbols results in even greater confusion.