ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Yikes! Dangerous equipment for sale!

Found this on a website for PC water cooling supplies.



Scary, eh? At least they stated "Grounding conductor is not supplied!"

what sense should this bring?

i know the receptacle, i have these in white. they're DIY, so i guess the guys from that shop make them. i bet thats a VDE violation.

The very same company offers a pump control that switches on the cooling pump whenever the computer is switched on. This control box only has a Euro outlet, but obviously some type of pump has a contour plug, so they invented that ingenious masterpiece.

That's pretty dangerous. Why not just fit 3-core flex and a grounded schuko plug? It's one of the things that I like about the UK/Ireland system; it presumes, correctly, that most people are blissfully unaware of what a ground pin is actually for and makes it non-optional. I'm not a big fan of 2 pin plugs as I've seen endless problems with people ignoring the need for grounding either by fitting 2-pin ungrounded rewirable plugs to 3-core flex or by plugging schuko/french grounded plugs into non-grounded outlets.

Likewise in the US system I've seen plugs with their ground pins cut off so that they could be inserted into an old ungrounded outlet!


To the average person the ground pin (or contacts in most of europe) are just an optional extra. I bet that most people in schuko countries think that they're simply to retain the plug in the socket!

From what I've seen the systems used in the UK/Ireland are the only ones in the world, perhaps due to their relatively late introduction, in which grounding isn't an afterthought. There simply is no non-grounded plug as the ground pin is required to open the socket shutters (and has been since very early versions of BS546 (round pin) sockets) way back in the 1930s/40s perhaps paul UK might know when it was introduced?) and unlike much of the rest of Europe (and north america) where older installations often contain 2-pin outlets, non-grounded sockets just don't exsist at all in the UK or Ireland (and presumably in the other countries which use BS1363 as standard)

Shutters were part of the BS1363 specification from the outset (late 1940s), after which they became the norm on BS546 as well. I'm not sure if there were some shuttered BS546 devices before then, however (there are none of any of the old 1930s sockets I have).

Shutters weren't universal on BS546 adapters. I have several dating from the 1950s, and even early 1960s which have a non-shuttered BS546 5A socket on the front.

Of course, none of the two-pin, non-grounding sockets ever had shutters.

It's probably fair to say that that's the case in 99.9% of homes these days, but old two-pin sockets survived for a remarkably long time.

There were certainly still a large number around in older houses when I was a kid in the 1970s, and even as late as the 1980s I remember seeing some (typically where new rings and BS1363 outlets had been installed but the house still had its original lighting circuits, including 5A sockets).

djk said ...

When visiting Australia for the first time I went looking for two-pin plugs for my laptop and cell phone chargers (both two-core) but couldn't find any - only three pin ones. Could any of antipodean members say whether this is Oz's answer to the problem djk highlighted above. Molded on 2 pin plugs are fine but not rewirables?

No rewireable ungrounded plugs here either. Crimp-on Euro plugs are very rare.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but to me it looks like they even removed the grounding contacts. Reminds me of the good old homemade 1970ies extension cord with Schuko plug and trailing socket but only 2x0.75mm2 zip cord. Go figure...
The trailing socket looks like the typical Conrad electronics type that goes for 1.50. I have a bright red one, and they feel real cheap.
As a side note, looking around a house that's being renovated I found a 1960ies or 1970ies trailing socket. Around the holes for the pins it has a porcelaine insert, so arcing won't destroy the socket. Now _that's_ what I call solid work! In that house some genius had hooked it up to a piece of NYM 2x1.5mm2 (a black and a grey wire inside) dangling down from a wall sconce. Talk about fixed wiring...

Paul uk

do you remember the last MK range when they change the mechanism to open the shutter, from the earth pin pushing the shutter down, to the gaget that worked when the live and neutral pins were inserted..

if you remember if the earth pin was missing off the plug top it would still go in the socket.

Ah yes, the new shutter design.

The old trick of opening the shutter with a meter probe in the earth contact and then transferring to live and neutral has to be changed. It took a little while to master the technique for the new shutters: Probes on opposing corners of live and neutral slots, then equal pressure.

One problem with the "wall wart" power supplies so common these days is that some of them have a plastic "earth" pin. These seem to break off quite easily if handled roughly, but the unit will still fit a socket with this new shutter nechanism.