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Joined: Sep 2020
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I think all of our hair dryers are double insulated but they also add an immersion detector so it will trip out if you drop it in the tub.

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Originally Posted by Meadow
Originally Posted by gfretwell
Toasters in the US are the metaphor for a potentially deadly appliance but they sell for $10 US (less than a 12 pack of beer).
I suppose we just trust the GFCI and get on with our lives. The actual death toll from kitchen appliances is lost in the margin of error in the statistics.


The lack of ground pins on small appliances are actually what got GFCIs into homes. Had their been a mandate GFCI could have been delayed if not eliminated in some areas of the home.


This goes into the history:
http://www.necconnect.org/resources/gfcis/


GFCI's were required for bathrooms, outdoor locations, & garages, long before they were required in kitchens, even then the requirements were limited to receptacles within 6' of the sink until it was later expanded to the whole kitchen.

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GFCI protection is much more significant than you would get by simply grounding the can. Using the toaster as an example GFCI protects the Darwin Award contestant who sticks a fork in there to retrieve a stuck piece of toast. Sinks and other water sources was where they began but standing barefoot on a tile floor in a house built on a slab is every bit as bad. The first thing I had to fix in this house was the grounding electrode system because the grounded equipment was carrying "tingle" voltage on the EGC, hence the can. Tingle is actually an understatement. It knocked the snot out of me the first morning I lived here. I was wide awake by the time the coffee was done.


Greg Fretwell
Joined: Dec 2001
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IMO toasters should have double-pole switches and all the respectable ones I've worked on did. However, I did also witness an RCD trip because of someone doing just that, so certainly not all of them do.

Y filter capacitors in appliances can give you quite a nasty belt when the earthing is compromised, either not connected at all or high-impedance, usually due to a poor connection. One of the most common complaints is "I always get a shock when I touch the dishwasher and the sink at the same time!". The first thing I do is break out the tester and do an earth continuity check (high-current resistance measurement) on the dishwasher socket.

Joined: May 2015
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Could also have been a faulty switch (one pole stuck closed) in the toaster, as has been implicated in these two recalls.

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I've never liked Y-type capacitors, they are effectively lipstick on a pig. mad
And inherently, the way they are installed, they will fail, that is without them being mass-produced
junk.
Back in the day when they first came out, they used paper, aluminium foil and were injected with
mineral oil.
These days, they could be anything, if some of them are even in fact capacitors inside the body.
It's no wonder people are getting shocks off of things they aren't meant to.
When these were first bought into the market, they had a withstand voltage of about 750VAC,
nowadays you see them with ratings like 550VAC, I removed one last week that had a rating
of 315V, which is below the peak voltage rating of a 230V mains circuit.

Joined: Jul 2002
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Originally Posted by LongRunner

Clipsal (our main Australian brand of electrical fittings) already have quite a few 'auto-switched' (the active contact disconnects from mains when the plug is removed) single outlets (and even a twin in their older "Standard" series); although observing their outrageous list prices, I can understand why hardly anyone bothers with them. crazy


Bearing in mind that Clipsal is not made in Australia anymore, just like PDL here in New Zealand, it is now a Schnieder brand in name only, so all of this gear is made in China, with their quality control (or lack thereof).

I've seen gear that I used to use day in, day out made by Clipsal and PDL, it is now just junk, no quality control whatsoever, when you have to sell this to customers, it doesn't make any sense at all, you will be back in a number of
weeks or months, because this stuff doesn't cut the mustard.
But I suppose you aren't "on the tools" are you LongRunner?, you wouldn't see that?

Joined: Dec 2001
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As far as I know the AC voltage rating of filter capacitors refers to the RMS voltage of the AC supply, not the peak voltage. In bygone days of 220 V, X and Y caps were usually rated for 250 V and those designed for the international market (including the UK) were usually 275 V ones. To this day, many electronics stores sell 250 V filter caps, presumably new old stock from the 1970s and 1980s. Before the X and Y designations were invented, filter capacitors had either dual DC/AC ratings, usually not exceeding 250 V AC either, or only DC ratings, usually at least 600 V DC.

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Originally Posted by gfretwell
The scary thing here is in a time when we are supposed to be conserving, there are more people getting 320 and 400 amp services.

Surely that isn't Residential with a load like that, Greg?

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Even over here in New Zealand, for a large house, it would still be a 63 Amp single phase pole/pillar box fuse, this normally feeds a 16mm² Neutral Screened cable.
We have installed the odd 80 Amp single phase, with a 35mm² Neutral Screened cable.

Any loading above that will be 3 phase derived from the transformer (either pole-top or ground-mounted on the boundary), this is common in rural areas where the water extraction (well) pump is 3 phase 400V, yet you have a neutral sized for all of the single-phase loads in the house, workshop and other things.

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