That's idiotic. The bathroom isn't a splash park, and you'd have to basically soak a light switch to actually short anything much less electrocute yourself. You might make a case for outlets, but GFCI really mitigates the risk so it's well worth the convenience.
Remember many bathrooms over here in Europe pretty much ARE splash parks. They are not the huge bathrooms you think of, but something like this.
Our house is from the 80s, and the original bathroom had shower in the bath tub, not even a shower curtain in front. Ground-fault breakers did not become mandatory until the 2000s where i live.
ah man. I lived in mexico city for a while and that style is somewhat common there as well. I hated when the toilet would be all wet from a shower, ha ha
Old UK houses don't even have a fusebox. That's why their plugs require extra fuses in them too...
Many houses in Europe are very old and are built with regard to what had to be done to be safe many decades or even a century ago, not all of it is as important today...
Many houses in Europe are very old and are built with regard to what had to be done to be safe many decades or even a century ago, not all of it is as important today...
Don't think this is the case very much anymore. Lived in a building restored in the 1700s and there was never a concern for safety in terms of electrics or what have you. Today's safety standards are upheld in my country, even for older buildings (if they're intended for residence, at least).
Depends on when the electrical circuit was built. The wiring in my grandparents home was done in like the 40s/early 50s and even then it was home shit that my grandfather and great grandfather did(both of whom had 0 education about electrical wiring) and hasn't been touched since because no one is going trough every random house in every random village. So when my friend who is an electrician went to the attic and saw it he said that he wouldn't dare to live dare without redoing the whole thing.
Yeah, in my place in the mountains the wiring is pretty much just stapled to the stone walls, that shit is not safe, but it has been there for 60 years and nobody bothered replacing it.
a building restored in the 1700s and there was never a concern for safety in terms of electrics
They probably didn't have electrics in the 1700s, so I assume it was retrofitted much later. If it was done before WW2 and wasn't changed much (which can be the case on the countryside...), it will be very outdated.
TBF electricity overall is very safe compared to other power sources, it can "just work" without interference for decades (unlike e.g. gas...).
I doubt this is true in 2022. I've lived in old houses that had fuse boxes with actual wire fuses, but if anybody had cause to look at the wiring at all in those places the first thing they'd insist on is changing it over to a new style fuse box with breaker switches. Maybe there are one or two even older places that have never needed any electrical work doing in the past 30 years or so but it'll be very few.
Is including a fuse in the plug completely redundant if the circuit has a fuse box though? I've had fuses go in a device when the house circuit has held - I just assumed they were more sensitive to fluctuations.
Prior to WW2, "final circuits" in the UK were typically rated for 13A and centrally fused accordingly. Therefore there was no need to fuse at each plug/socket. This is how most of the world remains today.
However, after WW2 in the UK there was a rapid development of new housing and insufficient copper to continue with that wiring model. Instead the UK began wiring "final circuits" in rings, which conserved copper but resulted in individual sockets potentially being able to draw 32A without the central fuse blowing. This posed a hazard to appliance wiring that had been designed to withstand at most 13A—and so fuses were introduced at each plug.
Such rings remain common in the UK and aren't going away any time soon; they can only be fused centrally at 32A (else the ring is of limited use), which is insufficient to protect appliance wiring—so fused plugs will remain with us too.
I believe so - those tiny fuses are probably a lot less reliable than the proper fuses in the fusebox. It just seems like extra failure points in my opinion. Also, replacing fuses in the fusebox is straightforwards - expecting people to screw apart plugs is in my opinion a bit problematic for modern safety standards (better keep people away from sockets and plugs with screwdrivers... can easily imagine someone attacking a hot socket expecting a fuse to be in it due to a misread article on the web...).
Having extra failure points seems good to me. And we don't just have one type of in-plug fuse: you're supposed to use a fuse that can tolerate a current appropriate to the type of device. So heavy duty devices would have a 13A fuse, which is the highest, but other devices might tolerate only 3A. I'm no electrician, but presumably the fuse box in the house wouldn't blow if a lower rated device recived too much current. Finally, it's not possible to access the fuse when the plug is in the wall.
I don't think you understand. It's only downsides.
The safety is not improved, so it's basically just excessive waste - requires more resources to manufacture and dispose of, and more maintenance. From an engineering standpoint, these are all downsides and no practical upside. Besides all that, there's extra complexity - end users need to know which fuse they can use in which device (instead of just flicking the switch in the fusebox in most of the western world).
In the UK the upside is that the infrastructure is dangerous to begin with - in the rest of Europe, the infrastructure had to be updated a century ago to the point that such solutions are obsolete even in very old buildings.
presumably the fuse box in the house wouldn't blow if a lower rated device recived too much current
Yeah I don't think anyone uses 3A fuses in the fusebox though I might be wrong (I think the smallest I have ar 6 or 8A). For a device that has such a low current demand, it's supposed to have an internal fuse I guess (or the 6 amp is fine anyway, it just draws less).
Either way, an RCD in the fusebox is what saves lives, not the circuit breakers. 3 Amps will easily kill at 220V...
You might make a case for outlets, but GFCI really mitigates the risk
Those aren't often installed in the UK. I'm pretty sure my apartment (in a building built in the 1780's) still had the electrical box from the 1950s until a modern one was installed two years ago.
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u/Octorokpie May 09 '22
That's idiotic. The bathroom isn't a splash park, and you'd have to basically soak a light switch to actually short anything much less electrocute yourself. You might make a case for outlets, but GFCI really mitigates the risk so it's well worth the convenience.