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What is the best Power Outlet, and why?
(media.piefed.social)
A useful source:
https://worldofsockets.com/
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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As someone who lived in the UK, the British one is far too chunky, especially in an age where most devices don’t use the mandatory earth pin (which is mechanically necessary to open the shutters in the socket). The one place it has an advantage over Europlug is in aeroplane seat sockets and such, where it stays in more firmly.
Having said that, the Swiss and Brazilian ones manage to get earthed connections into a slender footprint (the Swiss is compatible with unearthed Europlug, not sure about the Brazilian though it may be smaller). Apparently the Brazilian socket was proposed as an international standard by the IEC, though only Brazil adopted it.
South Africa is also slowly adopting Type-N.
Europe was supposed to, but abandoned the idea
Earth pin is a safety feature and a good one at that.
For your toaster or iron, yes. For your USB power supply, mobile charger, LED table lamp, game console, etc., which doesn’t even have an earth connection, not so much. But your power board takes up twice the space of a European one with a row of slender unearthed sockets for such devices.
The British standard is still stuck in 1947, where the expected use cases were kettles, washing machines, pre-transistor radios using high-voltage thermionic valves, and the domestic labour-saving devices of the midcentury that needed to be earthed. That and the shortage of copper that led to British houses being wired with a ring main, and each plug having its own fuse, rather than separately fused circuits as elsewhere.
People still use kettles and washing machines.
You can get a USB power strip.
You can still have sockets that accept grounded appliances like washing machines without ALWAYS requiring a bulky third prong that's not gonna get used anyways. And about the shutters you can have them open when both prongs are inserted at the same time
So is the shutter system. Blocking contacts unless a third is pushed in is great safety, particularly with kids.
And having your chargers look like clown shoes compared to the slender 2-pin chargers used in Europe, Australia and elsewhere is a small price to pay.
Do more kids really die of electrocution in, say, France or Germany than the UK?
Just jab a pen tip in the earth shutter, so you can push a European plug in, with little force. The diameters of the prongs are close.
That is true, though it is still taking up far more space than it could if the system accommodated unearthed plugs.