This is genuinely the best plug ever and no one can convince me otherwise.
I've toured continental Europe (France, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy), the US, India, and ANZ, and all of their plugs are downgrades in comparison to the icon of engineering that is Type G/BS1363. The former somehow all tend to end up with loose contact, wiggling and sparking, degraded power/current, or a cable that sticks out perpendicular to the wall, or some other annoyance. People argue for the Schuko but it is as large as, if not larger than BS1363 plugs. The earthing setup is odd.
The BS1363 is so massive that it shrugs off power loads of multiple kilowatts—British kettles and toaster ovens run at up to 3 kW or more. One could possibly even charge their EV with BS1363 without needing any automotive cable standard[1].
The BS1363 has a satisfying 'thonk' that no other plug has. It feels like you're powering up some futuristic space craft, not your vacuum cleaner.
2. Requires grounding (third pin), even when devices don't need it. Other standards let devices decide.
3. Doesn't allow the cord to go straight out of the plug, it always go sideways which makes it even clunkier, harder to plug (e.g. behind a nightstand at a hotel), and more prone to cord damage from bending.
CEE 7/3 and CEE 7/5 (known as "French" and "German") are way better IMHO. I doubt they have problems with "wiggling and sparking" -- that wouldn't pass certification. And it's easy to make a plug to fit both of them, with or without grounding. CEE 7/5 can even be plugged upside down.
1. There is little size difference between your choices and BS1363 plugs/sockets. They are large, I concede, but that is in pursuit of the many safety features of the plug.
2. Better have it than not. Plus, it makes for a single uniform plug design and specification that is straightforwardly adhered to.
3. IMO this is a good thing as it allows furniture to be set up considerably closer to the walls.
Funny you mention hotels, because I was in one in France not two weeks ago and it had the worst sockets I've ever seen. My phones took forever to charge, half the sockets didn't even seem to have power, and they all had this unintuitive setup where there was a spring loaded panel in the socket that needed to be twisted to get the plug in.
Now, I've seen some odd BS1363 setups, but never one this strange.
> Funny you mention hotels, because I was in one in France not two weeks ago and it had the worst sockets I've ever seen.
My worst experience was in a hotel in the US, with the weight of my adapter and plug they just fell out of the socket. Luckily, for once Jesus saved me; the ubiquitous bible in the nightstand drawer was just the right size to prop up the adapter and I was able to charge my laptop!
Never had a problem with Schuko plugs falling out by themselves, FWIW, if anything the springs are often so tight you need two hands to pull it out so you don't wiggle the socket.
1. Are we talking about the same plugs? Europlugs are significantly smaller and fit into both [1]. Grounded is larger but still way smaller than BS1363.
2. No, there's simply no point in having it for devices that don't need it.
3. My point is Europlugs give you choice, there are plugs that bend and ones that are not, your choice. BS1363 is always bent.
> My phones took forever to charge
Dude, that's not how chargers work. They either charge at full power your charger can, or do not charge at all. Well, unless your charger can supply 2000+ W to your phones, but I've yet to see a phone capable of more that 37 W. Which means one plug can charge _at least_ 50 phones at the same time, maybe even 100. Any plug is _way_ more powerful than USB can deliver.
On 2/ there is a safety point in having the grounding pin on all plugs, and it being longer than the live/neutral: in the socket side, the grounding pin opens up latches that block live/neutral, so kids can’t stick things into them..
I generally would agree it is the best plug standard for safety, but clunky and painful to step on..
My only issue with the plug is 3. sort of. I prefer the cable being perpendicular to the plug (prevents accidental removal), but I wish there was a standard dictating which way it should leave relative to the earth pin. Drives me mad when plugging in items to an extension lead and they all come off in different directions.
Agreed. If anything it's an icon of overengineering. The main advantage imo is that you dont need to worry about a kid sticking a fork into the wall socket. I grew up with it so i never really thought it strange that the plugs are 2 or 3 times bigger then necessary. It's an event every time you connect to the National Grid as the plug slots into the wall with a satisfying clunk, so there's that i guess.
Ironically the older BS546† had smaller plugs for lower powered appliances. But each different size of plug needed a different socket, because the fuse was in the socket. This system is still used in India, but I'm not sure how widespread it is.
BS546 is very uncommon now, but can still be found in some relatively modern british homes and businesses where the sockets are used to "code" for connected appliances. For example, the 5A socket may be wired up to a switched lighting circuit to connect lamps but prevent connecting higher power appliances. I've also seen the 15A sockets being placed in communal areas of flats to provide cleaning and maintenance staff power while discouraging tenants from using them.
You're completely right. People love the British plug because it has lots of features but they're mostly obsolete features or required by the equally obsolete ring wiring. So in the end, it's just a pile of useless inconveniences. Don't Britons have RCDs?
I've only seen this happen when the plug was fitted badly (pinched or damaged wires inside the plug) or someone use a nail in place of the fuse. People do stupid things like that all the time but it's not the fault of the standard, a fuse should blow if it's run over-current for too long.
It can happen if a high power device is used continually. This is against the regulations, but sometimes people do things like connect a 3kW weather heater with a 13A plug, or connect several devices adding up to that power through a power strip.
As a North American, I'm very jealous of the BS1363. I know some people don't like the mandatory ground pin, but it actually serves a really handy purpose. Because the shutter is engaged by the slightly longer ground pin, the shutter just works with minimal resistance.
In the US and Canada, the electrical codes now require tamper resistant receptacles in most residential settings, to stop children from poking metal objects into them. Because the ground pin is optional on plugs that connect to the standard NEMA 5-15R receptacle, you can't use the ground pin as a keying feature like you can with the BS1363. Instead, there is a mechanism that is supposed to only allow a plug to be inserted when both hot and neutral pins are present. It is probably the worst thing ever designed. Sometimes it works fine, a bit of extra pressure and the plug goes right in. But most of the time, it stubbornly binds up and you're left trying to fiddle with the plug to find the perfect combination of pressure and angle that allows the shutter to open. It can be horrendously frustrating.
I found that there's a surprising difference in quality for what feels like it should be a commodity item. All the outlets in my newish build were tamper-resistant, and pretty much as you described -- at best they were unpleasantly stiff and awkward to use, and some specific outlets would require a worrying amount of force and wiggling to plug anything in.
After a couple of high-usage outlets got jammed to the point that nothing could be plugged in, I replaced them with ones from the hardware store, and they are a big improvement. The existing outlets are unbranded, and I guess were from a bulk box of the cheapest that the electrician could source.
In my experience, Leviton are OK (much better than what was originally fitted), but Eaton are great -- they require slightly more force than non-TR outlets, but they're consistent, reliable, and I've never had to try more than once to plug anything in.
11 years living in the UK. I don't think even once I thought of it as _minimal resistance_. At best it requires a firm push. At worst, a couple of hammerings with the side of the fist.
Note that I don't mind the ground pin or having things grounded by default. Even if it wasn't more or less essential due to the mind blowing lack of safety of the ring circuit, it's still a nice and cheap enough extra bit of protection.
I live in UK so biased, but yeah, I mostly love British plugs and sockets.
They do take up too much space, and are painful to stand on if you leave one unplugged.
But they are still just really satisfying. Plugs just don't fall out of sockets. They are solid and feel reliable. The safety feature of the longer pin opening the socket for the live wires is good. Always found EU and US style plugs and sockets to be worryingly flimsy and the plugs sometimes dangle a bit out of the socket.
It also has a fuse in it that is completely useless in almost all world except UK. So no thanks, you can keep it. We prefer not to burn our houses down.
That "added safety feature" is only because of ring circuits, which are a cute hack sure, but not only have real fun failure modes, they make it impossible to use correctly rated MCBs. Your breaker won't trip unless you exceed total ring capacity.
> So this is why there is a need for a fuse, it is there to protect the cable running between the plug and the appliance. The alternative would be to have 32A tolerant cables on every device.
> they make it impossible to use correctly rated MCBs.
It looks like UK is 32A standard but US us 20 or 15A - is that a significant enough difference that the US is safer? 15/20A is still chunky.
If anything that argues in the other direction since an equivalent US appliance at the same wattage will draw almost twice the current as a UK one. If we’re talking about the risk of overheating then current is the big factor.
In the UK we can put a fuse of e.g. 3A in the plug of a device that is suited for the devices expected draw, but if I understand correctly this could be 15A for the same device in the US?
It would need to be a 6A fuse in the US. Watts = Amps * Volts, or Watts / Volts == amps.
US (and really, everywhere except the UK/Singapore/Malaysia, and I think HK) doesn’t use plug fuses, preferring circuit level protection, because they typically have non-insane circuit power levels.
It does result in more branch circuit wiring (albeit thinner gauge) and breakers though, and saving on copper post WW2 was the primary motivation for UK style ring circuits anyway.
Many houses in the US were 50A/120V (for the whole panel/house!) until the 60’s, because that was a lot of power - 6kw. It wasn’t until electric appliances that it started to change, and the modern 200A split phase panels (typically 22/44kw)didn’t start to become the norm until whole house HVAC became normal. Think 80’s/90’s. A lot of houses still don’t have modern panels.
A single UK ring circuit at 32A@220v is 7kw, or more than enough to run a very beefy welder, and more than a whole house service in the US at the time.
A breaker on each of those ring circuits is essentially a ‘whole house breaker’, and would not trip on a whole host of ‘everything is melting’ situations.
So you need per-appliance fuses to protect the wiring for appliances and not burn the place down, or run 6 gauge wire everywhere in your appliances too, which would remove any cost savings in material.
> It would need to be a 6A fuse in the US. Watts = Amps * Volts, or Watts / Volts == amps.
My point was that the (up to) 3A UK device gets 3A fuse in the plug in the UK. In the US that device becomes a 6A device but (essentially) gets a 15A fuse in the breaker box, is that the case? Because that seems worse.
A fault in the device blows the plug fuse in the UK. The same fault needs to trip the 15A one in the US.
> A breaker on each of those ring circuits is essentially a ‘whole house breaker’, and would not trip on a whole host of ‘everything is melting’ situations.
I don’t know what this means. It will trip for currents greater than its rating. Nothing should be melting under its rating.
The rating on a UK ring circuit breaker is so high that you can literally melt significant quantities of steel without tripping the breaker, and certainly can turn typical appliance wiring incandescent, also without tripping the breaker.
The rule for electrical systems is that any downstream wiring/circuit that would catch on fire in the event of a fault, needs to have a breaker in the circuit before that point, that will interrupt the circuit before the point it would catch on fire.
In the US, every device is just constructed to be safe up to 15/20amps, which uses a bit more copper but is not really a major problem.
But the current is so much higher in the UK, and that is why the fuses on the plugs, because without the fuses providing a lower cut-off point, at a minimum the wires to a typical lamp or whatever, at least to the point it has a fuse or circuit breaker, would need to safely be able to carry the full 32A/220v load without catching on fire.
Which is a very thick cable. And quite a bit more expensive than the tiny bit of extra copper needed to get to 15/20A from 6A.
Does that make sense? The UK plugs essentially distribute the job of overcurrent protection to every single devices plug, where everywhere else it is more centralized at the (lower capacity) circuit level.
As to if this is better or worse is more a matter of opinion and specific local economics that have changed over time than a resolvable ‘fact’.
It all makes sense in that it confirms the crazy thing I couldn’t believe was true at the beginning - US appliances have the ability to sink a ton more current than they would ever need under normal operation, which seems like a safety issue. Would you want your electric toothbrush charger sinking 15A in some fault condition?
A UK device blows its own fuse under these circumstances. The wasted copper in every US appliance cord is just insult to injury.
> The rating on a UK ring circuit breaker is so high that you can literally melt significant quantities of steel without tripping the breaker
That’s fine, as long as everything is rated to that draw and doesn’t melt. If the wires couldn’t handle it then the breaker would be rated lower.
> certainly can turn typical appliance wiring incandescent, also without tripping the breaker.
And that’s where the fuse “shines”!
Seems like the UK method uses less copper and gives finer control in over current scenarios. I don’t see any benefits of the US style.
The US style also has much smaller and cheaper plugs, and the cords are all basically the same size anyway. I don’t recall any UK appliances being notably less bulky or anything either (though when running 220v, you can have electric kettles which aren’t lame, which is nice).
Notably, pretty much everywhere else in the world also uses similar branch circuit type designs and 220v and their plugs and appliances are also not notably more bulky either.
The difference in wire diameter between say 6amps and 15 amps isn’t that noticeable. 15 and 30 is.
> The BS1363 is so massive that it shrugs off power loads of multiple kilowatts
They do have a higher current rating than the French and German standards (30A vs. 16A) but even those do support up to 4 kW. Ovens also run at 3 kW or so in France and Germany.
You usually do not plug an oven into a standard 230V socket in Germany. They are connected to 3 phase outlets with 400V and up to 16A, which is nothing to sneeze at.
3 phase for ovens? That seems totally overkill to me.
In France even though they're not usually plugged into a standard socket, all the ovens I've used ran on standard single phase current. Houses are almost never wired for 3 phase anyway.
Parent was talking about toaster ovens though, and those are (as far as I know) always plugged to normal sockets.
I think Swiss plugs (type C) might be better. They have a pretty good thonk.
I think your complaint with them is that they stick out perpendicularly from the wall but IMO this is a good tradeoff.
It means you can fit more plugs in the same wall space, so Swiss wall sockets typically come in groups of 3 instead of 2, and extension strips can fit many plugs without being very large.
Conversely if you need the cable to lie close to the wall you can get hinge adapters to make this work, they are convenient and reliable.
Since I lived in Switzerland I have not had a fuse blow, I don't know how that works. Having the fuses in a standard place in the British plugs is very nice.
Having lived in both countries for a while, I find the Swiss plugs nowhere near as satisfying, and the flat (non-recessed) wall outlets are also prone to plugs becoming loosened due to weight, similar to the US/CAN/JP plug.
I do quite like the compactness and aesthetic of the three-prong plug with three plugs in a typical wall fixture, and the compatibility with the two-prong Europlug is convenient. However, using even one adapter with a foreign plug often obstructs the other two plugs in a three-plug fixture, particularly as the adapter usually isn’t reversible if grounded, which is quite annoying if that’s the only socket in a room.
I guess the UK plug being large enough to subsume most foreign plug adapters is one silver lining of its size.
It could be a little smaller, but compared to the USA plug and socket it's pure perfection.
USA plugs have prongs that are so thin they bend. The prongs act as a hinge that lets the plug pivot away from the wall to expose the live prongs! And most USA sockets don't have ground on top to block anything resting over those exposed live prongs.
> British kettles and toaster ovens run at up to 3 kW or more
Not "or more" if it's using a BS1363. The absolute max at 230V with a 13 amp fuse is 3kW. The Schuko spec actually goes a bit higher (16amps) though in practice appliances >3kW are rare.
Surprised you've been to ANZ and didn't find their sockets best. Breakdown of things Type-I has:
1. small form factor – BS1363/EU no, US yes
2. grounding not required – BS1363 no, EU/US yes
3. good contact / not much wiggle (in type-I due to angling) – BS1363 yes, US/EU no
4. cable can either be parallel or perpendicular to the wall. You claim this is a failing but having options is good. Having a cable perpendicular to the wall is never an option with BS1363 and not having options is clearly worse (like with grounding) – BS1363/EU no, US yes
5. no risk of plugging in upside down – EU/BS1363 yes (BS because of required grounding), US no (need one pin to be larger which is error prone)
6. wall/female side can be flush – US/BS1363 yes, EU no
There is literally no downside to ANZ plugs imo. You say having required grounding is good but eh, many things don't need it. Even if we do think grounding is necessary, then the best option would still be type-I (because it is smaller then BS1363 and has the parallel/perpendicular options).
Schuko is terrible because needing a cavity in the wall in order to have good contact is a poor design and makes the plugs larger than necessary and I think that is the most important requirement.
The ANZ plug is pretty good but when China adopted it they found a way to improve it - they put it upside down so the ground is at the top for slightly improved safety.
Indeed, although even if it is unplugged only a careless moron would step on a plug. Rather like stepping on Lego - yes it would hurt but it's easily avoided!
That's what the parent commenter means by 'They just matched the outer dimensions of Whitney'.
In other words, metrically compatible. To the untrained eye, metrically compatible typefaces all look the same, because they're meant to be swapped between each other. In my view Whitney and Source Sans couldn't be more different. The stroke cuts in Whitney are angled, they're perpendicular in Source Sans. The lowercase 'b', 'e', and 'g' are very different in both fonts.
I'd say this is Source Sans. I'm sorry to trivialise Nebula's effort, but this seems much ado about nothing—they warped Source Sans' glyphs to be metrically compatible with Whitney, renamed the result 'Nebula Sans', got a developer and videographer to produce a whole website and mini-documentary on the matter and called it a day.
All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans.
Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.
At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.
I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.
Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.
The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.
I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.
Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.
Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.
Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.
I also spent some time evaluating a lot of open fonts and I agree that most of them have flaws, especially when it comes to kerning. The exceptions are fonts that have been developed for and are used by very large organizations, such as Public Sans (US government), IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans (Abobe), etc. Then the quality is equivalent (or even better) than what you get from proprietary fonts.
Every time I thought about buying a font, I've been put off by the terms.
A few tens of euro for desktop use? Sure. But when that font's supposed to be part of an organisation's identity, I'll need it for web use as well, which can be 10x as expensive. And when I want to e.g. generate invoices, that's even more money again, yearly.
I only work with small clients on things like this, but I've never had anyone willing to pay the money. Free fonts might not be as good, but that's not relevant for me, because paid fonts just aren't an option.
Oh, non-Latin type faces are an entirely different ball-game, don't even get me started. I have massive respect for CJK type designers; there are thousands of glyphs! Designing a good new typeface must take years, if not decades.
This is weird to say, but it never occurred to me previously that an ISO-8859-1 font perfectly consistent with all variants of itself + CJK(by switching variants or whatever) would be massively useful. CJK speakers usually switch and mix fonts as needed to build a content than trying to pick single font for everything, and vast majority of people just don't understand multiple languages, so there are little driving forces towards a single universal font solution.
But a universal font makes sense. It's almost odd that this is so rarely said out loud.
I agree and I'd like to know what's your take on the Fira font family? I've configured my desktop and browser to use this font and now I can't go back. Subjectively I kind of developed a little crush on that font and I'm interested if it also has technical merit or if I'm just making things up in my mind.
Fira was designed by world-class type designers, and it’s only free thanks to the funding by Mozilla and Here, so yes, definitely a different category.
I do like Fira, and definitely one of the few exceptions. Although I wish the lowercase 'y' were a bit less busy, with the left stroke completely joining into the right descender rather than how it is now, with a little bit sticking out. Additionally I must point out that Fira itself is a derivative (I'd say 'clone') of FF Meta, which was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bundespost.
Another commenter pointed out IBM Plex which I also like, but I have a bit of an issue with the lowercase Roman 'a' glyph, where the bottom curve into the vertical is a tad bit too thin for my liking.
As a rule of thumb, if a company has paid a foundry a handsome sum of money for its corporate branding and wants to use the resultant typeface everywhere, the result is usually quite decent, and has what I call 'character without being excessively fancy'.
All three are quite utilitarian typefaces, nothing to really write home about. But they're all quite readable, which makes them appropriate for the use cases they're typically employed for—UIs and basic document production. Especially Open and Noto Sans; they look like wider Calibris.
Alegreya seems like a Garamond derivative, but it has a very interesting character; the glyph stroke widths—especially the verticals—have an intriguing taper. I really like the lowercase italic 'g' and 'h'.
Playfair is Didone, and I feel Didones (this includes TeX's default, Computer Modern) don't really do well on displays because of the very high contrast between the ball serifs and rather thin vertical strokes. Otherwise it's a nice Didone: I'd use it, but as a printed typeface.
I'm not the biggest fan of Ubuntu. Especially the lowercase 'r', it's got a weird shape.
> It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn people about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross the road
I don't understand this mindset. Do people not walk where you live, or do you not have elderly care homes? I've been to _multiple_ countries and nearly all of them with some uniform signage standard warn motorists about elderly and children crossing.
I think the point is that elderly people are fairly sentient so you don't have to worry about them doing dumb things like darting out in front of a semi truck like you do with kids so there's no reason to warn drivers about a high density of them since they behave like normal pedestrians if perhaps a bit slower.
Naples FL needs signs like these. Only it’s to warn motorists of elderly people attempting to pilot Lamborghinis and other ridiculously powerful sports cars. It’s surreal to see valet have to help an 80 year old out of a aventador and the step up the curb to the door of a restaurant.
Solarpunk being an anarchist adjacent genre/aesthetic makes it very distant from an authoritarian regime that suppresses freedom of speech such as Singapore…
> always unplug any other drives when installing Windows!
Many motherboards and enterprise notebooks have functionality to disable SATA/NVMe ports, so there's increasingly less need to faff with physically unplugging discs.
It's easy when SATA drives are stacked to unplug the ones you want.
It's not easy when M.2 requires removing a heatsink to press the PCI-e unlock to extract the 2 ton GPU to access the primary M.2 slot underneath to use your screwdriver on the screw the size of a PopRock clinging on trying to not shake because it's holding onto the screwdriver with the magnetic force equivalent of a fridge magnet.
Swapping the actual nvme drive out is easy. But then getting that screw back in is even worse than removing it. Sometimes you get lucky and the motherboard is improving the hotswapping capability with the newest yearly reimplementation of a screw with a string on it so if your screwdriver has trouble holding a fridge magnet against the gravity of the earth then the string keeps the screw from phase warping. My favorite has been the rubber peg designs but we're 10 years out from combining the peg with the string tech.
That's when reading the manual to figure out the port numbers to disable in the BIOS makes sense. It just seems like missed opportunity they didn't make M.2 external facing.
Too bad my Lenovo lets me disable the SATA but not NvMe :(
Plus I remember doing this for years under bios until some version of NT6 came along and Windows could access them even when disabled in BIOS on some mainboards.
I've toured continental Europe (France, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy), the US, India, and ANZ, and all of their plugs are downgrades in comparison to the icon of engineering that is Type G/BS1363. The former somehow all tend to end up with loose contact, wiggling and sparking, degraded power/current, or a cable that sticks out perpendicular to the wall, or some other annoyance. People argue for the Schuko but it is as large as, if not larger than BS1363 plugs. The earthing setup is odd.
The BS1363 is so massive that it shrugs off power loads of multiple kilowatts—British kettles and toaster ovens run at up to 3 kW or more. One could possibly even charge their EV with BS1363 without needing any automotive cable standard[1].
The BS1363 has a satisfying 'thonk' that no other plug has. It feels like you're powering up some futuristic space craft, not your vacuum cleaner.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricVehiclesUK/comments/1gta12f...
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