The 400 deaths in the US are not in the bathroom. Most of those deaths are in the workplace, mostly construction workers.
Yes I know. The 29 E&W deaths aren’t bathroom deaths either - they’re total deaths from electric current. Somehow or other, Brits are much better at not killing themselves with electricity.
The US has 240V, too. We just split it into two 120V phases unless we need the juice for big appliances like clothes dryers or water heaters. 
Also, if we’re using Fisher-Price electricity because our voltage is half of yours, does that mean your electricity is also a kid’s toy because it draws half the current? 
There’s no economic or safety reason to unplug them. But those non-stop LEDs drive me crazy when I’m trying to sleep! I often unplug appliances (or put electrical tape over the LEDs) at night for this reason. I think this problem is getting better in newer devices though.
Re the bathroom light-switch thing, until relatively recently, lighting circuits in British homes were commonly not earthed (grounded). The main lighting circuit in my house, built in the mid 1960s, is not earthed. Wet hands plus unearthed light switches = bad plan.
In my own bathroom the switch is on the wall outside. It’s actually a double switch shared with the light for the upstairs landing, which is on a different circuit. And a few months ago when I replaced the switch, I forgot this fact and only turned off one of the circuits, with the result that I grabbed a live wire. Weirdly, I hardly even noticed, other than wondering what the slight tingly feeling was. I even grabbed it a second time. I guess I have now used up my luck with 240V juice!
UK domestic installations have three wires, live, neutral, earth.
The neutral is referenced to earth at the incomer, this means it is possible to get a shock from live to earth. It also means that absolutely anything that conducts, such as copper pipes can provide a return route for a shock.
In areas where there is greater vulnerability to electric shock, such as bathrooms, kitchens, wet rooms etc it means that all these non-current carrying conductors must also be bonded to earth - and this ensures that in the event of a fault, current will be grounded.
The idea is to shunt current through a very low impedance path, this will result in a large current flow and will disconnect a circuit quickly through the protective device
This is called equipotential bonding.
Our electrical system developed over a period when gas mains and water pipes were often used as earthing points and their grounded rating could be guaranteed, this is not the case nowadays since we use pvc and other plastics for pipework, we even had some installations that used the cold water pipes as a ground reference in its own right.
Many installations even today have a mixture of copper and plastic pipework, so you cannot guarantee that everything is earthed unless you make an earth bond directly - previously it was just assumed that the copper pipe was grounded
In the event of a fault where there is a current flow or current charging of a non -circuit conductor, we have to ensure these are now grounded, or the danger is that the non-circuit conductor could become live and remain live if it is not grounded - and if it is not grounded then there will be no current flow, and the circuit will not trip out.
Other options for power in a high risk zone can include low voltage - or double insulated non-earthed systems such as shaver sockets.
It is not necessarily the socket that directly presents the danger, water ingress can condense inside a box and cause problems, and the more common risk comes from whatever you happen to plug into the outlet - you have flex leads, you really do not want someone using a hair dryer whilst sitting in the bath (yes really some folk are genuinely that dumb)
Colophon You have it slightly wrong, if you have an earth free zone, you cannot get a shock to earth, and in some very high risk areas we will use an isolating transformer to produce an earth free zone.
It does of course allow you to get a shock from points of different potential , so you can get a shock from the frayed lead into the neutral - such as if you chopped through a flex - and in such as case you don’t have too much protection.
You might wonder why bother having earths in a circuit at all, well its very hard to absolutely ensure there is no false earth in a circuit - after all if you have no reference to ground then there is no return path, and its possible for you to touch a live conductor - you would not get a shock. The reality is that what happens is that you can then get a fault earth, imagine appliance has melted its wiring - if that happens and you have not earth, there is a very good chance that the current will still not be enough to blow the fuse - so the appliance gets hot, breaks down and starts a fire, you can also get loops in double earth systems where a fault develops in one area and yet other areas such as the kitchen sink or other water pipe connected appliance then becomes partially live, let me tell you that a 100v shock is not very pleasing.
By introducing one controlled earth and referencing everything to it, it ensures that any short circuit current is going to blow the fuse.
Another big advantage we have by operating our electrical system is that we can use Residual Current (RCD)devices - these appear at first to be the same as GFCI devices, but they are not.
RCDs operate on a balance between outgoing current and return current - any difference and they will trip - this is because any ground fault current is shared between the earth and the neutral, making live minus neutral not being zero.
The result is that they are far more sensitive than GFCI and they operate faster at lower levels of fault current.
GFCI operate somewhat differently, its still possible to get a belt from a GFCI device, its just very likely it will disconnect before you receive a fatal shock - these tend to be used on systems without an earth, such as 2 wire 110v
Deaths from electricity from direct contact are rare, by far the most common way electricity can kill you is from the fire that is caused by a faulty electrical appliance.
@Mangetout- Sorry, I wasn’t clear - I was referring to Bob++'s comment regarding the fact that Brits have split the single household breaker panel that we have in N.A. into two separate units. One to which all the wall receptacles are wired and a second one to which all the ceiling fixtures are wired. I did notice this at my friend’s flat.
I’m not at all clear what practical advantages this confers. I presume it to be for safety, as opposed to extensive lobbying by an electrician’s guild that wants to get paid more to wire a house.
I understand the critical importance of grounding, but I’m not sure what the dual breaker panels have to do with that or how they improve it. Typical N.A. homes have dedicated ground connections. All the houses I’ve ever seen have a steel rod driven directly into the earth outside the house & most also have a second ground wire attached to the copper water inflow pipe.
It seems to me the double breaker panels (or quadruple as Bob++ notes in a 2 story house!) are a massive amount of extra cost for unclear benefits.
"RCDs operate on a balance between outgoing current and return current "
“GFCI operate somewhat differently”
Enlighten me on the difference as I read that both act pretty much the same way. Difference between hot and neutral = ground in the system downstream. Sensitivity, trip speed, and allowable current seem to be the difference and that is set by governmental agencies not physics.
Oh, OK.
Not sure on that, but it must be a relatively new standard - my house was built in the 1980s and it only has one consumer unit.
There are separate breakers inside for wall outlets and lights on each floor, plus another separate breaker for the supply to the oven - so they are wired separately from the box to the fitting.
The circuits for lights vs power have different currentratings - 5A or 6A for lights, 15A for outlets, 30A for ovens
Yes; one consumer unit with a row of MCBs. Each MCB controls/protects a separate circuit: 5 amps for lighting, 13 amps for power and 30 amps for the cooker. The advantage of a separate 5 amp circuit for lighting is that the cable costs less. Of course, there will often be lights plugged into the 13 amp ring, but care needs to be taken before connecting anything other than a light to the 5 amp circuit. It is rare for there to be any outlets.
Back in the bad old days, landlords would often put coin operated meters on the power circuit but include the cost of the light (one 60 watt bulb) in the rent. It was possible to buy an adaptor to screw into the light socket so that things like irons or even electric fires could be run (free) as well as the light being on. I refer you back to Casdave’s comment that *“by far the most common way electricity can kill you is from the fire that is caused by a faulty electrical appliance.”*and add ‘by overloading unprotected circuits’.
We now have four consumer units, due to piecemeal addition of new circuits - the original 1960s one, then the “Economy 7” heating system added in the 1980s, then the new bathroom circuit and finally a new circuit for the kitchen five years ago.
Mine appears to have separate breakers per category per floor - it’s actually really convenient to be able to isolate just one part of the wiring to work on it - if I’m replacing a socket faceplate, I don’t have to do it in the dark - if I’m working on the lighting, I can still plug my drill and a portable work light into the socket.
Where one draws the line is always going to be somewhat arbitrary. This sort of proactive safety thinking is all too often implemented with an narrowly focussed zeal that overlooks the extremely tiny but massively multiplied incremental society wide cost in time and materials of marginal safety improvements.
The English plug is actually a really good study in this. It would undoubtedly be safer in some tiny, tiny way. Well, that’s good isn’t it?
But it’s also (for example) “rugged” to the point of parody. The thickness of the pins is mindboggling. You could make three Australian plugs for the amount of metal used in one single pin of an English plug. Theoretically, maybe, some almost unmeasurable number of people are saved by the ruggedness of the English plug. So that’s a win, right? The electrical engineers designed a good safe plug. They did their job.
Did anyone think more widely? I doubt it. Did anyone think about the environmental and human cost of using probably nine times as much metal as in a perfectly serviceable US or Australian plug? How much more CO2? How much more smog, use of fossil fuels, mining environmental damage, deforestation, and on and on and on? How many deaths did or will all that cause?
There’s a human cost to inefficiency also.
That’s not how GFCIs originally operated, they used to detect the earth current flow through a volt drop across a specified impedance - it meant that GFCIs could leave an earth fault connected when current flow was small but with live voltages on non-circuit conductors of up to 70V eg water pipes, metal appliance surfaces. If a system was working from a local earth instead of an imported one, ie through a ground rod, then there was to possibility of changes in ground conductivity would affect the tripping of the GFCI, for instance if the ground dried out more than planned such as during a drought.
RCD do not directly monitor current to earth, they detect the difference between live, and neutral - if there is any difference greater than 5mA they trip out - the obvious inference is that if any current is being earthed then the live will carry more current than neutral.
All this was quite some time ago, in the early 1980’s. It now seems that GFCIs appear to trip under the same fault conditions as RCDs and is pretty much that same thing, but it was not always so.
I don’t know how far back you’re going, but in America (and I assume elsewhere), electric lighting was the killer app for residential electric power. Electric appliances came along later, and originally plugged into a light socket, not a wall outlet. You can find lots of old pictures from the turn of the 20th Century of people ironing their clothes or vacuuming or making toast with the cord plugged into the ceiling.
Also, “overloading unprotected circuits”? Which circuits are unprotected? That’s a big no-no over here. Unless you’re talking about poorly-made Chinese power strips or something, everything circuit in your home should have an overcurrent device protecting it. The problem mainly comes with things like those Chinese power strips that can’t carry enough current to trip the breaker, so they burn up without the overcurrent device getting a chance to protect it. Or things like old incandescent bulbs getting too close to the curtains or something and starting fires that way.
Then there’s human stupidity getting in the way of proper electrical techniques. Like snipping off ground plugs so you can plug your devices into ungrounded sockets, or the penny in the fuse box, or its modern equivalent, wiring or screwing down the switch on your circuit breaker so that it can’t trip. :smack:
Of course not. But I don’t think a project that took place in the 1950s could reasonably have been expected to deliver a product that meets those sort of more modern concerns.
I’m certainly not arguing that the utopia-building projects of that era delivered perfect outputs - many of them were dire (as I noted above). The UK 3 pin plug, however, has succeeded in being ‘good’ within the scope that it set out to be good.
The result would possibly be quite different if done today (and I bet we could design it safer as well as cheaper as well as more sustainable) , but the standard is now established.
As you say; there seems to be no limit to human stupidity. When we were plugging irons and heaters into the light socket, the fuse was a simple metal wire designed to fail before the main cable did. It was not uncommon to replace it with a nail or just a higher rated fuse.As I said - lights back then were ungrounded so a short would make them live.
Anything you buy in the UK that has to plug into the mains, will have a standard three pin plug moulded on to it, so that the ignorant won’t wire a plug the wrong way round. You may find Chinese made power strips, but they had better be up to code or the supplier could be in big trouble.
I’m not so sure. The other plugs in use around the world are just as effective. IMHO the English plug is and always was over-engineered and clumsy.
How many folks have turned the light off on their brother so that he pees on his shoes?
The rules are the same, but solutions have changed. From the regs:
Combination taps with separate waterways do not require any additional backflow
protection. However, combination (blending) taps that allow mixing of the water to occur
within the body of the tap should have single check valves on the hot and cold inlets
When it was first manufactured the material for the casing was bakelite, which is not as strong as modern plastics, so what seems like over-engineering (at least in the build of the casing) is probably just about right for the time. I haven’t any excuse for the size of the pins. The price of brass was probably on the downward slide once we weren’t using it to make bullets quite so much, so I guess it probably didn’t seem like extravagance.
I think if we were designing a safety plug now, we might end up with something like the IEC connector standard, where the pins of the male plug are boxed in (so no chance of touching them when the plug is halfway engaged) and the enforcement of plugging in the right way around is handled by the shape of the plastic case. The shuttered live pin socket might be tricky, but could probably still be done.