Sadly true. I’m reminded of the famous description of how companies built TVs…
They hired a good engineer to create a reliable design. Then they had someone randomly remove components, one by one, until it stopped working. Put the last one removed back, and ship!
That’s the way to keep costs down! Probably apocryphal, of course…
You are thinking of Madman Muntz and his technique of “Muntzing”:
Muntz developed a television chassis that produced an acceptable monochromepicture with 17 tubes. He often carried a pair of wire clippers, and when he thought that one of his employees was “overengineering” a circuit, he would begin snipping components out until the picture or sound stopped working. At that point, he would tell the engineer “Well, I guess you have to put that last part back in” and walk away.[14]
Quoted from Madman Muntz - Wikipedia.
Muntz got away with this technique because he sold TVs only in the metro NYC area where signals were strong. His TVs did not work so well in the more rural areas with weak signals (the stuff he chopped out were frequently the sections that helped with weak signal reception).
It seems to me that Muntz had to have at least some working knowledge of circuit design to be able to do that. Because, while some components might only be needed for weak signals, if you just cut something at random, you probably will hit something that the system as a whole needs. Heck, even if you cut something that isn’t actually necessary, it might be in series with something that is, so it still won’t work.
Yes, Muntz had some self-taught engineering skills. At the risk of continuing the hijack, here is a more detailed article about Muntz and his TV cost cutting (written by a late legendary curmudgeon of the EE industry):
And that could only ever possibly refer to Bob Pease. A legend indeed.
This is what i carry when i travel. I used to have a heavy adapter to change the voltage. Then i looked at the fine print on my electronics. Every device i travel with is rated for 100-250 volts, so i stopped worrying about anything beyond, “does the plug fit into the wall”. I have a bunch of adapters for the EU, one for the UK, and maybe something i bought for Australia. Although i was surprised visiting Japan – a lot of my power supplies want to be grounded, and i never saw a Japanese outlet with a third hole. So i bought a cute pokemon-themed power supply at the Anker store for all my USB-C devices. (Japanese wall outlets are just like US ungrounded outlets, so this works just fine at home, too. And it’s small and makes a nice travel power supply.)
(I understand that things with motors, blow dryers, electric kettles, and clocks don’t work with just a plug adapter. I don’t travel with any of those, i use ones available locally.)
Because Japanese circuits are protected by GFCI, it wasn’t until 2022 that grounded outlets were required for bathrooms, kitchens and outdoors.
Unless you stay in brand new hotels, you won’t see them.
Nit picking since this is FQ. We’ve been 230V (-6%/+10%) for 25 years now.
I used to travel overseas a lot for work. It was a pain in the butt to deal with a laptop before these. Luckily most hotels where I stayed had a transformer that you could borrow because lugging one of those beasts areound would have been awful.
Nominal, perhaps? I think the UK where I live is supposed to be 240V, by the way. I haven’t tested it recently.
In any case, as Francis_Vaughan says, it’ll give you a damn good belt if you touch it…
With the 120V in the US, one wire is hot while the other is neutral. With the 240V systems, both wires are hot but the instantaneous voltages are always opposite. It is 240 volts between the two wires. The jolt is about the same if you touch the American hot wire or just one of the 240V wires. touching both wires OTOH will give you a nastier jolt.
Zero stars. Would not recommend.
I don’t think so, in the UK at least. Now I’ll have to get out my multimeter to check, but I’m pretty sure that the neutral wire is close to ground voltage.
To expand,
In 230 volt nominal countries* this isn’t the case. Supplies are 3 phase (120 degree angle), and thus 400 Volts between phases, and a full 230 volts to ground. Australia ties the neutral to ground in the breaker box. How the neutral is bonded varies between countries, but there is always a tie to ground somewhere. Domestic 3 phase connection is common, although single phase is the usual. (My house has a 3 phase supply.) If I want a 400 volt outlet I can get a 3 phase outlet installed. It has five pins - three hot, one neutral and one ground. Most common use case nowadays is an EV charger. That can deliver up to 22kW.
Domestic power in the US system derives 240 volts in a fundamentally different manner. There is a local transformer that hangs across one phase of the street 3 phase distribution, and is centre tapped. This delivers two 180 degree apart 120 volt legs, which are referenced to the centre tap (the neutral), which is grounded. Normal outlets are hung between one 120 volt phase and neutral, and 240 volt outlets are hung across the two 120v legs. So as described, each side is 120v relative to ground (via the neutral bonding). Such 240 volt outlets have two hot legs and a neutral (and now usually have a ground, making four pins.)
For completeness, the load on a US 2 phase 240 v service, or any 3 phase service should be balanced, which means no current flows in the neutral. Doesn’t always happen, which is why there is a neutral conductor. But badly unbalanced loads are frowned upon (to say the least.)
* @Lenny55 is quite correct, Australia followed most of the world, adopted IEC 600038, and is now 230v -6% +10%. But nobody calls it 230 volts. We used to be 240v ±6%. 240 volts is within IEC 600038, and adoption of the standard didn’t immediately mean actual voltages dropped.
I stand corrected. Here in the US industrial areas have three phase power with 208V between the phases and 120 to neutral. Residential areas are single phase with 220V between two hot legs or 110 to neutral. Most plugs are polarized. One of two blades is longer so it only goes in one way. If you want to charge a car, you can get 220V at 40 or 50 Amps from a plug originally intended for a clothes dryer.
I just got back from Italy where the typical plug had two round pins that would plug in either way. Things got complicated because I took my laptop. It’s brick uses a US three wire plug with hot, neutral, and ground. My travel adapter let me plug it in but did not connect the ground pin and the brick was not happy. A local computer store there sold me an adapter that made the connection but, it needed a different plug which was only available in inconvenient places like the bathroom or behind the microwave. There were lots of plugs that took three round pins and lots of adapters, all in use. After finding a hardware store, I was fully equipped. since it went in either way, I assumed that both pins were hot.
After getting back home to the US, I explored online. It seems that my adapter is only useful in five countries around the world, Italy, Uruguay, two countries in Africa that were once controlled by Italy, and San Marino.
Nitpick: one blade is wider, not longer.
Since everyone is nitpicking, there are two types of residential service in the U.S. By far the most common is a split-phase transformer that supplies 240 volts to typically 3 or 4 homes, with the center tap of the transformer grounded to become the “neutral” (so 240 volts line to line, and 120 volts from either line to neutral). There are also some older systems out there which have 3 phase power running down through the neighborhood, and each home gets 2 lines from that 3 phase system (again, with transformers feeding every few homes). This results in 120 volts line to neutral, but only 208 volts line to line.
It’s important to know which you have, since some appliances (like clothes dryers) can have different heating elements installed if you have the lower voltage. Many people just use 240 volt appliances, and things like clothes dryers just take a bit longer to dry clothes, ovens take longer to heat up, etc.
120/208 residential service for individual homes is not very common in the U.S. There are some parts of New York City that have homes wired up that way, and parts of Chicago as well (IIRC), but these are generally older neighborhoods with homes that are close together.
What is much more common is the three phases will be split up and sent down different streets through neighborhoods. In other words, one street would get phase A, the next street over would get phase B, and the next street over from that would get phase C.
In rural areas (like where I live) the different phases might not even go to the same neighborhoods. Instead the phases might be split so that each phase goes to different areas. When I first saw a power map of my area, I was surprised to see the 3 phases split off from each other at one point and then end up miles away from each other at their end.
Smaller commercial buildings and apartment buildings will often be fed from 3 phase 120/208 service. If you are in an office building and you buy/rent a large photocopier, they will need to know if you have 120/240 or 120/208 since it makes a difference for the copier.
Commercial and industrial facilities might also be fed by 480 volt 3 phase service. The building that I work in is one such facility. All of our lighting used to be 480 volt fluorescent, with 120/208 in lab areas and 120 volts in office cubicles. They have switched the lighting over to 120v LED lighting in the last year or so though to save on energy costs.
To expand a bit on this: the “official” name for a 120 VAC plug without a ground prong is NEMA 1-15P. There are two kinds of NEMA 1-15P plugs: non-polarized, where the hot & neutral prongs have the same dimensions, and polarized, where the neutral prong is a little bit wider than the hot prong. The latter is used when the device has a line fuse and/or power switch, and the manufacturer will connect the switch (and/or fuse) to the hot conductor inside the device.
Wouldn’t this cause issues if there are significantly different loads on the three phases?
I’m assuming that the load was reasonably balanced, probably just by keeping the number of homes served by each branch roughly equal.
All three phases ran through the same neighborhoods closer to town (before splitting off in their own directions), which also helps to keep the overall load reasonably balanced.