I had an addition put on my house in March of 2005, and the electricians installed all outlets ground prong down (Essex county). Passed electrical inspection with no issues.
For the locations that have codes mandating “ground up” - what do they say for receptacles that are mounted horizontally? Do they want the ground facing to the left or to the right?
Ah. Ground facing the left, then.
I’ll add another WAG to do with child safety. Imagine a toddler with a metal object. He sees a partially pulled plug and decides to pry it out further with his “tool”. I maintain that a toddler will invariably use a downward stroke in this instance, contacting the ground wire first and no more than one live prong. Contacting both live prongs necessitates coming from below, a motion that no toddler worth his salt would ever employ. (Perhaps not the reason for the code, but a good side benefit, IMO).
There is only one live prong in a single-phase 120 V outlet in the US. A contact between the hot and ground is just as dangerous as a contact between hot and neutral, except in a GFCI installation.
then again, if you’ve got a kid who sees an animal face and his first impulse is to poke it in the eye with a metal object, you’ve got other problems…
What I want to know is why the USA (and much of the rest of the world) uses such a cruddy wobbly electrical plug design. This is definitely one of the few things that we Brits get right, with nice chunky plugs that fit snugly into a socket with no wobbling, and with the cable directed down parallel with the wall rather than sticking at 90 degrees out from it.
My house in California (built in 2000) is all ground-down, except for the switched outlets, which are ground-up (so that you can distinguish them at a glance). As I recall, the builder did not say this was code, just common practice.
Are kids really sticking things into electrical outlets these days? I thought the prevalence of outlet plug covers, or whatever they’re called, pretty much did away with this practice.
What’s really bizarre is the way the outlets go from happy to sad after the wall-wart is plugged in…
Well, OK then…never mind.
partypooper
The right-angled plug/cable design is superior and apparently the cost is slightly higher in assembly then the standard North American style of Cable straight to the Blades (prongs).
Until the government steps in at regulates away wall warts and straight through plugs, industry will continue to make them.
I work for a company that makes the blades and assembles the whip sets (Blades, Molded housing and Cable).
Jim
Here’s the explanation I heard:
Let’s say the receptacle is installed with the ground down. If the receptacle’s wall plate is made of steel, and if the plug is not fully inserted in the receptacle, and if the screw that connects the wall plate to the receptacle falls off, then the wall plate will rest across the plug’s hot & neutral prongs and create a short. This won’t happen if the receptacle is installed with the ground up.
But I don’t buy this explanation, since almost all wall plates are constructed of plastic nowadays.
I see one advantage and one disadvantage to installing the receptacle with the ground up:
Advantage: There is usually a downward torque applied to the plug due to the mass of the cable. On a three-pronged plug, this torque will sometimes cause the top prong(s) to be partially pulled out of their respective sockets in the receptacle. It would thus be better for the top prong to be the ground prong rather than the hot & neutral prongs.
Disadvantage: When inserting the 3-pronged plug, you must insert the ground first. (It’s the longest of the three prongs.) If the ground is up, the ground prong obscures the line-of-site to the hot and neutral prongs, i.e. you have a hard time seeing the hot and neutral prongs when the ground is up. (After inserting the ground prong, you sometimes have to rotate the plug CW and CCW while trying to insert the hot & neutral prongs.) When the ground is down, you first insert the ground, and the hot and neutral are easy to see, and thus easy to align.
Because it’s easier to arrange the wires inside, from an entry at the bottom of the plug, if there isn’t a pin in the way?
Crafter_Man I had the metal outlet plate come off and short against the 2 ‘prongs’. Nothing serious happened, just a tripped breaker, and a partly burn plate and plug. So yes it can and does happen.
That said more and more plates are plastic or even wood, so the threat is less, especially since these types of plates are almost exclusively used on new construction and those would be the ones effected by this ‘rule’ of ground up. However I think this ‘rule’ came about when plastic and wood plates were still looked down upon and metal plates were still the norm.
The 90[sup]o[/sup] plug can be a pain when in the top receptacle of a duplex outlet.
I’m surprised that the Australian/NZ Plug isn’t more popular, to be honest. It’s got your Earth, Phase, and Neutral prongs, fits snugly into the wall with no wiggling about, and you can have the cable coming out the back either horizontally or at a 90 degree angle.
That and we use 240v 50Hz power, which is better than the paltry 110/120v stuff you lot in North America try to pass off as Electricity. 
The last time I did electrical work in New Jersey was in the early 90’s, and at that time the UCC was the statewide code. I’ve always been a ground down guy, and that job passed without comment.
PA adopted the UCC a few years ago, and no electrical job which I’ve done has been questioned.
The UCC by reference typically includes the ICC Electrical Code. The NEC is silent with respect to receptacle orientation.
Also-I haven’t seen them in a few years, but Eagle Electric devices (now part of Cooper) manufactured GFCI receptacles for horizontal installation which could be installed ground pin down or up. When upgrading electrical stuff in my house, I put one in the horizontal space below the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
I’ve only seen metal plates in “industrial” applications, i.e. places like restaurant kitchens. The plates I’ve seen in homes, new and old, are always plastic.
My own experience is limited, of course, to the outlets I’ve seen. But when I’ve seen ground-up installations, they are usually the exceptions; most of the outlets in the house are installed ground-down, but I’ll find one or two are upside-down. These almost always appear to have been repaired at some point by a non-expert (you can see cracks in the plate, or obvious screwdriver marks), or replacements that were simply installed upside-down (the fixture doesn’t match the others in the house - it’s a slightly different color or style).
The National Electrical Code is NOT available online.
The owners of the copyright on that (National Fire Protection Assn.) make a lot of money selling copies to electricians, construction companies, architects, etc. They simply do not allow anyone to post it online.