Once again the USA gets right what the Euros/Brits get incredibly wrong
Here we have a chart of the several AC wiring color codes from around the word. Most notable the US/Canada NEC vs. the Euro IEC
If we look at the single phase column we see some variations. But for the most part there is a logical rythym for most of the planet.
Black for hot ( because if you touch your dead) in the USA. Red ( danger) in Canada. Japan too knows what's up. The rest of the world seems to follow suit more or less here not being totally brain dead. China goes with yellow, sorta odd but makes sense. It's colorful, colorful means lively. Alice with electrons. Yes.
But there's a small catch in this chart. It doesn't accurately detail split phase. So if we look at the 3 phase panel we see the second phase is marked red for the use and orange for Canada. So really a single phase wiring would be red or black for US or orange or red for Canada. We already mentioned the logical reasoning for red, orange makes sense to as being sorta red, red adjacent if you will
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Now let's get to the dumbassery.
If we look at the neutral column we see some true weirdness. The Turbo Graffix-16 has decided once again logically neutral should be white. White being well neutral in color. But look at the Brits and Euros.Blue...BLUE? Blue? Blue is anything but neutral it's very blue. Which is why the NEC harnessing the awesome power of 16 bit graphics has related it to the hot of the third phase of wiring.. Canada wanted to spice it up a bit which is fine and gone with grey, again grey being a very neutral tone.
We all agree green of some sort should be earth. Of course it should, the Earth is green.
Again we have the Euros and Brits and decide no. Brown is hot!. Brown what the hell is this lamp cord doing in the gange box? Is this some sort of Super Earth? Can't surely be a hot lead it's the color of dirt, it must be ground. But no fuck logic it's a hot lead.. Canada it's half corrected state goes full Tropic thunder in the three phase wiring and all of a sudden the first phase is brown. I pitty them for their British influence. Instead of just leaving the first phase red as it was in half phase.
The rest of the world just goes willy-nilly after this and it's best are off. Some even use black as the neutral which is again pure lunacy. But it pales in comparison to the absurdity of EU wiring making brown a hot lead and blue a neutral reference. No wonder they have such stupid and ridiculous outlet and curious breakers. Fucking lunatics. Big ups to Japan for choosing the circuit path of civility though.
Yesh yeah yeah.Same old moan. The USA - the only nation still using Imperial weights and measures for ordinary trade* - does something its way so insults everyone else around the world for not copying it!
The UK single-phase colour scheme used to be red for live, black for neutral, brown (if I remember rightly) for earth.
It became changed to match the European codes, but I don't think this was a European Union ruling.
That stupid and ridiculous last paragraph, gratuitous swearing and all, about socket outlet standards, is needless. I don't know if other countries' standards have similar, but the UK's 230V 13A sockets and plugs are designed so you cannot touch any exposed, live contacts while inserting or withdrawing the plug; and the live and neutral contacts are behind an internal shutter operated by the plug's earth pin when the plug is removed.
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*To be fair, American scientists and presumably many engineers [i]do[/i] use the Systèmè Internationale units, developed from the French-invented Metric System by the International Standards Organisation, of which the USA is a fully paid-up member.. While nowadays basically any manufactured goods the US imports will be to metric dimensions, unless perhaps by some special order.
I remember on another forum helping quite a few American swimming-pool owners calculate the right doses of additives sold in litre or kilogramme unit containers with metric instructions; and others (possibly children struggling with their arithmetic homework) how to perform basic Imperial / Metric conversions.
@MethDozer It makes complete sense when you know what "Power" and "Energy" are.
Power is the rate of transfer or conversion (consumption) of any energy type by any method w.r.t. time, so we use units cohesive across the entire system. .
1 Watt of power = 1 Joule of energy per second of time.
Both units are defined in terms of the foundation units of mass and length.
And you know energy has many different forms but its common property is that it can be stored, transported or converted, but neither created not destroyed.
(Making the term "renewable energy" more convenience than fact.)
So it is entirely logical to use Watts throughout a whole system. E.g. a car's internal-combustion engine converts potential chemical energy to heat energy then to mechanical energy; then its alternator converts some of that mechanical energy to electrical energy stored chemically in the battery.
Why the Horsepower? What is it?
It originally gave the industrial customers of the first practical steam-engines, an assessment of the machines' powers, and numerical measurements of their efficiency. It was useful in the late 18C and early 19C to use a comparison with the literal "horse-power" the steam power was replacing. Unfortunately the power's and efficiency's foundation mass, length, time, heat and temperature units used then, are mathematically incoherent and non-cohesive, making designing and testing machinery more difficult that necessary.
The Watt measures power irrespective of machine and "fuel"; and is named after James Watt, the Scots engineer who devised the horsepower. He did not invent the steam engine, but used his research to develop the first decently efficient ones capable of driving factory machinery.
To convert the Watts measurement to Horsepower, divide by 750. Sufficient for most purposes (0.5% error), simple enough for pen-&-paper, even mental, arithmetic!
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That is a simple example of the point of the SI: units counted decimally so arithmetically easy, and which correspond and co-operate scientifically. Hence its now universal use in any serious work.
SI units can be awkward in some practical ways, so some "non-preferred" units are allowed. E.g. the "Preferred" Radian greatly simplifies certain physics and engineering calculations, but the Degree (angle) is permitted for much greater convenience in practical manufacturing, navigation, etc. Or the Bar as well as the "preferred" Pascal, for pressure.
I find the oddest is that pressure-unit. The Pascal is fully coherent with the foundation mass, length and time units; yet so tiny you need over two hundred thousand of them to inflate an ordinary car tyre, and so big you need million[i]th[/i]s of them to measure sound levels!
Though I don't believe naming compound units after people like Pascal, honouring them and shortening the labels, can make Dimensional Analysis easy.
@ElwoodBlues the ground plug in your outlet has no bearing aon someone knocking down a distribution pole with their car.
Also there is no special outlet for aluminum wire. They use the exact same receptacals as copper wiring. I think you're thinking about the "for copper wiring only" warning on the back of receptacles. Shown somewhat here
That isn't in reference to the actual receptacle as a whole, but the push in quick connect holes in the back of the receptacle. That is just referencing that those particular connections are for copper use only. If you are the unlucky bastard that has old aluminum wiring you use the same receptacals but are to only use the side connects with a combination head screw connection. But there are no strictly copper or special aluminum wire outlets . The same ones are used by both just one of the connection methods the outlet is capable of us strictly for copper wire only.
Personally I think those push in compression quick connects in the back of outlets should never be used at all and am kind of surprised the NEC still allows them.
@MethDozer It helps to understand a system you don't know, rather than just rubbish it, even without the needless swearing.
The fuse in a 13A plug is first-barrier protection for the appliance and its flex only, and should break without tripping the ring-main circuit-breaker, though both can happen at once.
The main circuit fuse or breaker protects the entire ring-main, and if a fault in the appliance trips that it switches off everything else on the same ring.
(Standard practice for an ordinary house is two separate ring-mains per floor: one for the 13A power sockets, one for the fixed room lamps. Electric cookers, showers and immersion-heaters are separately hard-wired to their own, dedicated high-current spurs. A 7kW electric car charger, rather than using a low-rate one plugged into an ordinary socket, has to be installed on its own spur - and consumption meter.)
. The UK's mains voltage was 240V but one effect of EU membership was having to convert to 230V: the countries bordering the English Channel and North Sea do share electricity on their main high-voltage networks, via undersea cables. Perhaps recognising we cannot change everything wholesale the standard was given a generous tolerance to encompass both voltages.
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I see you refer in another post to aluminium cables. I did not know anyone in America used those for domestic and business mains. It was never used for that in the UK, but in the 1970s Post Office Telephones (now BT) started using (still use??) aluminium for telephone lines and for the l.v. power bus-bars in telephone exchanges. Although cheaper than copper it can carry more serious corrosion problems, and of course is much harder to solder.
