this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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This is a standard wall outlet in my country; this is how it looks like with the face plate. This is the surfaced mounted version.
It carries the ground pins as standard and it is sunken in order to prevent touching the charged prongs and it has a built in shutter which is very annoying to tamper with.
Even the ungrounded version is sunk and has the same pesky shutters but it is even starting to become hard to find.
You guys are being played with. Your outlets are death traps.
Not they're not, people are not dying from our outlets. We run 120V here, so it's not a lot of power.
I'm just as defensive of my standard but I've at some point in my life coexisted with one similar to yours and it was unsafe, put into simple therms.
And yet people getting electrocuted here is rarer than people getting hit by lightning, and it almost always people working on power lines or high voltage equipment and virtually never from outlets.
They are not unsafe, they are fine.
Growing up with a similar standard, hearing people saying the exact same thing then, at some point the standard was altered, so someone found the previous lacking on some front.
I'm as defensive of mine as you are of yours.
And what was your previous standard? It may have been significantly worse than North American plugs.
North American plugs are actually fine.
I can't find pictures of it but keeping in mind the same basic two prong setup, remove the sunken safety socket, ground prongs, ground line and socket safety shutter.
It was essentially a flat face plate with two holes on it.
Ya, that's way worse than North American plugs. We have a deep ground pin, and the slots hold plugs pretty tightly.
Our outlets are not "death traps." Standard outlets nowadays are grounded and TR (Tamper Resistant) The outlets are designed so that a grounded plug hits ground first before the rest of plug is energized. They look like this. https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D-hdRZMa2Zo/Vqe-AfvYA5I/AAAAAAAAAM4/I0Ln6JRNRRw/s1600/photojoiner.jpg
Also while I'm sure people are electrocuted every year, it's not because they didn't plug in something correctly and I doubt a more bulky outlet would have save them.
It probably wouldn't hurt to start overmolding the hot and neutral prongs with plastic for the first quarter inch, but otherwise I'm much more concerned with how fucky extension cords are with their AWG; if you've got something heavy, like my 12 amp thickness planer, "can this extension cord handle this load continuously" is a reasonable question that not a lot of them are willing to answer in an accessible way.
I'll tell you what is the first concern coming to mind when I look at those outlets: the appliances plugs have no safety socket to rest in.
Exposed plugs are prone to being easily damaged by accidental pull-outs.