The Australian examples are very odd - the pictures of our general purpose outlets are normal (figures 1 and 3 when you click on Australia), but most of the rest is unusual and either fairly or very rare.
For example the plug shown on the main page is very non-typical - it's a re-wireable one which you very rarely see (because it's generally only if a plug has been damaged and had to be replaced) - almost all the plugs normal people will ever use in Australia will actually be fully moulded.
Secondly it's right-angle, which is not incredibly rare but not the default - normally you'd only see that on some power-boards (what the US I think calls 'power strips') or some extension cables. Appliances usually have straight plugs, the right angle one you do see on them sometimes but not as much (maybe 5-10%).
When you click in to the Australia page, the back side of the plug is also shown as piggy-back which is also quite rare (usually only on extension cords - such as in figure 10, that one is fairly normal).
Figures 5, 6, 7 and 8 and 9 are also things you'll almost never see (it does say in the case of figure 9 that a rewirable piggy-back as shown is now disallowed by our wiring standards).
Some of the example pictures would be better to be changed to something more normal, and the detailed page could probably be broken up into typical, specialist and rare/obsolete sections because it's confusing having it all together.
It's an interesting point of view, conversely, as an Australian of some decades, they all look fairly normal to me and a subset of a greater spectrum I'm also familiar with.
Right angle plugs may well be less common (in your experience) but they're essential for, say, getting power from the wall to a breakout strip (for TV + games consoles, NAS, media box, etc. corners) when the wall plug is behind a low cabinet / cupboard.
In any case it's a museum, a catalog, intended to show a range of things that do exist, even if a good number may not encounter them frequently.
Yeah I'm not saying they are unheard of - for example I've done a lot of stuff in AV and almost every single extension cord you use in that world will be a piggy-back right angle (always moulded though because they have to be test-and-tagged so a reputable certifier won't pass them).
Just that not having any pictures of the plug that you see on 90% of cords in normal use is an odd choice.
They used to be more common in the pre power board age (piggy backs, and screw terminal - they were very common back in the day), I can't see a date anywhere on the page. 5-8 are more specialist.
Grateful to the human who built this and finds it interesting enough to keep at it. A valuable resource indeed, available to all of humanity! Well done!
I was thinking about this and came to conclusion that the only correct type is UK style socket because it has fuse.
In our houses, there are circuit breakers. They don't protect you or devices, they can only protect wires in the wall, those who installed the wires knew how much current they can take and installed appropriate circuit breakers.
When you plug the plug in the wall socket, the circuit breaker has no idea what you plugged in so it cannot protect it, so there has to be a fuse in the plug, like in the UK plug. Whoever chose the wires for this device choose appropriate fuse.
There is one more case possible, the wire is not permanently attached to the device but via another socket, for example C14 socket like in PC. In that case manufacturer of the PC should know what kind of currents it is capable of handling and should put fuse inside it.
Now everything is protected (at least for over-current, if you touch live and neutral with two hands, 30mA through heart is enough to kill you but that's something that cannot be avoided, not even GFCI can do it).
Per-socket circuit breakers are very much a thing here in the US. I assume they are mandatory in wet environments like bathrooms and kitchens. I think they are adequate to protect against a local leak from the live wire to the ground wire, which would likely mean that the connected device is broken or got water inside it, and may be dangerous to touch.
I suppose that a device that suddenly starts to consume far more current than normal under normal voltage is likely broken / fried inside, and it's too late to save it by blowing a fuse. The fuse just prevents a fire, but an automatic circuit breaker in a socket would likely do the same.
There is the case of overvoltage due e.g. to nearby lightning strikes. I suppose a fuse is unlikely to save your computer in such a case, it's too slow. Fast-acting power line protectors exist though, and are cheap and ubiquitous.
I think it's overrated, plenty of equipment has some kind of protection internally anyway.
My country has never had a fuse in the plug and we generally have a very safe electrical system (much stricter earthing rules than the US for example). Adding an extra fuse doesn't really seem to add much, it really doesn't seem to be any kind of significant risk.
The historical reason why is that UK homes were wired early in history for lighting with a ring circuit going throughout the house, and this was also literally set in stone so impractical to phase out for a long time.
So the regulations had to allow one 50A (for example, I don’t know the actual numbers) fuse supplying an unknown number of outlets and devices, rather than requiring one circuit per small area. Such a large fuse will happily let your radio malfunction and start on fire, so local, smaller fuses are necessary.
In other areas a 10A fuse (for example) on a circuit that only goes to one room or one appliance is enough to protect from overloading the circuit as well as most dangerous malfunctions of one device.
Fuses are very imprecise devices. A 10A fuse won't really protect you from an overload of 20A. It could take an hour to blow or not blow at all. Both the 10A and 20A fuse will protect you from 1000A short circuits.
Almost always when I'm in a country that does not have European (CEE) plugs and sockets, I feel uncomfortable. All CEE combinations have very solid touch protection. It's almost impossible to touch a metal pin of a plug when it's so close to the socket that it might have contact.
When I the see the "flat" style sockets plus the full-metal pins I wonder if it's just a bad feeling or if way more people gets accidentally electrocuted with that kind of plugs/socket than with our CEE types.
Despite being fairly careless when handling them, I've managed a fair few decades without once shocking myself.
With that being said, I would be delighted with CEE, BS or almost anything other than NEMA anything.
The 120v plugs aren't the worst thing since they usually have some good gripping points, and the 50 amp plugs usually have a handle on the back, but the 30 amp plugs typically have no finger indentation at all for gripping and I feel like my fingers are going to slip over and around every time I pull one out.
I agree (Except British plugs which are also fine if made properly¹).
Denmark made installing CEE (the French version) sockets legal in 2011, but the only place I've seen one is a friend's house — he's German and swapped the sockets when he bought it.
¹ Hong Kong also uses British plugs, and this seems to have led some Chinese manufacturers to make non-compliant, unsafe plugs which fit — and nowadays with Amazon, AliExpress etc selling any old rubbish they are sometimes seen in Britain.
US style plugs and derivatives (and Australian, Japanese, Brazilian, etc) - all invented by Hubbell - are "good enough".
Are they objectively good? No. Do they regularly fail, cause fires, or shock people? No.
Even my kids when young understood how to grip the plug without touching the metal contacts and to this day still have not been shocked. In theory can something fall and hit the pins just right to cause a short? Sure. You could also get struck by lightning. In practice it just doesn't happen very often.
For the US/North American NEMA style there are some improvements and some clever things about them. Modern receptacles have shutter doors that stop you from putting anything into the holes unless the ground pin or neutral pin unlocks it first. Many plugs also cover the rear part of the hot/neutral with plastic so if the plug is not fully inserted there is no exposed metal.
The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Similarly the 240v version of this plug (6-15/6-20) has the same property: 15amp and 20amp versions. The 15 amp is two horizontal blades. The 20 amp is one horizontal + 1 vertical but swapped places compared to the 120v version. I do wish more builders installed the 240v receptacles in kitchens in the US. There is no technical reason we can't have higher power kettles and whatnot. If code required these in garages and kitchens more appliances would be available for them.
(I find it insane that Brazil continues to be dual exclusive voltage; all of North America is dual concurrent voltage. Every home/office has 120v and 240v available. In Brazil it depends on what state/city you live in - some get 120v, some get 240v. Even worse they use the same standard plug design for both so you'd better hope the plug is the right color or has the right sticker. And you can't be sure you can take electrical appliances from one city to the next! At least they should have adopted different plugs for different voltages.)
The huge advantage of these plugs is compatibility. We already have them. The cost to change designs is massive. The benefit extremely small. It just isn't worth doing.
Note: The 240v NEMA plugs I am referencing are not "dryer plugs" which are physically much* larger and designed for much higher amp loads in the 30-60 range. The 6-15/6-20 are literally identical to the standard 120v plugs but with different blade orientations. They were designed to support 240v appliances in everyday use since all of North America is dual voltage. In practice 240v is only ever used for large appliances like ovens so the 6 series doesn't get much use which is a bit of a shame.
> The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Alternatively you can just run everything at 230V and then you don't need a million different plugs as any wall socket can provide up to 3.5 kW, enough for any home appliance except for the most power hungry ovens and IH stoves.
Due to health issues, no updates to the Plugs and Sockets website are expected in the coming months. Email contact may also be affected.
For the time being, please do not send any material that might be interesting to add to the website.
Next year, I shall make a decision about the future of the collection and website. Wait and see.
August 2025
The Australian examples are very odd - the pictures of our general purpose outlets are normal (figures 1 and 3 when you click on Australia), but most of the rest is unusual and either fairly or very rare.
For example the plug shown on the main page is very non-typical - it's a re-wireable one which you very rarely see (because it's generally only if a plug has been damaged and had to be replaced) - almost all the plugs normal people will ever use in Australia will actually be fully moulded.
Secondly it's right-angle, which is not incredibly rare but not the default - normally you'd only see that on some power-boards (what the US I think calls 'power strips') or some extension cables. Appliances usually have straight plugs, the right angle one you do see on them sometimes but not as much (maybe 5-10%).
When you click in to the Australia page, the back side of the plug is also shown as piggy-back which is also quite rare (usually only on extension cords - such as in figure 10, that one is fairly normal).
Figures 5, 6, 7 and 8 and 9 are also things you'll almost never see (it does say in the case of figure 9 that a rewirable piggy-back as shown is now disallowed by our wiring standards).
Some of the example pictures would be better to be changed to something more normal, and the detailed page could probably be broken up into typical, specialist and rare/obsolete sections because it's confusing having it all together.
A museum is usually a collection of uncommon and curious, historical, along with the common and modern.
(I, for instance, like the uncommon Italian design of plugs without pins.)
It's an interesting point of view, conversely, as an Australian of some decades, they all look fairly normal to me and a subset of a greater spectrum I'm also familiar with.
Right angle plugs may well be less common (in your experience) but they're essential for, say, getting power from the wall to a breakout strip (for TV + games consoles, NAS, media box, etc. corners) when the wall plug is behind a low cabinet / cupboard.
In any case it's a museum, a catalog, intended to show a range of things that do exist, even if a good number may not encounter them frequently.
Yeah I'm not saying they are unheard of - for example I've done a lot of stuff in AV and almost every single extension cord you use in that world will be a piggy-back right angle (always moulded though because they have to be test-and-tagged so a reputable certifier won't pass them).
Just that not having any pictures of the plug that you see on 90% of cords in normal use is an odd choice.
They used to be more common in the pre power board age (piggy backs, and screw terminal - they were very common back in the day), I can't see a date anywhere on the page. 5-8 are more specialist.
Grateful to the human who built this and finds it interesting enough to keep at it. A valuable resource indeed, available to all of humanity! Well done!
I was thinking about this and came to conclusion that the only correct type is UK style socket because it has fuse.
In our houses, there are circuit breakers. They don't protect you or devices, they can only protect wires in the wall, those who installed the wires knew how much current they can take and installed appropriate circuit breakers.
When you plug the plug in the wall socket, the circuit breaker has no idea what you plugged in so it cannot protect it, so there has to be a fuse in the plug, like in the UK plug. Whoever chose the wires for this device choose appropriate fuse.
There is one more case possible, the wire is not permanently attached to the device but via another socket, for example C14 socket like in PC. In that case manufacturer of the PC should know what kind of currents it is capable of handling and should put fuse inside it.
Now everything is protected (at least for over-current, if you touch live and neutral with two hands, 30mA through heart is enough to kill you but that's something that cannot be avoided, not even GFCI can do it).
Per-socket circuit breakers are very much a thing here in the US. I assume they are mandatory in wet environments like bathrooms and kitchens. I think they are adequate to protect against a local leak from the live wire to the ground wire, which would likely mean that the connected device is broken or got water inside it, and may be dangerous to touch.
I suppose that a device that suddenly starts to consume far more current than normal under normal voltage is likely broken / fried inside, and it's too late to save it by blowing a fuse. The fuse just prevents a fire, but an automatic circuit breaker in a socket would likely do the same.
There is the case of overvoltage due e.g. to nearby lightning strikes. I suppose a fuse is unlikely to save your computer in such a case, it's too slow. Fast-acting power line protectors exist though, and are cheap and ubiquitous.
I think it's overrated, plenty of equipment has some kind of protection internally anyway.
My country has never had a fuse in the plug and we generally have a very safe electrical system (much stricter earthing rules than the US for example). Adding an extra fuse doesn't really seem to add much, it really doesn't seem to be any kind of significant risk.
The historical reason why is that UK homes were wired early in history for lighting with a ring circuit going throughout the house, and this was also literally set in stone so impractical to phase out for a long time.
So the regulations had to allow one 50A (for example, I don’t know the actual numbers) fuse supplying an unknown number of outlets and devices, rather than requiring one circuit per small area. Such a large fuse will happily let your radio malfunction and start on fire, so local, smaller fuses are necessary.
In other areas a 10A fuse (for example) on a circuit that only goes to one room or one appliance is enough to protect from overloading the circuit as well as most dangerous malfunctions of one device.
Fuses are very imprecise devices. A 10A fuse won't really protect you from an overload of 20A. It could take an hour to blow or not blow at all. Both the 10A and 20A fuse will protect you from 1000A short circuits.
Almost always when I'm in a country that does not have European (CEE) plugs and sockets, I feel uncomfortable. All CEE combinations have very solid touch protection. It's almost impossible to touch a metal pin of a plug when it's so close to the socket that it might have contact. When I the see the "flat" style sockets plus the full-metal pins I wonder if it's just a bad feeling or if way more people gets accidentally electrocuted with that kind of plugs/socket than with our CEE types.
Despite being fairly careless when handling them, I've managed a fair few decades without once shocking myself.
With that being said, I would be delighted with CEE, BS or almost anything other than NEMA anything.
The 120v plugs aren't the worst thing since they usually have some good gripping points, and the 50 amp plugs usually have a handle on the back, but the 30 amp plugs typically have no finger indentation at all for gripping and I feel like my fingers are going to slip over and around every time I pull one out.
I'm only a tourist when I visit places with NEMA sockets, so I'm sure I see much more worn sockets than a resident of America.
But I often find sockets that have a loose grip on heavier plugs, like a phone charger, or a NEMA-CEE adaptor.
(Half my experience is in Central and South America, where maintenance is probably worse — though in Africa old CEE or UK sockets are usually OK.)
2 replies →
I agree (Except British plugs which are also fine if made properly¹).
Denmark made installing CEE (the French version) sockets legal in 2011, but the only place I've seen one is a friend's house — he's German and swapped the sockets when he bought it.
¹ Hong Kong also uses British plugs, and this seems to have led some Chinese manufacturers to make non-compliant, unsafe plugs which fit — and nowadays with Amazon, AliExpress etc selling any old rubbish they are sometimes seen in Britain.
US style plugs and derivatives (and Australian, Japanese, Brazilian, etc) - all invented by Hubbell - are "good enough".
Are they objectively good? No. Do they regularly fail, cause fires, or shock people? No.
Even my kids when young understood how to grip the plug without touching the metal contacts and to this day still have not been shocked. In theory can something fall and hit the pins just right to cause a short? Sure. You could also get struck by lightning. In practice it just doesn't happen very often.
For the US/North American NEMA style there are some improvements and some clever things about them. Modern receptacles have shutter doors that stop you from putting anything into the holes unless the ground pin or neutral pin unlocks it first. Many plugs also cover the rear part of the hot/neutral with plastic so if the plug is not fully inserted there is no exposed metal.
The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Similarly the 240v version of this plug (6-15/6-20) has the same property: 15amp and 20amp versions. The 15 amp is two horizontal blades. The 20 amp is one horizontal + 1 vertical but swapped places compared to the 120v version. I do wish more builders installed the 240v receptacles in kitchens in the US. There is no technical reason we can't have higher power kettles and whatnot. If code required these in garages and kitchens more appliances would be available for them.
(I find it insane that Brazil continues to be dual exclusive voltage; all of North America is dual concurrent voltage. Every home/office has 120v and 240v available. In Brazil it depends on what state/city you live in - some get 120v, some get 240v. Even worse they use the same standard plug design for both so you'd better hope the plug is the right color or has the right sticker. And you can't be sure you can take electrical appliances from one city to the next! At least they should have adopted different plugs for different voltages.)
The huge advantage of these plugs is compatibility. We already have them. The cost to change designs is massive. The benefit extremely small. It just isn't worth doing.
Note: The 240v NEMA plugs I am referencing are not "dryer plugs" which are physically much* larger and designed for much higher amp loads in the 30-60 range. The 6-15/6-20 are literally identical to the standard 120v plugs but with different blade orientations. They were designed to support 240v appliances in everyday use since all of North America is dual voltage. In practice 240v is only ever used for large appliances like ovens so the 6 series doesn't get much use which is a bit of a shame.
> The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Alternatively you can just run everything at 230V and then you don't need a million different plugs as any wall socket can provide up to 3.5 kW, enough for any home appliance except for the most power hungry ovens and IH stoves.
1 reply →
I also want ceiling sockets :( https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/LampSockets1.html
Amazing, that's a thing I want to import.
This website is beautiful. I wish I have skill to craft something like this.
I hope it doesn't disappear:
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Important message
Due to health issues, no updates to the Plugs and Sockets website are expected in the coming months. Email contact may also be affected. For the time being, please do not send any material that might be interesting to add to the website. Next year, I shall make a decision about the future of the collection and website. Wait and see. August 2025
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My man! I love these sorts of sites.
My favorite is https://pinouts.ru/
The Danish sockets are a happy smiley face! That's so cute
https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/DK/DK_socket_standard.jpg
This one looks a bit hungover though LOL
https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/DK/DK_connector-2pole.jpg
back to web 1.0! Nice anyway :)
Page loads that aren't measured in megabytes, no tracking cookies, and works without Javascript? Refreshing, if you ask me.
iPod 30-pin is a classic.