Plugs around the world

Opinion on up or down is pretty evenly divided. https://www.archtoolbox.com/materials-systems/electrical/groundorientation.html

I just rewired my kitchen and GFCI reads correct with ground in. I googled nema 5-20r - overwhelming ground up in photos.

Check out NEMA charts - ground up.

The one I liked was the electrician that did pin down except for switched outlets - which doesn't work in theatres but at home, at least useful. I'm sure it would offend my electrician friend who aligns all of the slotted screws the same.

I always do ground up on plug strips and boxes because I've seen the safety cable fall into that gap albeit, it's the neutral.
@BillConnerFASTC @mikefellh @derekleffew @gafftapegreenia @JohnD Now that we've swerved in to alignment of slot screw heads. I spent my IBEW provincial construction and maintenance apprenticeship with Comstock Canada's electrical division. Anytime I'd be dispatched to a new project, I'd be informed as to ground up, down, left, right in the specific building but the one constant with Comstock's Electrical Division Canada wide was slotted heads on ALL cover screws were to be aligned vertically, this purportedly was decreed by Comstock Canada's VP of Electrical Construction. I vividly recall a project in the third term of my apprenticeship when we received word that Comstock's Canadian VP would be visiting our sight as it was the largest new construction project Comstock Electrical was running at the moment out of our Hamilton, Ontario, office. Purportedly the gentleman was making a sweep of all Comstock Electrical offices across the country and wanted to visit the largest project of each and every office.
Herewith his purported logic: Toggle switches were mounted vertically. Toggle switches may be operated by women with neatly manicured finger nails. Purportedly his logic was no woman should be able to inadvertently catch her finger nail in a cover screw's slot while actuating a toggle switch on a Comstock project.
I don't make this stuff up. This was drilled into me in the third year of my apprenticeship and it's stuck with me since.
Not that I'm paranoid or obsessive compulsive (though I may be) but even now that I'm blind and existing in a home for the decrepit I still find myself taking a screwdriver and touching up the flawless alignment of screw heads if I find a careless maintenance person has carelessly misaligned one. At the peak of Comstock Canada's slot-head alignment furor, our foremen had us go around a job site during the last week with our square shanked Craftsman, Klein or Xcelite drivers, our best ones, the ones we weren't also using for cold chisels, and using our torpedo levels on the square shanks while carefully applying our final finesse. @GreyWyvern How's that?
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
But what did he do upon encountering the much more common situation when one of the duplex outlets was switched and the other constant? There's a similar argument as to whether the switched outlet goes on top or bottom. Using a Sharpie, I draw a dot in the center of the outlet, forming a "nose" if you will, to indicate a switched outlet.


And then there's this.
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NSFW.
Quad-plex. I don't like split wiring so avoid your hypothetical.
 
Because that outlet is installed upside down!!!

I used to work for an electrician, and we were taught the ground pin always goes down...the outlets in my house were certainly installed that way (when vertical).

What you got is one that someone thought they were know what they were doing! If I was buying a new house it's an obvious sign to be weary that there's home-owner electrical work done, and they don't know what they were doing!


New installation in a (then) new commercial facility ca. 2001. Dumbest excuse I've ever heard for purposely installing receptacle upside down...
 
Herewith his purported logic: Toggle switches were mounted vertically. Toggle switches may be operated by women with neatly manicured finger nails. Purportedly his logic was no woman should be able to inadvertently catch her finger nail in a cover screw's slot while actuating a toggle switch on a Comstock project.
I don't make this stuff up.

When we first moved into our current house back in the 70's there was still a light switch like this:
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As it operated the basement lights and was in the stairwell it made sense installing the replacement switch horizontally so you flick the switch in the direction you are going as to whether you are turning the light on or off.
 
Ground up is highly regarded as safer and the original intent, even if not code/UL mandated.

Humans have a propensity for seeing faces in the world that is well ingrained by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Messing with a force that strong is not easy!
 
When we first moved into our current house back in the 70's there was still a light switch like this:
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As it operated the basement lights and was in the stairwell it made sense installing the replacement switch horizontally so you flick the switch in the direction you are going as to whether you are turning the light on or off.
@mikefellh Continuing today's divergent swerves:
~40 miles down the highway from you in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, my grandmother's two story plus basement home was supplied by a a single pole solid neutral 30 Amp fused main switch feeding an open porcelain block holding two screw-in "plug" fuses. This would've been installed when her home was built in the 1800's; kitchen, dining room, living room just above ground level with a sewing room (manual treddle Singer of course) just off the dining room. By the time of my earliest recollections, running water had been added including an indoor 'privy' within the sewing room with a full washroom added directly above on the second floor to service the FOUR bedrooms. By sometime in the 1950's, my grandmother had added an enclosed sun porch on the rear where she had a used Gilson "Snowbird" brand commercial grade chest freezer installed some years after having sold her ice box and purchased her original electric refrigerator, an early Crosley (Sp?) of course. The entire house was heated by a coal fired furnace in the basement by convection via an approximately 3' x 3' square steel grate at ground floor level adjacent to the basement door and directly above the coal furnace. No ducts, none, just an exhaust hood and pipe into the brick chimney erected directly outside her walls. In the ceiling above the 3' square grate was a smaller grate cut in to heat the FOUR bedrooms. When her home was built her kitchen stove burned wood and refuse providing heat, four locations designated for pots, pans and kettles (to heat bath water that you carried upstairs) and a flat top open griddle. Eventually she added a gas stove alongside her wood burner and had a threaded gas pipe added to power an open-face porcelain heater in the main washroom [Exhausting through a 90 degree elbow through a hole in sheet metal where a glass window pane had been replaced.]
Your porcelain rotary switch brought this all back to me. Three such switches were originally installed in her front hall across from the stairwell. None of the switches were 3-ways, of course not, but the middle switch allowed you to turn on a light in the second floor's central hall IF the series connected switch upstairs was in its correct position. EVERYTHING was knob & tube, non-stranded, asbestos of course. By the time of my earliest recollections, my grandparents had added four ornate porcelain lamp sockets by pulling wiring through the non-structural hollowed wooden ceiling beams decorating their dining room ceiling. All ceilings were high with ornate 'plate rails' surrounding the dining room and master bedroom. When originally constructed the living room was lit by two large windows (with thin, single pane, non energy efficient, wavy glass) and four CANDLE BURNING wall sconces.
Leap ahead a couple of decades. By the time I was in my apprenticeship, I continually marvelled at how ALL of my grandmother's home ran from a two wire, one hot and one neutral, 30 Amp service. The Ontario Hydro meter reader visited monthly to read the glass enclosed KWH meter high on the wall inside the ground floor stairwell. (An old porcelain based, hard-wired, meter NOT one of the new-fangled plug in meters)
As a kid I never gave any of this a second thought, it was simply walking a few doors up our street to Grandma's and a chance to visit with two maiden aunts and their assortment of cats dogs, canaries, budgies and goldfish. I can remember being four or five and sitting on an army surplus munitions case in the ground floor central hall to warm myself and dry my winter boots on the 3' x 3' metal grill; as much as the dogs wanted to visit to be patted, you couldn't entice them to burn their paws on the hot steel grill if the furnace was burning. This was at the time in eastern Hamilton, roughly Kenilworth Avenue and Barton Street in general terms. [Of course the city's grown far, far east of there now a days]
Years later, I was in high school, my father had died and I'd scored a part time job working in commercial AM broadcasting. While in high school I'd noted asbestos wiring pulled through gas pipes when electricity came to my high school. By the time I'd drifted into amateur theatre I wasn't at all surprised to learn both the large chandelier in the group's large central dining room and its smaller matching twin were fed via asbestos routed through the original threaded gas pipes. The group was, and is to this day, based in a two and a half story home in downtown Hamilton with a basement added at some point and an annex added in the 1950's to accommodate a rehearsal stage with scene shop and prop storage below. They used to perform in a 1,000 seat high school auditorium then performed in a smaller 776 seat space when it opened in 1970 with a 45' grid and 27 counter balanced line sets.
One insidious thing I learned the hard way and will NEVER forget: In the days when electricity was being added to buildings originally lit by gas chandeliers, they'd install single pole dual latching push buttons or your rotary switches in the NEUTRAL supplying the fixture rather than the hot. I can't tell you how 'shocked' this hot-shot young apprentice was when he made this discovery but I'm still breathing to attest to the fact I've never forgotten when, where and how I learned this important lesson.
More than enough of this divergent drivel. Thanks for the memories @mikefellh
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
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Ron- fun side anecdote. In some order houses the wall or crown moulding was held off the ceiling just a touch. This gave a place to set nails to hang pictures since nailing into plaster is a pain. This is the origin of a picture rail mould.
 
@mikefellh Continuing today's divergent swerves:
~.......... basement home was supplied by a a single pole solid neutral 30 Amp fused main switch feeding an open porcelain block holding two screw-in "plug" fuses. This would've been installed when her home was built in the 1800's;............
Ron Hebbard.

Just a question, are you sure the wiring was original and not added a couple of years or so later??
 
Just a question, are you sure the wiring was original and not added a couple of years or so later??
@MPowers To the best of my knowledge my maternal grandparents home was built before electricity and natural gas arrived on our street. By the time I was five or so, at least four relatives owned homes on the street. My father's parents arrived from England and built a home in the next block to the north. In my earliest recollections my my maternal great grandparents, grandparents and a number of relatives lived one block south while my paternal grandparents owned a home across the street from where my parents eventually built their home.
Thanks for asking Sir.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
We haven't even touched Cee-Form plugs which are also super common around the world for our theatrical usage.
 
The first power amp I ever blew up (tho this was not my fault) was at my high school, a Winchester Mystery House set of building layers upon layers for 5000 students in Evanston, IL. One day I plugged a trusty Allied Electronics combo mixer/tube amp in the same outlet as always in the oldest part of the building, and POOF! before my hand could move away from the power switch, we had a smoke effect. It turned out some prior genius had wired the branch fuse panel (circuit breakers still unheard of) with the screw-in fuse in the NEUTRAL. Someone had overloaded it before I came along, smoked the fuse, and my amp got a full 240 volts til something melted. Moral - Never assume an outlet is wired or voltaged correctly if you value what you're about to plug in - espeically on tour or in funky surroundings.
 
Because that outlet is installed upside down!!!

I used to work for an electrician, and we were taught the ground pin always goes down...the outlets in my house were certainly installed that way (when vertical).
Did you ever question as to why this is?

What you got is one that someone thought they were know what they were doing! If I was buying a new house it's an obvious sign to be weary that there's home-owner electrical work done, and they don't know what they were doing!
The irony is, those you accuse of ignorance, were probably the safe ones.

Once, I watched a metal plate fall off a wall and land directly across the two prongs. While I still do ground down for old installations, any time I get to do a fresh start, it's ground up for me.


Nothing personal, but sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong, and there's a valid reason for swimming upstream.
 
The notations on the back of most outlets is oriented with the ground pin up. I take that to mean that the outlet was designed g-pin up oriented .
The fellow who taught me said the g-pin goes down because that is where the earth is. So that the ground pin points to the ground.
 
Did you ever question as to why this is?


The irony is, those you accuse of ignorance, were probably the safe ones.

Once, I watched a metal plate fall off a wall and land directly across the two prongs. While I still do ground down for old installations, any time I get to do a fresh start, it's ground up for me.


Nothing personal, but sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong, and there's a valid reason for swimming upstream.
@Chris Pflieger Writing in support. I've personally witnessed various tradepersons working on finished, or near-finished sites measuring their way horizontally across a wall only to have the edge of their metal self-retracting measuring blade slip due to gravity and end up arcing across the neutral and hot contacts of a practically fully-mated listed male cable end. I especially enjoy the resulting unscheduled pyro performance when the tape's owner is some arrogant self-proclaimed experienced expert sporting one of those 50' x 5/4 blades which require the use of a shoulder holster to carry without losing your pants in the process. I enjoy the performance even more so if he's a talented dancer. I further note this talent is more often publicly displayed by male tradepersons of our species. @GreyWyvern Do you know either the tapes or personages of which I'm speaking? @kiwitechgirl Care to comment?
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
The notations on the back of most outlets is oriented with the ground pin up. I take that to mean that the outlet was designed g-pin up oriented .
The fellow who taught me said the g-pin goes down because that is where the earth is. So that the ground pin points to the ground.
It may sound like the tail wagging the dog, but I would say the most convincing reason to mount them with the ground pin down is that most molded right angle plugs exit the cord on the ground pin end.
 
John - maybe that was the case but I just goggled these. ALL of Hubble's are ground pin up with cord exiting down . Leviton seems mostly down. Pass and Seymour more evenly split. Most but not all at Graingers are ground up with cord exiting down. And just googling images "angled 5-15p plug" shows all orientations - up, down, left, right, and at various angles - somewhat evenly represented. And I checked home depot - I'd say ground pin down with cord down was in the minority.

I think it's changed because I sensed I would find you were correct.
 
John - maybe that was the case but I just goggled these. ALL of Hubble's are ground pin up with cord exiting down . Leviton seems mostly down. Pass and Seymour more evenly split. Most but not all at Graingers are ground up with cord exiting down. And just googling images "angled 5-15p plug" shows all orientations - up, down, left, right, and at various angles - somewhat evenly represented. And I checked home depot - I'd say ground pin down with cord down was in the minority.

I think it's changed because I sensed I would find you were correct.
More like my refrigerator, window air conditioner, dehumidifier, APC battery back-up, printer, and power strip are all ground pin down. Haven't run into an appliance yet that isn't but I am sure they are out there or at least I would assume.
 
Once, I watched a metal plate fall off a wall and land directly across the two prongs. While I still do ground down for old installations, any time I get to do a fresh start, it's ground up for me.

From https://www.joneakes.com/jons-fixit...ould-the-ground-plug-go-on-electrical-outlets

"Probably the biggest problem with this whole question comes from the flat cords that are designed to hang down, but only when the ground pin is on the bottom. This is common for microwave ovens. A reversed outlet will put stress on such a plug. Most small transformers have polarised plugs (one prong wider than the other) and they are all designed to hang properly on the wall when the grounding pin is on the bottom of the outlet. We discovered battery chargers whose batteries fall out with the ground pin up. Night lights also usually have polarised plugs which means on reversed outlets, they will light up the ceiling not the floor. We did find one water cooler which had a three-prong plug made for the ground pin to be up, but that was the only manufactured device that we could find at all that had the ground pin purposely up -- a result of Quebec's tendency to go the other way."
 
From https://www.joneakes.com/jons-fixit...ould-the-ground-plug-go-on-electrical-outlets

"Probably the biggest problem with this whole question comes from the flat cords that are designed to hang down, but only when the ground pin is on the bottom. This is common for microwave ovens. A reversed outlet will put stress on such a plug. Most small transformers have polarised plugs (one prong wider than the other) and they are all designed to hang properly on the wall when the grounding pin is on the bottom of the outlet. We discovered battery chargers whose batteries fall out with the ground pin up. Night lights also usually have polarised plugs which means on reversed outlets, they will light up the ceiling not the floor. We did find one water cooler which had a three-prong plug made for the ground pin to be up, but that was the only manufactured device that we could find at all that had the ground pin purposely up -- a result of Quebec's tendency to go the other way."

As I mentioned in response to John's post, maybe it's changing. That quote is from 2004. I surveyed my desk and computer, kind of split. Oddly the computer and UPS are at 45 degrees. My wall warts are not polarized.

My 1904 house was wired with (very few) plugs horizontal, in the baseboard. I continued that and made sure neutral was up, for that piece of metal that might fall in the gap.
 

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