13 amp plugs - memories

Electrical safety legislation only covers items sold in the course of a business. For private sales it's buyer beware but the seller should at least describe the item accurately.

Opinion confirmed by conversation with local trading standards.

MBQ

You weren't doing Business Studies I presume?

I suspect he just enjoyed the fact that he was pissing the shopkeeper off

You were wrongly advised. The Plugs and Sockets (Safety) Regulations is very clear...

"No person shall supply, offer for supply, agree to supply, expose for supply or possess for supply an electrical device unless [...the plug conforms to BS1363 or the appliance isn't a type which would ever be plugged in...]".

There are no exclusions for private or car boot sales. This is actually at least a theoretical legal headache for people selling electrical items of historic value only, which are not being sold for real use, where the 1920's plug is an important part of the historic value of the item.

This was before the days of people feeling they needed to make money out of just about every they did (and back in the days when students did get grants).

Possibly (although I doubt the shopkeeper ever knew).

I know the BS has never been slow to call a spade a manual digging apparatus, but where does this bizarre word "plugtop" originally come from ? And what happens to all the plugbottoms?

The Navy seems to have done these particularly well.

Best of the lot is a famous US Navy manual on bomb disposal (on the web somewhere)

Probably wondered why the product he'd made a fortune on last semester had suddenly become unpopular!

According to an electrical book I have, the plug is what goes on the wall and the plugtop is what goes on the appliance. Quite possibly in the early days of electricity the plug and plugtop were sold in pairs.

The term 'socket' is reserved for the brass thingies in the [sic] plug.

Owain

I feel partly responsible for this thread being the second 'poster' Problem, how can I view the latest postings wthout having to trawl through all the posting dates! There's got to be a better way!

|I feel partly responsible for this thread being the second 'poster' |Problem, how can I view the latest postings wthout having to trawl |through all the posting dates! There's got to be a better way!

Does your ISP give you a usenet newsserver address? If so, go to

Use proper news client software rather than accessing via a web based method?

Most of them allow you to slice and dice and sort in numerous ways

Indeed...not that again!

And what's a 'draw'....

was => is

We had them in the 1950s, until approx 1956/57. (in Brighton)

I mentioned the rotary converter for my train set the other day. But I also unplugged an electric fire once. Lots of newspaper and a chair nearby, to be ignited by the arc.

I was really excited about the fire engine.

We used them at Essex too.

I did exactly the same at work a few years ago, with floppy disks. Bought and sold at cost...at a fraction of what computing reception charged. I do it every new academic year with ethernet cards now...they want 12 quid a throw,

The message from snipped-for-privacy@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) contains these words:

Whoever drafted those regulations obviously didn't know (or care) about Owains book but now plugs and sockets are enshrined in the law isn't it about time to drop the plugtops description that only serves to confuse the unwary?

Incidentally plugtop is so obscure that it hasn't made it into any of the several dictionaries I have consulted. The closest any get is to say that colloquially plug can be used to refer to an electric socket.

you pulled the plug out. That is the origin of the switches on all our sockets today." IMO any feed switch when thrown to Off interrupts voltage and therefore current. I was told little old folk used to plug safety 13A blank moulds - to stop the electrons from tumbling out! Jim