Re: upside down????

Risky though as the pin sizes are wrong. The same is true of plugging them into shaver adapters the pins are too small. You might get away with it or you might overheat the thing and cause a fire later when someone plugs an electric fire in.

Indeed.

I have done it with a shaver needing a charge when there has been no shaver socket or adapter. In that case it is unlikely to cause any harm due to the very low charging current. More worrying is that in a fault case the very thin flex and the shaver itself is only protected by the

SteveW

Whilst I agree that the can be snapped off, I've never had it happen to me - and I can be really clumsy at times.

Of course, if you abuse anything sufficiently badly it will break ...

Possibly because they were dangerous if abused?

One idiot I worked with was delighted when he found that you could easily plug unfused 2.5A Europlugs into them.

Much easier than cutting it off and fitting a fused 13A plug...

had two go recently...pain inthe butt...who stocks 13amp plugs these days .....

No solution if it's a wall wart. Just means you can only plug it into the same socket.

Pin size is fine, those plugs are on low current loads. Lack of fusing is more an issue.

NT

You can do that with any 13A socket, just by using a screwdriver or the earth pin of a upturned 13A plug to open the shutter first.

Not a good idea, but I suppose useful as a one off when you don't have an adapter and either don't have a spare plug or don't want to permanently alter the lead.

SteveW

The pin size is not fine.

No it is not. However, with the low current drawn by a charging shaver or toothbrush, overheating due to poor contact is not going to happen, so it wouldn't matter. Higher loads would.

SteveW

I needed half a dozen last week. Somewhere I have some old ones. I ended up buying a box of 20 as it was cheaper! (first I had to fond some with proper cord grips)

... which makes the pin size absolutely fine for such loads. Sheesh.

But it doesn't. Even with small loads any vibration can make it arc and that damages the contacts in the socket and then it becomes a fire risk when someone plugs in a real plug with a load on it.

I conclude you've either not used the method or not examined the mechanics behind the faceplate. I used such plugs & sockets extensively as a kid. I looked to find the sockets gripping the pins. That's ok at low current.

Plugging them only into 2A or 3A fused extension leads was how I fused them. (I'm not recomending using that approach now, it's hardly ideal.)

NT

The problem is less what happens to your appliance with the wrong plug, and more what happens to the next hapless person along with a high load appliance and proper plug using a socket which now has (potentially) damaged contacts.

They grip ok, but how do you guarantee that the pins which don't have the proper profile will not displace or bend a contact on insertion? Are you confident that a smaller diameter pin which that can be inserted at an angle will not hit the leading edge of a contact?

Ordered an additional 18V battery charger the other day - turned up with the earth pin snapped off! (it was well packaged and wrapped up, but the plug had been located in the packaging such that its pins were resting against the charger. Must have got a knock in just the wrong direction)

This is a pointless discussion as obviously plugging a continental

Its not a pointless discussion since ISTM that people are missing one of the key problems with doing this...

Yes from the point of view of the user poking things into the socket, it will "work", its unlikely to result in immediate Armageddon etc. The main concern is that the socket gets damaged in the process, and that then causes problems for later users of the socket.