They’re like that in this apartment we’re renting and I keep seeing them elsewhere. I don’t get it.
I present to you my favorite YouTube person:
The GFCI/RCD, a simple but life saving protector:
https://youtu.be/ILBjnZq0n8s?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFU62mIGZNag5vQ0a6tDGBpO
In defense of the Switched Outlet:
Electrical topics playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFU62mIGZNag5vQ0a6tDGBpO
I could just watch this guy all day lol
A fellow human of great and distinguished taste I see
I expected Technology Connections or ElectroBOOM, was not disappointed.
One teaches what to do, the other teaches what not to do.
ElectroBOOM keeps me alive sometimes, and Technology Connections told me how to properly use a dishwasher.
To turn things on and off.
I remember when I was young and bending down all the time was a thing you could do painlessly. Ah, youth.
Being a uk person its cause they can & its also in to building / electric code. Its just a switch that breaks the live leg, stops sparking when plugging in stuff.
Your sockets spark when you plug something in?
I’ve definitely had that happen to me, sort of at random, in the U.S.
But it doesn’t seem to have any effect. It’s not like a gigantic spark and it’s pretty contained.
Oh I’ve never seen that in the US, maybe I just didn’t notice
Laptop power bricks is probably where I see it most. Or if you plug in something with a motor already switched on. Listen for a soft popping noise if you plug in a big power brick.
You’re right, now that I think about it. Laptop power does it more than anything else.
Many, many big power-smoothing capacitors inside those jumping from 0 to 120V in a microsecond, that’s why. The better-smoothed the power supply, the more capacitors and the bigger the sparks tend to be, although some really high quality ones put most of them behind inrush-current limiters to reduce the sparking, but that can also marginally reduce efficiency. High power electronics are always a bit of a tradeoff. The problem is that capacitors charge and discharge almost instantly in most cases, and when empty they act like a short circuit until they’re filled, so they can create some pretty big sparks, even though the actual energy going in is minuscule by any reasonable measurement. It’s almost like a static shock, huge spark, tiny energy.
Some motors will also spark badly when disconnected, but the reason is slightly different. They have a huge electromagnetic field which suddenly fills or collapses and that inductance in the coils can draw a lot of amps on startup and generate some pretty high voltages, more than enough to spark across the gap. Like the capacitors, they are very nearly a short circuit until they start moving.
