Dear friends, this is to bring to your attention the problem with wrongly designed plugs and sockets which are recommended by the Indian Standards Organization. While the rest of the world has switched to flat pin design, which ensures proper electric contact even when the items are not produced to exacting standards, the round pin design we use in India will only function properly if the design is very accurate.
Poor electric contacts are unsafe, especially when the grounding is not OK (a couple of mild shocks received by all my family members prompted me to post this writeup). Poor electric contact must be responsible for loss of thousands of crores of rupees in transmission losses. Poor electric contact will lead to undue heating, which is undesirable.
We trust that the government will set up a high powered committee to examine this issue. Let us also hope that our IITs, Institution of Engineers, Indian Industries Association and consumer associations will get involved to sort out this unsatisfactory situation.
We just cannot become an advanced nation if we do not know how to make a proper electric contact!
Fig 1: The problem: the tester shows that there is unsafe voltage in the ground line of the plug, which forms part of a brand new extension board. This voltage is fed back from the voltage stabilizer to which our computer is connected (Apparently most voltage stabilizers in India have this problem!?).
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Fig 2: The problem solved by tilting the plug (The grounding pin in the plug is small compared with the size of the socket)
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Fig 3: The problem solved temporarily by jacking up the plug with the help of an anchor. Tomorrow I will purchase a new plug and replace the plug that came with the extension board.
Fig 4: The extension board, purchased for Rs 500. The letters in small print over 'Kolors', state: An ISO 9001:2000 Certified Company. In case you are wondering what the purpose of the white wire leading away from the grounding pin of the plug to the right is?.... That is to solve a similar grounding problem involving a voltage stabilizer and another extension board : - (
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Posted on: 02/10/10
For the sake of completeness I am posting whatever I had posted on this subject in a discussion group:
1) Design M was originally used by the British (they introduced the same design in India), now they have switched to Design F - a wise switch over. Anyone familiar with jig and fixture design will tell you that the three pin design used in India violates the basic principle of jig and fixture design. No doubt the Europeans are able to produce their hardware to great accuracy. Kudos to them, but that does not change the fact that the American and British designs are superior.
2) Actually this is a quite important development.
I made a living off of the other types of plugs with their non-polarized Live and Neutral. Those braindead reversible AC connectors have successfully destroyed millions of dollars of computer equipment with their imaginary grounding and hefty currents that “boldly go where no current was designed to go”, providing me with decades of employment repairing toasted gear. All this despite my repeated cautions to managements which regarded the extra cost of the British system as simply too extravagant, preferring the economy of the standard issue two-prong electrical connectors they save so much infrastructure money using..
Dissatisfaction with electric plugs appears universal...... Although I doubt that the 'technically' advanced nations have the peculiar problem we have, of seriously shoddy workmanship in addition to bad design. With so many standards, people who talk of globalization must be jokiing : -)
Selvaraj
3) The problems I see is this (I am a Mechanical Engineer, so my discussion will be biased accordingly):
There are three pins to be matched with three holes, to do so precisely is difficult unless manufacturing is done to high accuracy. The possibility is very high that point contacts may be taking place at all the three pins. Or at best a circumferential line contact at one pin and point contacts at the other pins. In flat pin design it should be possible to make line contacts at all the three pins, without the components being made to great accuracy.
We need to also think out of the box. Many systems are permanently connected, like those relating to computer hardware, why not fix them more permanently using an elegantly designed and safe terminal strip?
Regards,
Selvaraj
