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From: "Edward Rawde" <invalid@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: British (european?) kitchen counter electric outlets
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 21:35:20 -0400
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"Martin Brown" <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in message news:v4pis9$n93f$2@dont-email.me...
> On 16/06/2024 19:37, Edward Rawde wrote:
>> "Martin Brown" <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in message news:v4m1bn$3ub3e$1@dont-email.me...
>>> On 16/06/2024 03:23, Edward Rawde wrote:
>
>>>> It may be the case that 240V has now been reduced to 230V in line with the rest of Europe.
>>>> And these days most, perhaps all, electronics won't care about the difference.
>>>
>>> No we have a nominal 230vac which in practice varies between 220vac and 255vac depending on where you are and local loading.
>>
>> Ok. Most of the all country power adapters I have are labeled 100-240V 50-60 Hz so I hope they were designed for up to 255V.
>
> They get around it by having an asymmetric  error band on the nominal UK 230v supply of -6% +10% (in practice roughly centred on 
> 240v). Cheap US kit made for 60Hz sometimes has transformers that saturate on UK 50Hz.
>
> I recall some cheap and nasty US made razors that depend on a 60Hz mechanical resonance to work so that in the UK at 50Hz they are 
> next to useless.

That reminds me of a time when I was working in the US and a friend from the UK came to stay.
His razor came with various adapter cords but none would fit any outlet we could find.
So we went to radio shack and bought a cable which did fit a local outlet.
The we cut and joined two of the cables together to make the necessary adapter cord.
Then we found that his razor still didn't work because it was designed for 50Hz resonance.

>
>>> Our mains was sometimes high enough to blow filament light bulbs. In cities such wide variations are much less common but single
>>> line rural feeds are higher near the transformer so that the folk at the far end get the volts.
>
> The lowest I have ever seen my mains voltage was just under 200v when one of the three phases had gone down (not my phase). I 
> didn't notice at all until I tried to boil the kettle because almost everything these days is so voltage tolerant. LED light bulbs 
> just draw more current so do computers and their displays.
>
> Incandescent bulbs were really dim on that low voltage (I still have one or two in seldom used locations).
>
> -- 
> Martin Brown
>