Badger Électricité

No more dithering about with plugs

One of the most frequent questions I hear is "I need to swap the plugs on my UK appliances to French ones, but there's no indication which side of the plug is live or neutral - what do I do?". Until recently this would have opened a large can of worms as even the French couldn't seem to agree on the matter. However, I have always had a belief as to which side is correct, which has now been proven right.

Anyway, if you look at the front of a French socket (assuming it is the right way up, with the sticking out earth pin at the top), the LIVE (phase) is on the right (or clockwise from the earth if you like). Translate that to the inside of a plug, & it's the same. Put another way, it's the same as a UK 13 Amp plug. More to the point it's the same principal as the Europe-wide standard (CEE17) for industrial & weatherproof connectors that most people will have seen in the form of the blue 16 Amp plugs/sockets used for caravan hook-ups, or the yellow (110 Volt) version used for building site power tools. Although this standard also encompasses three-phase connectors & goes up to 125 Amp capacity, the live connection in a socket (viewed from the front) is always clockwise from the earth.

So, how do I know what's right? Well, in recent times Legrand & other major manufacturers of fittings for domestic installation in France) have introduced colour coding to their ranges. Lo & behold, the live is on the right! In the absence of any more official information this move is as good as it gets.

Whilst agreeing that in terms of physics the polarity does not matter it is really bad practice to mix things up in the same installation. What leads, adaptors etc. then do is whatever they do, but at least an installation should be correct.