[ken]

BS 1363 plug has some neat safety features, but it's really big. Look at the size of a British power strip, for example. As Tom Scott observes, to get the full benefit of the safety features, they would need to make them even bigger. It's also not even close to round, so pulling it out of a nest of cables looks terrible.

I'm not convinced that a fuse belongs in a plug, either, especially if it's invisible, and the plug has to be completely disassembled with a screwdriver to access it. Put the fuse in the device, which certainly has much more space for it, and probably a mechanism to make it easy to access.

As far as the physical structure goes, BS 1363 looks like it was designed in the 1940's ... because it was designed in the 1940's. I'd much rather have something modern and ergonomic like TRUE1. It's small and round, it locks, it's basically impossible to shock yourself with it, and it's IP rated.

I'm not alone here. There's many videos on YouTube of people hacking the Edison plugs off their power tools to replace them with powerCON or TRUE1, but I have yet to find anyone in the world who wants to replace their Edison plug with BS 1363!

[jdietrich]

>I'm not convinced that a fuse belongs in a plug, either, especially if it's invisible, and the plug has to be completely disassembled with a screwdriver to access it.

Moulded plugs generally use a clip-in fuseholder that can be opened with any pointed object; rewireable plugs can be opened to replace the fuse by loosening one captive combination Philips/flat screw. It's usually far easier than replacing a fuse in the appliance, which is often on a PCB-mounted holder buried within the guts of the appliance.

[zrobotics]

The fuse is located in the plug, rather than the device, because one of the most likely ways to be exposed to live wire is a damaged/frayed power lead. If the fuse is located in the device, it does not protect the upstream part of the system.