Units of measurement
Now, here's something I picked up via The Devil's Kitchen
The Royal College of Art's graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was a plug. Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passer by with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width [FNS: surely you mean 'thickness'] of an Apple MacBook Air. "The MacBook Air is the world's thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the UK, we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug," says Choi.
I'm so glad that the thickness (10mm) is expressed in terms of Apple Macbook Air™-Thicknesses; I would find it incredibly hard to visualise the extreme super-cool sleekness of such a plug without the universal yardstick of a Macbook Air™ to compare it to. I have at least a dozen Macbook Airs™ on my desk, on hand in case I need to measure something about half an inch thick*. Although, I have heard of a fantastic new invention that can be as little as 1/4 of a Macbook Air™-Thickness, which surely must make it at least 4x as super cool as a super cool Macbook Air™.
I'm also incredibly glad that someone has tackled the decidedly uncool and un-"now" unfreasibly large BS1363 UK 240v plug. I often look at the plugs I have in my life and think "to hell with safety and practicality- I want plugs to look cool, yeah!". Indeed, a flimsy sleek fold out plug will come in useful to me every time I'm lugging electrical appliances or chargers around and could use the extra few cubic centimetres of space so freed up to carry, I dunno, one of my fleet of measuring Macbook Airs™?
PS: They could give the plug a super-cool "now" name like iPlug, or something. That would make it absolutely perfect.
*or just to have a wank over the sleek perfection that is absolutely anything with a fucking Apple™ logo on it. Fuck yeah.
December 11th, 2009 - 22:53
To be fair, the design is a pretty neat reworking of our rather overengineered plug. I’ve had a look at the design before, and it looks just as safe and practical as the normal plug to me. Something that takes less material to do the job will probably become the norm in time (it’ll be cheaper to make)…
But yes, they lose 20 inventor points for sucking Apple’s cock.
December 12th, 2009 - 18:40
What concerns me is that the live and neutral connections both have to go through that small pivot point. With repeated use that would be the first point of failure and the connections would necessarily be very close to each other. A normal UK socket will quite happily provide 32A or more (depending on the circuit breaker) at 240v+ (here I get up to 255v, which gives a maximum fault condition power of 8.1KW!), which has the capability to cause quite a lot of trouble in a short circuit.
Also I disagree that plugs of that type would become cheaper than what we use currently, there are extra manufacturing costs of making the pivot point and internal connections, and I doubt that the new design would use less plastic anyway (current plugs are largely hollow).
December 16th, 2009 - 01:05
Yes, I take your points there. I suppose that, should the idea take off, that our rather excitable H+S culture would be all over the potential shortcomings, and that some form of “ruggedness” would have to be built in. In the words of Ms Faulds-Wood, “This could be… a potential death-trap!”
I was guessing about the volume of plastic, but I guess that comparisons can’t be made because we don’t have stats for either type of device?
Mind you, some of the electrical systems we have now are a bit crap! The big switch that isolates our cooker went duff a few weeks ago, so the whole panel (big switch, socket and little switch) got changed. I took it to bits, and the design is a bit, shall we say, Spartan? Tiny leaves of unknown metal, seesawing over plastic pivot points under spring loaded plastic pressurisers – yuk, I’m not surprised it fell apart. The contact area of the switches in particular did NOT look up to the job of powering a multi-KW device!
Bah, humbug.
December 18th, 2009 - 17:27
What you want is a *real* switch… http://uk.farnell.com/moeller/p3-100-i5-svb-k-ci/isolator-plastic-encl-100a-3pole/dp/1225395