The Workshopshed blog writes about a conversation on Mastodon which started as to why the USA have communal laundry rooms in their apartment blocks and diverged into a discussion on UK home wiring, raisng the question. Why does the UK have fused plugs and how does everyone else manage without?

Looking around my house, I realised that not everything that fits in the socket has these cartridge fuses. And I think this is a big clue to why the fuses are there.

It is because of the ring main.

One commenter was insistent that the reason the fuses were there was because of the ring design of our socket wiring. This statement is repeated around the internet, but it didn’t seem like the whole answer to me as there’s nothing inherent the ring topology which means we need fuses.

The fuses in UK plugs are 13A for large appliances and 5A or 3A for smaller devices. There are certain devices such as AC to low voltage DC that don’t have fuses, sometimes known as “wall warts”. The key feature of these is that they have no wire between the device and the plug, so there is no wire to protect. As the only output is low voltage these devices often don’t have an earth either. These devices have multiple layers of casing to protect the user from any possibility of exposure to high voltages.

So in summary, the UK has fuses in their plugs so they can do their laundry at home.

Read more in the post here.