electrical help please urgent

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rubbachicken

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Location
london, UK
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i have a real easy one to sort out
i'm in the UK and i have a charger for my drill sent over from the states, as we 240volts for home use, but we are only allowed 110volts on construction sites, i needed a 110v charger
so i have my charger two prongs one bigger than the other, obviously so it will only go in the socket one way around, so which one is the live, as the cables two cores are both black, one is morked and the other is plain
plug2584.jpg

as i don't want to get them the wrong way around an blow up my new charger
thanks in advance
 
Short answer: I don't think it makes any difference in the case of a charger.

Long answer: I'm not an electrician, and I'm sure you'll get more-qualified answers when folks wake up on Sunday morning in North America.

Check out here... about halfway down the page, in the paragraph that starts "The typical wall outlet...", it says that the wider blade is the neutral one, and the narrower blade is the hot one. Our current standard outlets of course look like the one attached below. The standard is that the wide blade goes to the left, and the semi-circular hole underneath is the ground. You charger doesn't seem to need a ground.

I'm pretty certain that it doesn't matter in your charger which is hot and which is neutral. I don't think there are that many pieces of equipment where it really does matter which blade goes which way; it's just that all our plugs are constructed in this way now. (But I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong.)

The reason I say that is, those of us Americans who travel or move a lot in Europe are real familiar with this kind of adapter (attached). If you look closely, you can see that one of the two female slots for the blades is wider than the other; that's just so that the plug fits physically... because the male pins can be plugged into a European outlet either way using this adapter.

Oh... and I've used multi-voltage chargers with North American blades many times here in Europe with an adapter like this, paying no attention to which way they're plugged in; with no problem.

You'll probably want to cut off the North American plug, though, and attach one of your normal mains plugs.

I assume your work site 110v power supply will be otherwise compatible... it shouldn't make any difference to the charger whether it's 60Hz or 50Hz -- despite what may be marked on the charger.

Hope that helps!

--Marek
 
It won't blow your charger either way.
The wider blade is the neutral and the narrow is the hot. The charger and tool should be double insulated to use an ungrounded cord so it doesn't really matter that much.

Bottom line, it doesn't matter which way that cord plugs in as long as it is pluggen in to 110VAC. Plugging it into 220VAC will blow it up.
 
So in his case the white wire is black. :11:

That is the lovely thing about standards, there are so many to choose from. :eyebrow:
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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