what's going on my friends this is dustin stelzer with electricianu um today i have a question that
i want to answer and somebody recently asked me why do uh the prongs on receptacles actually look
different why are like what some of the slots bigger and some of the slots smaller
if you notice this is a 15 amp receptacle this is a 20 amp receptacle there's a difference between
them in that there's one horizontal blade that can be inserted into a 20 amp receptacle where
a 15 amp receptacle will only allow for vertical uh plug-ins so if we have a 15 amp cord we can
only plug it into a 15 amp receptacle whereas if we have a 15 or a 20 amp cord that has a
horizontal blade we can fit both of those into this receptacle but you could not put that 20 amp
horizontal blade into this device and they do that because they don't want you over driving
something or over using something beyond the rating of its use because you could actually
melt the face of this if you run too much current through it and the breaker doesn't detect that
there's too much current so there actually is a problem with uh people usually during the winter
months they'll they'll plug in um space heaters to these 15 amp receptacles but back at the panel
they'll have a 20 amp breaker on a 20 amp circuit and the only thing that's not 20
amp rated is this so there might actually be like 18 amps of current running for hours and
hours and hours while that space heater is on but this 15 amp receptacle is not meant to hold it so
that 15 amp receptacle will start to melt over time we see that all the time in the winter so
just something to consider you could just put 20 amp devices in everything because the 20 amp
is rated to handle that much current through it all the time it's not going to overheat the metal
in here enough to melt the plastic the other side of that is why do these receptacles have
one side that's bigger than the other side they're not the same slits basically
and if you look at some cords there are different kinds of cords out there
so these are both 13 amp cords they're just pretty standard like this is a standard size
core that you're going to find for most things for even appliance cords and things like that
but a lot of the front sides of them are different so like this one specifically has a larger
prong and this one a smaller prong and what it does is it just tells you which polarity
you're going to be plugging this in so that you can keep your hot and your neutral on the same
polarity now a lot of times with the two pronged cord it really doesn't matter either way you
plug it in the motor would run the same way or a light is going to turn on the same way but you are
reversing the polarity of the actual conductor so it's more of a technicality kind of thing so the
chords are telling you with the larger prong the one that's fatter is the neutral and the
other one is the hot so when they put the prongs like that you can't physically insert it any other
way than the way that it's supposed to go but not all cords are like that so this is another
13 amp cord this one just has a ground this is a a two wire cord this is a three wire cord
so it's still only a 13 amp cord but they don't actually give you a fatter side on this again
there's only one way you can plug this in right like you can't screw that up but that's really
the reason the larger prong 2 lets you know out in the field installing stuff that's neutral
the smaller one is hot obviously the bottom one's ground so while i was digging through my
shop just to find this stuff i figured i would talk about different kinds of receptacles so
this is what we would call a single receptacle and this is a duplex receptacle
if you were to put two duplexes next to each other you call that a quad or that's what we in
the south call a quad receptacle so in one box you've got four actual uh devices inside of it
uh you'll notice that there's two different styles right so like these are essentially the same thing
they're both 15 amp duplex receptacles but this one is what we call a standard receptacle and
this is what we call a decor receptacle these aren't really nice they're a lot more people
are using them than use these just because of the clean look and you know you can have
a switches receptacles gfcis all kinds of devices with the same exact plates so you don't have to
go buy separate plug plates and separate switch plates for every single thing so those are things
that you're going to come across and then also if you'll notice on these these are 250 volt
receptacles so they're just different variations of receptacles but you see the prongs it's a
similar thing like this one has an l shape so the prong on the on that ground will be an l
shape whereas this one's just going to be a normal round ground but the blades are all three the same
size so really it's not just these receptacles that do that all receptacles across the industry
are made for specific types of applications so like this one is a 50 amp 125 or 250 volt
rated receptacle that means that it is a 50 amp receptacle and you can either run 125
volts in it or you can run up to 250 volts so a lot of receptacles are rated in 125 and 250.
just 120 240 same thing those are all just nominal numbers that we speak in so if somebody says 250
or 230 or 240 or 220 they're talking about the same thing they just don't realize that there's
some of them are reserved for when we're talking about motors and some of them are for devices and
so you know there's different reasons why we use different nomenclature it's the same thing for
110 or 115 120 125 but it's the same like range of use so that's a 50 amp layout so you know when you
see one of these it's like oh that's probably for a range right like a like an oven would plug into
something like that pretty consistently across the market that's what these are used for i think even
on the packaging it says range receptacle um this is something you're probably going to see
on welder so this is a 30 amp 125 and 250 meaning that you can do 125 volts or 250 volts but either
way it is a 30 amp receptacle so it can handle 30 amps of current going through it no matter
what voltage you put through it um you're always supposed to stay within the rating obviously but
it is a three prong in a little bit different layout so all these receptacles there's multiple
different styles of 30 amp receptacles that'll do 250 or some of them will only do 125. sometimes
you'll find a receptacle just like this that's 30 amps so it's got two sideways prongs on it
and it's a 250 volt some are 125 volt only so that's something that you need to understand about
receptacles is the layout of the pins actually does mean something and the reason why everything
looks the way it does is because there's something that's supposed to plug into it and if you try to
jam something in that doesn't fit you're not doing it right you can actually damage the equipment so
hope that helps thanks for the question love you guys and i'll see you in the next one
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