Oh I see. It would have been nice if you used 220v for all devices, since you would use less current, thus less heat. But its nice to have that option.
I wonder what tri phase plug do you use? We use IEC 60309.
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IEC 60309 is common here for industrial applications (3-phase plugs, color red for 480V), we even use them in residential applications for hooking up generators to the house or powering machinery with 3-phase motors. The single phase plug (color coded blue for 240V), in addition to industrial use, is used to hook up single phase generators. But I've never seen it used on an appliance because it's giant compared to a Schuko.
Most people here seem to be missing the point of the fuse in british plugs. In electrical engineering, the first and most important purpose of a fuse is to protect wire from overload. The fuse is thus sized to the downstream wire current capacity. It's important to know that this is to protect the downstream wire, not the upstream wire. The upstream wire needs to be protected by a fuse of its own upstream wherever it meets a wire or busbar that is larger and so on.
So a typical scenario is that you have a 2.5mm2 wire in the wall fused at 16A that feeds a 16A socket. That socket can accept any cord of any wire size. Say that the cord has 1.5mm2 wire, this is technically still OK as 1.5mm2 in free air can handle 16A (the wire needs to be thicker inside the wall due to thermal insulation making heat dissipation worse).
But if you plug a thinner cord into the socket, like say a 0.75mm2 or even 0.5mm2, this is now unsafe, as the wire can't handle 16A, so in case of an overload on the end of the thin wire, the fuse or breaker in the fuseboard or distribution panel won't protect the wire from melting down and starting a fire.
That's why putting a fuse in the plug is objectively the best and safest way to do it: the fuse is sized to the wire that the plug is attached to. This allows a socket that could be fused even at 25A to safely feed thin cords.
"But the rest of the world doesn't do this and I don't hear about there being a lot of fires due to thin cords catching fire" true, as usually, the thin cord is fixed to an appliance, and the appliance itself won't normally draw enough current to overload the wire, or the appliance is fused inside (fusing downstream of the wire is otherwise improper). Most failure scenarios don't involve an overload, but a short circuit, in which case the fault current will be several times what's required to melt the fuse or trip the breaker almost instantly (short circuit currents of kiloamps, thousands of amps, are common even in 16A circuits). The thermal mass of the wire, even if a bit too thin for the current rating of the fuse, is too large to melt before the actual fuse melts. Now if you go to the extreme, have a wire that is very thin connected to a fuse that's way too large for it (and not just in the 2-3x range), the wire itself will start acting as a fuse and blow up spectacularly in case of a short circuit. That's obviously not what you want to happen.
The problem is extension cords that use wire not rated to the current at which the socket they're plugged into is fused at. If you have an extension cord with 0.75mm2 wire plugged into a 16A socket, you could plug an appliance that uses the whole 16A into this thin extension cord, and it will melt and short circuit and possibly start a fire. But in countries with safety regulations and government bodies that monitor the market for unsafe products and which actually recall and punish sellers of unsafe products, such a product will be pulled from the market as soon as a complaint is sent to the governing body. Imported products that don't conform to safety regulations that use wire that's too thin or not even copper (copper coated aluminum) will sometimes slip through the cracks and cause a fire.
In countries where there are no such regulations, unsafe extension cords could be everywhere and fires could be common. I don't know the statistics.
Now even the british plug isn't invincible: in case the user puts a counterfeit fuse in it that doesn't blow when it's supposed to, or a cheap user wraps the fuse in aluminum foil to bypass it.
One other thing that fusing the plug allows is to have an outlet that's fused in the panel at a high current (say 25A or even more) and have a 16A or less cord plugged into the outlet, and still have adequate protection of all parts. You could have a giant circuit with 10 or more outlets all powered by a 25 or 32 breaker and have many 16A cords plugged into all the outlets and still be safe.
If you had a 16A breaker protecting a giant radial with a lot of outlets and you had a lot of appliances plugged into the circuit, chances are high that the combined total current drawn from all the outlets exceeded 16A, which would result in nuisance tripping.
So to summarize, the fuse or breaker in the panel is only meant to protect the wire downstream of it, not the thing that's plugged into the outlet. British plugs have a feature, fuse, that all other fuseless plugs lack, and that makes them objectively better, for a good reason.
Personally, I think their mechanical design isn't that good, they're too large and heavy. But I'd like for fuses in plugs to be incorporated into other plugs that currently don't have them, as it would make them better.
Even though I live in Europe and the standard here is Schuko, I don't necessarily think it's the best standard. For one thing it's not polarized, so all appliances have to be made to accept any polarity of power. Wire colors inside appliances don't make sense, as live and neutral could be reversed just by rotating the plug.
Now don't get me started on Euro plugs... a design of compromises that's objectively bad. If anyone doesn't know, the pins on an Euro plug are meant to be bent together! it's so they make better contact in a Schuko outlet. I'm not joking, that's the standard. That means that when they're plugged into an outlet that's made for Euro plugs, the pins have to be bent slightly apart to even fit.
When I didn't know this, I straightened the pins on all Euro plugs out of habit, thinking they were meant to be straight, but that just made them fit too loose in Schuko outlets and fall out too easy.
And those plugs that are on all vacuum cleaners that are like a Schuko but without a ground, but only fit into a Schuko outlet? I hate those things, they always get caught on stuff when you retract them inside the vacuum because of their square design. Even a regular schuko is superior to those.
