It is obvious that there will be three pins for most of the plugs you use in your day-to-day life. The Earth pin is longer and thinner than the live and Neutral pins. This three pin plug is safer than the plug with two pins. This third pin helps in neutralizing the leakage voltage if any in the arrangement and protect you from electrical shock. This arrangement ensures that your device is earthed first before powering.
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| Why Is The Earth Pin On A Three Pin Plug Is Bigger and Thicker Than The Other Two Pins? |
These three pins carry three different wires based on their application. The Red or Brown wire represents the live line, the Blue or Black wire represents the neutral line, and the Green or Yellow wire represents the Earth.
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| Why Is The Earth Pin On A Three Pin Plug Is Bigger and Thicker Than The Other Two Pins? |
When electrical appliance with metal bodies, are vulnerable to the fault current or leakage inside the appliance, the whole metal case becomes live. If you happen to touch it, a current will flow through you to the earth (i.e. electric shock). Hence, to prevent you from electric shock, you need to ensure that the system is properly grounded or earthed.
Reasons for making the Earth Pin bigger and thicker than the other two pins:
The Electrical Sockets consists of three holes with shutters on the live and neutral lines to prevent children from inserting conducting materials and avoid electric shock. Insertion of a longer pin i.e. the earth pin helps in opening the shutters and helping in the insertion of the other two pins. These shutters are called Earth-Pin operated shutters.
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| Why Is The Earth Pin On A Three Pin Plug Is Bigger and Thicker Than The Other Two Pins? |
The Earth Pin on the plug is Bigger than the live and neutral pins. When inserting the Plugin to the socket the Earth Pin is the first to insert before the current carrying pins of the plug become live. When removing the plug from the socket, the current carrying pins will separate before the earth connection is broken. That means the earth pin is the first to connect and the last to disconnect. This helps in maintaining safety.
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| Why Is The Earth Pin On A Three Pin Plug Is Bigger and Thicker Than The Other Two Pins? |
The Earth Pin on the plug is thicker to prevent from the wrong insertion of this pin to the live and neutral holes. This prevents earth pin from establishing an electrical contact with the live terminals.
Technically, the thickness of the earth pin is more, in order to decrease its resistance. And any leakage or fault current will always pass through the low resistance path.
Where P is the Resistivity of the material,
L is the length of the material,
A is the Area of Cross section,
R is the resistance of the material.
Here Resistance(R) is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area of the conductor area (A). Therefore Resistance of earth pin decreases if the thickness increases. Here larger pin (earth pin) has more area. So, more the area, less the resistance and more fault current will pass through low resistance path and prevent from electric shock.
Every effort is taken to protect you from electric shock and maintain safety.And it’s your responsibility to connect earth wire in the socket to the proper grounding system.
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