Friday, 20 October 2017

standard - Are these AC wires in this cable swapped?


(I am located in the US)



I'm taking apart a cable to use for AC in a project. When I stripped the ends, I saw the expected Black/White/Green colors to indicate hot/neutral/ground respectively. However just to be sure (before using the cable) I traced each with a multimeter. What I found was as below, however their positions on the plug are REVERSED from what I would expect to find in an AC plug in the USA. (As indicated in any number of the results from e.g. this Google Images search)


Am I correct, that I should be using this cable's BLACK wire for neutral, and it's WHITE wire for hot?


AC Power supply cable



Answer



You're right, it appears to be backwards.


However, in practice, it doesn't really make all that much difference. Inside your equipment, you have to keep both line and neutral isolated from the ground connection anyway.


Even if your cable was wired correctly, there could be an error elsewhere in the mains wiring.


In other words, you have to treat both black and white as "equally dangerous".


No comments:

Post a Comment

arduino - Can I use TI's cc2541 BLE as micro controller to perform operations/ processing instead of ATmega328P AU to save cost?

I am using arduino pro mini (which contains Atmega328p AU ) along with cc2541(HM-10) to process and transfer data over BLE to smartphone. I...