Strange Wiring

easy, the earth is connected locally to neutral, if you had a RCD breaker it would have tripped

Martin

Yes but where is the live feed?

Over the years I have heard a similar story from 2 different unknowingly dangerous people concerning putting a plug on UK equipment. One reckoned the most obviously marked wire, therefore the most dangerous, was the one with yellow and green colouring , a bit like hazard tape colouring of 2 colours. Another one with the same reasoning reckoned that as the green/yellow one was marked like a snake then that was the dangerous one, the earthy brown coloured one must be the earth leaving just the blue which must be neautral.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

IOW:

Supply Socket Plug Appliance

N --+--( N O----- E < >

L -----( L O----- N ----+

Live is connected to neutral via earth, neutral is connected to live.

So far as supplying power is concerned, it doesn't matter if you swap the appliance's live and neutral and/or swap the supply's earth and neutral (so long as you don't have an RCCB). Safety is a different matter.

oops, miss read the post

Martin

When I was very young my Dad wired up the new dryer. He used flexible conduit (that gooseneck stuff, I think he called it Greenfield). Well, he miswired something, and when he fired up, it welded the conduit to the back of the dryer. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Does that not mean that the appliances' metal surround was live too?

Have you checked where the wires connect internally? I understand that it is probably illegal, but I have seen many a device imported from OS that uses incorrect coloured wiring and incorrectly configured wiring of the correct colours. IT may look wrong at the plugtop, but it may be wired correctly.

No, the appliance's case (earth) is connected to neutral, which is ultimately connected to earth. In practice, the neutral may be slightly above earth due to the neutral current and the resistance of the mains wiring, but only by a few volts.

It worked because the dryer is only concerned about the difference voltage between its internal connections and not where they connect into the house wiring. The plug fell apart because the earth prong was overloaded by the relatively large dryer heater current, between the dryer live and neutral and the plug earth and live prongs, which it is not sized to handle, resulting in excessive heating of the plug and embrittlement of its encapsulation. The miswiring was a hazard, just fix it.