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In a flexible cable, the brown is the "line" voltage and blue is "neutral", often tied to ground at the mains panel.
In fixed cables, i.e., "behind the walls", the UK wiring standard changed in 2004, where it now MATCHES the flexible cable: brown is line, blue is neutral. Prior to that, blue, red or yellow were acceptable LINE conductor colors and black was neutral.
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Where do you connect blue and brown wires in European and UK wiring?
These colour wires are used in European and UK wiring. The blue wire is used to the identify the neutral conductor and the brown wire is used to identify the "hot" conductor.In Canada and the US. The white wire is used to the identify the neutral conductor and the any colour but green is used to identify the "hot" conductor.
What brown colour wire indicate in a electric iron?
Brown is the "hot" wire and blue is the neutral on a UK 220 volt power system.
Are UK and Australian electrical wiring the same?
No.
Why do the French use single core copper wire for house wiring whereas in the UK we use multi-strand?
In the North American market, solid core is used for home wiring where flexibility is not a problem with installation. Conduit systems use stranded wire because of its flexibility when being pulled into a conduit system that has multiple bends between pull boxes.
Why is a plug live wire brown?
I've been trying to find a satisfactory answer to this through a casual search on the web and nothing jumps out at me immediately which amazes me!What idiot sitting on some "standards committee" somewhere thought that brown would be a good colour for a live wire?For starters brown is the colour of earth, so anyone knowing nothing about electricity would assume that brown is earth and that live must be that fancy coloured green and yellow wire with fatal consequences no doubt.Nature gives us natural warning and danger colours and they are typically vivid colours or unnatural contrasts - such as green and yellow in snakes! Red is also a classic danger colour and means "stop" on traffic lights etc. So...why is the live wire not red ?From my dim and distant past I can vaguely recall messing around with plugs and wires and in those days I remember the live wire in the UK as being red. So...what caused the change? I suspect some crazy dictate from faceless bureaucrats at the so called European Union lol.The only reason I can think of for this madness is that major circuits which feed directly into the mains, tend to have live as red and neutral as black (earth is green or green and yellow I think). As a means of distinguishing between the two, brown was chosen as a "shade" of red to mean live - though why not choose vivid orange? Why do we need to distinguish between the two types of circuits anyway?Unfortunately, I suspect that the real answer lies in some legal case where an idiot was working in building somewhere and mixed up the old style red live of a lighting circuit with a red live straight from the mains and frizzled themselves to death. The family sued because they were short of cash and the legal precendent was set that wiring should be re-labeled in colour (because - displaying warning signs near every electrical outlet was deemed unpractical...doh!)CommentI think you're probably correct in assuming that it was dreamt up by some idiot in the European Union of Socialist Republics!
