Things New Zealand doesn't have (Part 5)

New Zealand doesn't have fuses. Well, I'm sure it does in some places, but standard electrical plugs don't seem to have fuses. I've got no idea how this works or why it's deemed safe (and we already had one plug meltdown which could easily have set the house on fire), but it seems to be standard.

Here's a UK plug. Note the large size, three rectangular prongs, and drawing of a fuse on the label to show where inside the plug the fuse lives:



And here's a Kiwi plug - small size and with three flat prongs, only the top two of which are actually required :

I think the third prong is for earthing the appliance, but the sockets work fine without it, unlike UK sockets which seem to require that third prong to "open up" the other two. The third prong also makes all the plug sockets look like sad little faces.

This is what has kept us going over the last 18 months - that's right, it's a plug adapter:
Skry's dad did rewire lots of UK plugs for us when he was here in January, but we haven't figured out how to do that for ourselves so there are lots of UK plugs still in use. My bedside lamp, laptop, camera chargers, our DS chargers, my hairdryer, the stereo... the list goes on. We really must figure out how to rewire the rest of them for ourselves, but it just hasn't happened yet!