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With a newer home, probably nothing will happen.. can you guess why?




And for a really new home (with an RCD) all your lights and computers will go off and you'll have to reset your clocks and....

These Residual Current Devices replace the main (or sub) fuses/circuit-breakers and work by 'measuring' the current flowing into your house on the live wire and the current flowing out of your house on the neutral. If they don't match to within a few mA (typically 30), they trip. So any attempt to light bulbs using the live->earth->electric company loop will fail

Actually that's a 'cos anyone who's been miswiring plugs (or dremelling them down <shock>) will still not kill any innocent bulb-changing house guests who happen to be standing in the kitchen sink (Canada is a strange place...)

I must admit we have a lot more respect for the mains over here in the UK - I don't know anyone who would *dream* of doing what Tony did to a plug. Maybe the added lethality/pain of the 240V instils more caution?

As an aside - the RCDs do have a drawback - because the house circuit breakers only switch live and the neutral and local earths always have a slightly different potential you do get a tiny current flow if you short neutral to earth. So when you're rewiring bits of the house (eg changing wall sockets) you can still trip the main RCD if you brush the neutral against the earth *even after isolating the circuit at the fusebox*. This is much more annoying than a slight belt from touching the live with your fingers and weirdly leads to a far more bomb-disposal-like approach when you're threading the non-live wires throught the metal back-boxes etc..
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LittleBlueThing Running twin 30's