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Unread 28-06-2011, 00:20
Tristan Lall's Avatar
Tristan Lall Tristan Lall is offline
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Re: pic: Graduation Present

Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199 View Post
That's really not a concern for the engineers. Sure, dropping just about anything plugged into an outlet into the sink or bathtub is bad (and now that I said that, someone's bound to give a counter example). However, at least here in the US, that's completely covered by the National Electrical Code, which is reviewed/amended every 3 years, and is required to be followed by law in most states. GFI circuits have been required on all outlets serving counters near sinks in the kitchen since 1987, and in bathrooms since 1975.

Rather, the results of dropping your appliance in a body of water is usually something that a company's marketing, legal, or compliance department worries about, and simply applies to the labeling materials that accompany the product - something the Engineer might never even see.
GFCI protection is great, if your house has it. The electrical code isn't retroactive for ordinary homes in any state that I know of. That means there are millions of dwellings in the United States that can't be counted on to be protected, not to mention hundreds of millions of such dwellings around the world. (For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 10 million American households that don't even have working safety grounds on some of their outlets.)

The engineer designing the appliance ought to know all of this, and take it into consideration. The blender's designers probably decided against a bare metal case, for example—because an internal fault could enliven the housing. (Or if it is bare metal, I bet they thought about the degradation of insulation inside of the unit, and chose something that would be durable.)

That's not to say every device is designed with the same care: an immersion blender has different insulation and sealing requirements than a tabletop blender. Although nobody needed to lose sleep over a blender, there was likely at least some consideration of the life-threatening failure modes, simply as part of the due diligence necessary to avoid a finding of negligence. You definitely wouldn't want to have to testify that you were relying on the NEC to protect users of your blender.
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