Electricity Part I — AC/DC 220V 120V 50/60 HZ
Now that I’ve given birth to OutInUruguay.com I have a little more time to work on other things. I’ve been promising entries about electricity for a while so here’s Part I.
Part I, Electricity in the world. All of North America uses a common electrical standard Alternating Current (AC) 120 volts at 60 Hertz. Growing up in Canada or the United States you’re not exposed to any other electrical standards. Well, it turns out that most of the world uses 220 volts at 50 Hertz. While researching this entry I discovered that it’s commonly accepted that 220 V at 60 Hz is the most efficient way to deliver electricity but very few countries around the world use this standard.
To make this a little more confusing the terms 120 V and 220 V are not really accurate. 120 V really allows for a range from 100 V to 127 V. Anything you plug in should be able to operate with an electrical supply falling within this range. 220V allows for a range of 220 V to 240 V.
Uruguay uses 220 V at 50 Hz. The good news is that many of todays electronic items don’t run on Alternating Current at all. They actually use Edison’s original Direct Current (DC). That’s why almost everything you plug in has a “power brick” either inline (attached to the power cord) or in the appliance itself. That power brick converts or transforms the electricity from the supplied AC to DC. So far there’s nothing good about this. Those damn power bricks are a pain in the butt to carry around and are quite often a pain to plug into the wall, especially the ones that have the brick part directly attached to the plug. Here’s the good news… a majority of these DC converters accept AC power sources anywhere in the range of 100 V to 240 V and 50 Hz to 60 Hz. In my experience very few of them require one or the other standard (be careful though because there are some that only work on one or the other).
Those power converters that accept the full range may be plugged directly into the wall in North America or Uruguay. Some items like desktop computers have a switch on the power converter that lets you switch between 120 V or 220 V. If you have the switch set in the wrong direction when you plug in your computer you will instantly fry the power supply though if you’re lucky the computer itself should be okay.
For the items you have that can’t use 240 V directly you can buy converters or transformers. For the ones that can plug into the wall directly you’ll still need to buy adapters since the plugs here are a different shape than in North America. I’ll tackle converters, transformers, and adapters in Part II. In the meantime here are a couple of links with much more detailed information on the subject. Note that in these pages you will encounter some, gasp, “British English.” The expressions “mains voltage” and “mains electricity” translate to household voltage and household electricity in North American English.