Plugs/Power points wiring in South Africa

You may run into having to wire one of your plugs at home to a three point plug that is still the most common pug found in South Africa, so we thought we would help by adding this quick post on the correct wiring for your plug, and we are going to give you a quick tip on remembering next time which wire goes on which side.

We follow the IEC 60446 standard for flexible cords in South Africa, which in essence means that all live or active wires have to be brown, neutral wires have to be blue and and earth or grounding wires have to be a combination of yellow and green, we also thought you may wish to know what that means as well, here below is a summary of the different colours and what they represent:

• Brown (live) – connects your appliances to the main power supply in your house.

• Blue (neutral) – keeps the power loads in your house balanced

• Yellow/green (earth) – is a protective conductor which creates a low resistance path for faulty current to flow into.

Now here is life hack for you to remember what goes where when you look at your plug from the top, also see the picture below showing the right way to place the different colour wires:

• bLue - Left

• bRown - Right

• The other wire (Green/Yellow) will then go into the remaining point