Dan Abel > wrote:

>I'm not so sure. It certainly works the other way. If your house
>wiring, receptacles, light switches, sockets and fixtures are rated for
>220 volts, they will work fine on 110. If your house wiring,
>receptacles, light switches, sockets and fixtures are rated for 110,
>then they aren't rated for 220. The bulb and the plug will work fine,
>but in my mind, the rest is questionable.

Here's an anecdote. We have a laptop whose power cable has a
three-prong, standard American power plug on it. It runs
off either 120V or 240V, 50 or 60 Hz. So when traveling,
it can be plugged into a European circuit -- with the appropriate
adaptor.

The appropriate adaptors often only accept a two-pronged plug,
so we also need a "cheater" -- the gizmo that lets you plug
a 3-prong plug into a 2-prong outlet, such as many Americans
have on say their refirgerator. So we once had such a cheater,
that was rated at only 120V, and were using it to plug the
laptop into a 240V circuit.

It smoked.

Everything else was rated for 240, including the laptop cable
itself. It would have been safer to just cut the third prong off...

To this day I haven't been able to find a 240-Volt rate, American-plug
cheater.


Steve