[Symbiote]

I'm only a tourist when I visit places with NEMA sockets, so I'm sure I see much more worn sockets than a resident of America.

But I often find sockets that have a loose grip on heavier plugs, like a phone charger, or a NEMA-CEE adaptor.

(Half my experience is in Central and South America, where maintenance is probably worse — though in Africa old CEE or UK sockets are usually OK.)

[quickthrowman]

Residential grade receptacles are basically complete garbage, always buy commercial spec grade wiring devices at the bare minimum, heavy duty receptacles will last even longer.

Video illustrating the much better device you get for $1.50 more: https://youtu.be/JoL7TzGhMt0

Hospital grade receptacles have extra strong contacts which make it more difficult to remove a plug, but I wouldn’t use them in a home.

[ssl-3]

AFAIK, hospital-grade outlets differ mostly by having an isolated ground. The ground terminals and the mounting points do not share a conductive path, which is sometimes useful in some nuanced ways in hospital environments.

Spec grade tends to go the other direction with that: A lot of these are self-grounding. What that means is that there's a deliberate conductive path between the ground terminals and the mounting points. When properly fastened to a grounded metal box, it can become unnecessary to use the ground screw on the back of the outlet.

Both grip things that are plugged in about the same, in my experience. It seems likely that they share many of the same components inside.

And yeah: Cheap outlets (including "contractor grade") are junk. They take longer to install, they loosen up over time, and they do everything worse. If an house has 50 cheap outlets instead of 50 decent outlets, then someone saved $75 on materials -- but probably paid more than that in additional labor hours. They're reprehensibly stupid.

[Kaliboy]

I live in a Caribbean Dutch island, we grew up with NEMA, being a 127v/50hz distribution network.

They suck. Like you said, eventually everything starts sagging in the sockets.

Recently there's been a trend to switch to 220v based appliances here so modern homes have European plugs instead or alongside NEMA plugs.

It's safer on so many levels. NEMA being 110v means generally higher currents compared to 220v. Then the socket being absolute shit makes it so you often, thanks to gravity, get a situation where you're passing too much current through pins that aren't making enough contact. Followed by fire.