UK appliances in France?

[thesimianprince]

Have just emigrated to France and am currently cutting all the plugs off UK appliance leads to fit French plugs.

Did the toaster, kettle, coffee machine, i-Pod speaker, laptop charger etc and all working a-ok. Ran into trouble with my phone chargers though...

Have two portable landline phones both with charger/docking units. Cut the plug off the phone (very skinny lead into large/insitu AC adaptor). Noticed that the two wires were same colour (grey), no blue, brown, green/yellow as in previous leads). Wired one to the left side and one to the right side of the French plug, assuming one Neutral, one Live and no Earth. (The Bose i-Pod speaker only had two internal wires - blue & brown I think - and this method worked fine for that). Plugged the charger in and sat the phone on it and ZAP - no phone any more...just a dead screen and a faint whiff in the air.

So, a few questions I guess:

1/ Have I fried the phone/is it a write-off, or can it be fixed maybe?
2/ I have other similarly wired appliances (really skinny leads with only two internal wires housed in large insitu adaptors) eg. baby monitors, is it possible to fit French pugs to these, or do I have to continue using UK adaptors?
3/ Anything else I should be aware of when fitting French plugs to UK appliances - still have to do TV, Video, DVD, Sky-box etc. would like not to blow these up too.

Cheers for any advice, sorry am a novice when it comes to electrics.

 

[JohnD]

... Cut the plug off the phone (very skinny lead into large/insitu AC adaptor). Noticed that the two wires were same colour (grey), no blue, brown, green/yellow as in previous leads). Wired one to the left side and one to the right side of the French plug, assuming one Neutral, one Live and no Earth...

It sounds like you have cut the transformer off, and plugged the low-voltage lead into the mains

Let me see... 230Volts into a 6volt phone.... fried.

 

[plugwash]

1/ Have I fried the phone/is it a write-off, or can it be fixed maybe?

the phone is a write-off. It wouldn't surprise me if the docking unit is as well

2/ I have other similarly wired appliances (really skinny leads with only two internal wires housed in large insitu adaptors) eg. baby monitors, is it possible to fit French pugs to these, or do I have to continue using UK adaptors?

I don't reccomend using travel adaptors on a long term basis, thier pins are thinner than those of real french/german plugs to allow them to fit more different socket types and this makes them unreliable.

My advice is to get some british power strips (order them from a UK supplier if you can't buy them locally) and fit french plugs to them for equipment like this.

 

[thesimianprince]

Cheers guys, I figured it was toast...thanks for confirming

Thanks for the tip re the British strip, I guess that is the only way forward.