Outlet Adapters
 

Hi, my boyfriend and I are going to Europe next week (!!!) from the US and just bought a pack of outlet adapters for our ipods and camera battery chargers. I noticed that 2 in the pack look identical, but one is for "Northern Europe" and the other for "Southern Europe". Are they the same? What is the difference? I will only need them in hotels in Italy and on a Costa Cruise (Italian run company). Will I only be able to use the Southern Europe one?

Also - will our ipods (the touch, shuffle, and old nano versions) convert fine in Europe or do we need voltage converters for them?

Look on the wall warts - they'll have a voltage rating. Most newer ones ragne from 100 - 240VAC, so you can use them anywhere in the world.

But... I fried my cell charger in the CR. The phone was a tri-band 'world phone' so it never occured to me that the wall wart would be US only. The replacement, curtesy of the local computer recycler, is the newer kind that works anywhere.

How about the plugs themselves?

If they look exactly the same, they probably are. There can be slight variations on plugs in Europe, and older vs. newer (newer ones can have a grounding hole and may not fit exactly in sockets that older two-prong plugs do and vice versa). Italy has some three-prong plugs with the three in a row, not like a triangle, but most of Europe is the same, and those aren't in all of Italy. But they definitely look different. Cyprus and Matla are like UK, but you'd see it.


I don't know what cruise ships would have.

We have 2 cell phone rechargers, a camera recharger, a nano ipod docking station & recharger, a curling iron, hairdryer, and a toothbrush recharger that we plug directly into the France, Switzerland, and Italy sockets without any voltage converters (but with the plug adaptors). We spend 2 months in Europe every year since we retired in '99 - so that's 20 months worth of usage. We have never "fried" anything - yet.

Stu Dudley

No, the Northern Europe and Southern Europe adapters are not the same. The pins on the NE are bigger around than the SE.