Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

When using plugs and sockets on things like battery wires or the wires to a motor, is there some kind of convention as to which one gets the male and which the female?

Ask yourself which one gets the male or female on extension leads on 240v. On dc I always go, if its the positive feed, female ( apart from some really early cars with a positive to chassis) ( kicked the beer fridge and its working again)

OK that makes sense.

Thanks.

If it does give up on you permanently, broken fridges make great home brew largering cellars. They have amazing insulation. My broken fridge only ever moved a couple of degrees between night time and daytime temperatures when used as an esky.

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The convention is to have power supplying connectors female, and power consuming connectors male. As sleepe says, look at a 240V plug. On my solar powered system I did this, so that I can plug a pump directly into the battery connector and it works fine.

If you're using plugs and sockets with more than one pin on them then the convention (if there is one) is for the earth pin to be pin 1. The only time I've seen this rigorously followed is in custom racecar wiring, it's not very widely known. As standards go it's as good as any.

"standard" is a pretty rubbery word. There are millions of them!

If you're talking about an AS, or an IPC, or an IEEE, or an industry standard, etc, etc..

"convention" is better for describing what you'd like to know.. when it comes to that I think it's a bit "anyone's guess". When working on consumer electronics, it seems to be that pin 1 is the highest voltage on the connector. On audio equipment pin 1 is screen ground..

From what I've seen, the sourcing side is female in many if not most cases. That's to make it harder to short live pins I would say. The sinking (load) side would have the male pins.

This is not withstanding genderless connectors like the Anderson "powerpole" series that's popular for low voltage DC.

The best advice I could give you would be pick a way to do things, follow it rigorously, and write it down. Because people forget things, and in a few months time when you're making a change or addition and you can't figure out what's going on with your wiring, those diagrams you drew at the start will really help out.

Cheers
ks

Thanks kingsapper.

Making some coloured wires for my breadboard has made a stack of difference to my life as far as conventions go.

All my original wires were white because I nabbed them from a ribbon of wires in an old PC.

Now I have a rainbow of wires at my disposal so I have created my own little conventions which makes the spaghetti on the breadboard make a little more sense.

In my opinion, I think there is no male or female conventions.