Cords

It goes like this, on the the 25th. A minor shock? No. Death madeshift.

I thought that was a snake....

We call them a Deadman's cable up here, and sadly they're still quite frequently used in the northern rural areas because it costs almost $2,000 to have a dedicated bypass switch installed(generator hookup) so nobody does it, they just throw the Main and hope they don't put too much stress on the internal lines.

Is it legal? Hell no but they do it anyway

The lord chord

I too have developed into a very politically correct person with lemmy, I kinda miss being able to make gay jokes

You have been warned but you needed proof.
You hanged some lighting on the roof.
The spirit of the holiday overthrew you.
You climbed atop the kitchen chair.
You plugged the cord. It zapped your hair.
And from your lips you stuttered Hallelujah.

Beautiful

Amazing, I got like two lines in on my own and gave up but you did it you beautiful mind

Looks pretty weak sauce. I use jumper cables.

Memories. Me and my friends used to zap eachother with these before social media made everyone into cowards

How do you non-sketchily feed a generator's power into your home?

Modern inverters do this somewhat safely by sensing the phase before outputting power.

Of course, you can’t tell just by looking, so I still would steer clear of the whole thing on principle.

Strand of exterior lights, one end male plug one female. Idiots start to mount the lights with the female end near their outlet. Get done, become confused, go to store for male to male cord to plug into female end.

The female end is for chaining multiple strands, not for supplying power (directly) from the power socket.

A strand of christmas lights resembles an extension cord, but they tend to be made of smaller gauge wire and obviously have little sockets for tiny light bulbs spaced along them. They typically have 2-prong male plug on one end, often with a 2-prong female pass through on the back so you could plug more than one strand into the same receptacle, and they usually end in a female plug so they can be daisy chained.

Sometimes, when installing them on a house or something, the person installing them may not pay attention to which direction is which, and end up installing them so that the female-only end is near where they intended to plug them in. So instead of pulling them down, or running a long extension cord, they go to the hardware store looking for a male-to-male plug adapter.

Power plugs and sockets are gendered for a very good reason; the female receptacle keeps the energized contacts protected inside, and the male plug's contacts should only be energized when plugged in and their outer shells protect them. A male-to-male cable when one end is plugged in and the other is free now has exposed mains current just waving around in the open air ready to kill someone. And, on a smaller note with christmas lights, they usually have a fuse built into the plug, and plugging them in backwards bypasses this for at least the first strand, so it's technically 102.7% unsafe to do this.

The other thing a male-to-male adapter or cable is sometimes used for is to attach a portable generator to your home's electrical system by just plugging it into an outlet, especially during a power failure. They do make what are essentially special male receptacles I think mainly for the RV industry for attaching generators like that, most houses won't have these. Plugging it into a normal wall socket will actually work, but 1. you have bypassed the breaker panel, so the breakers no longer provide over-current protection. You could overheat the wires in the walls and burn down the house. 2. there's a possibility that you're feeding electricity to the entire house through the breaker box and even out to the transformer, which means the lines could be energized for linemen working on them. Throwing the main breaker might prevent that? They make switching gear designed for buildings with their own backup generators that can either manually or automatically sever their connection to the grid when on internal power, but again a doofus trying to make one of these cables probably doesn't have one of those.

Their lights usually have a plug on one end and a socket on the other. Ppl put them around the exterior of their hoses, then realise they did it the wrong way, and the socket end is near the outlet they wanted to plug them in.

Or they mounted two strands of lights, and where they meet up it’s either 2 plugs or two sockets accidentally.

/...tooo ya.../

My dumbass made one by accident. Plugged it in, walked to the other end, picked it up my saw, "Shit. How did I throw the wrong end out here?" Whatever, we've all strung the extension cord backwards before. Here come the IQ test.

Walked to the other end of the cord, yanked it and threw that end back out into yard, plugged it in. Went back to my saw, "Oh for fuck's sake!"

FYI, you can just turn off the main breaker of the residence to prevent backfeeding into the power lines.

Yeah, there is a reason why proper installations require actual transfer switches or at least a manual interlock to prevent both feeds being connected at the same time. I'm also not sure what would happen if your generator was out of phase with the grid when it reenergised, but I'm sure it wouldn't be good

I used to use one to get power into my popup camper...

You didn't do it right...

Okay but can we agree very very few uses besides generator hookup

Teehee, it tingles!

Good thing you never touched it. What your boss did is possible and if he really understands what he is doing and is not connected to the grid then he can do it. But for any ordinary homeowner absolutely do not try this. You could burn your house down or even worse kill some poor lineman/electrician working on the problem somewhere else on the grid who isn't expecting the equipment he's working on to go live out of nowhere.

You don't work around dangerous things assuming you'll never make a mistake, you work around dangerous things assuming you'll never make three mistakes at the same time.

You are not immune to making one (or more) mistakes, no matter how careful you think you are.

Well, maybe it's because you may die if you accidentally touched touched the prongs? The purpose of female plugs is among other reasons to prevent accidentally touching them.

The problem really is the super exposed hot prong you now have once you plug one end in

In addition to the exposed prongs, it also means you are passing current into a circuit of unknown capacity without using a safety breaker. You may also be back feeding into your neighborhood power grid and can kill people in the street/other houses that were not expecting the lines to be energized.

50-50 chance whether those two outlets are on the same phase or opposite phases; if it's the latter, congrats, that's a 240V short.

Besides, if there's an outlet at the far end of your string of lights, you don't need this, you just plug it in there

Two things: 1: there's a high chance you do cross live and neutral, or even live and live on different phases. 2: using it to plug in a generator to power your house can kill electrical workers who are trying to restore a power outage. (If you fail to open your circuit breaker.)

Double live is very bad and the cord becomes a literal short. If you're lucky a breaker will flip or fuse burn out. If you're not so lucky you have a cable thats either going to start a fire burning its insulation off and melting itself, or potentially exploding depending on quality and type of cable.

Why would you "need" one of these if you could plug in the other end into a second outlet? The point is that idiots don't plan out their christmas light layout and end up with the wrong end at the outlet. They decide that they would rather drive to the hardware store and buy/build a suicide cable rather then just taking the lights down and rehanging them or running an extension cord to where the male end of the lights are.

aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh lic-

For simple stuff such as those lights, polarity is usually not a problem when using AC.

In case of AC (Alternating Current), instead of having a + and - pole, you have a Line and a Neutral terminal.

The Line terminal goes + ... - ... + ... - ... + ... - with time and the Neutral stays at 0.

When connecting to LEDs and such, you have an AC to DC converter, which tends to be fine no matter which pin you put in which hole.

Edit for clarity: I am talking only about the specific appliance in this case, having a 2 pin plug. When doing home wiring, polarity matters a lot.

Anti Commercial-AI license

It would still work. But it is VERY dangerous. 1. The far end of the light string will now have exposed metal prongs that are energized at 120v, which can be fatal. 2. If the other end gets plugged into a socket, there is a 50% chance it will be a different circuit on a different phase, which can create a 240v direct short, across a wire that has no properly sized circuit breaker. 3. Using it to plug a generator into your house during a power outage can kill electrical workers trying to fix the outage if you fail to open your circuit breakers.

No, alternating current doesn’t have a polarity like DC does.

Even with a generator, suicide cord is the WRONG way to do it.

Not like that'll stop anyone anyways.

Tell me you've never heard of an Interconnect and put the lives of every power line worker in your area at risk every time there's a blackout without telling me...

Are you actually insane? Never EVER backfeed a socket like that. Way more dangerous than the Christmas light loonies.

It's not that it won't work - polarity doesn't quite work like that in AC systems - it's that as soon as you plug in one end, the other end has a pair of exposed metal contacts with mains voltage between them. One mistake, touching the contacts or having them come into something metal (like the ladder you are using to hang the Christmas lights) and someone dies

Reversing polarity is a Starfleet-approved procedure in all situations.

in AC, which is what home electricity uses, the polarity is constantly switching, from + , then - , then + , and so on, 50 or 60 times a second depending on where you live. This means that, unlike batteries, it's symmetrical, and you can just splice the cables and attach two male plugs together and they will work regardless, even if you somehow attach the neutral to live and live to neutral, in fact in many countries you can actually buy just the plug without the cable and then you can assemble it yourself in whatever way you please.

of course tho, this should be done only if you have a decent understanding of electricity, and it should not be attempted by someone who lacks those competences, hence why hardware stores "gatekeep" male to male plugs. If you really need one and are sure you understand how they work, you can probably make one yourself.

Christmas lights.

Strings of them have a plug on one side and a receptacle on the other. When hanging the lights, people don't notice if they have someone backwards and end up with a receptacle facing a receptacle. Rather than do the smart thing and turn the lights around, they go to the hardware store for assistance in killing themselves.

Another common one is backup generators.

Someone will turn off the breaker in the service panel, then plug a suicide cord from any receptacle in the circuit, to the output of a portable generator.

I'm sure there's more.

Just because you didn't get hurt doesn't mean it wasn't dangerous.

There's a reason the people who write the fire and electrical codes say that if you need to do something like that, you need to have a properly installed transfer switch.

Not smart. You could kill yourself or some poor electrician working the problem outside your house somewhere.

The backup-generator seems to be the one semi-legit use-case that keeps coming up where few people have been able to present a significantly better alternative.