4mo ago

Cords

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My old boss had one, for when power went out, he could back feed from his car to the house. I never touched it.
- 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.
  
  Exactly this. It's so insanely selfish and pretty illegal.
  That said, 120v backfeed is unlikely to kill and linemen kind of expect and test for residual current because of accidents like this causing falls, but it doesn't mean it's okay, and the chances of hurting someone are still non-zero.
  
  But doesn't the transformer convert the current back up? So it could be way more than 120v on a line that they're expecting to be shut down. At least that's my understanding of it.
  But either way yeah, they probably check for it, but no you shouldn't do it because you there's a possibility that you could kill someone.
  
  You'd have to be pumping up quite a bit I think to reverse through the residential transformer with just your little generac home unit, but you may be correct if there are no one way circuits or backfeed fuses. Even so, hopefully it wouldn't kill. Home voltage stepped up would lose its amperage and be like an extremely anemic taser potentially.
  I'd love to hear from an electrical worker on the topic, but yea, it's the amps that kill more than the volts.
  
  Yeah I don't know much about it myself, but I know enough to not do this kind of thing. Just going by what I've heard about it.

210 comments