Shocking if true
The perfect dorm-warming gift:
My friend worked in a hardware store for a couple years and he said that around Christmas time you get about a dozen people asking for these.
This tale is old, and I still don’t understand what people try to accomplish with these?! Like, I know hanging like a trillion extenders behind each other is also a way to start a fire, but what are people trying to do with male-to-male cables? I’m at a loss.
They get requested around Christmas time because someone strung their lights the wrong way and now wants to connect the female end of the lights directly to the wall instead of reversing all the lights they just hung.
Oh, I was thinking the holidays were just really depressing for some people, but I like this explanation better.
I always heard they were for powering a house off a generator
There is a kind of person who knows how to do that safely, but that kind of person has already installed an actual load transfer switch to do it the right way.
I still do it, I have a lot of blackouts here, I have to close the breaker, turn on the generator and then every 15 min go downstairs to unplug the gen, and turn on the breaker to know if the electricity came back, I’m cheap but I’m also getting tired of the whole process.
This is what automatic generators are for. They come on after sensing the power drop out and when it comes back on, it shuts down automatically. I have such a system because I live in the middle of a forest and trees fall over sometimes. And for bonus points, it can happen when the outside temps are at -30F/-29C and be off for a few hours or days.
It is expensive, but worth every penny.
I’m going to have solar with island mode soon so I will not invest in a new gen
You have two bus bars in your breaker panel. It is designed to be fed from one main breaker. But, electricity can flow backwards through a circuit.
An interlock kit is a simple device that allows either your main breaker to be turned on, or a different breaker to be turned on. Not both at the same time. With such an interlock in place, you wire the auxiliary breaker to a generator inlet box, so you can plug your house into your generator.
A non-contact voltage detector is the rest of your answer. The detector is locked on, and placed where it can pick up voltage on the main feed into your house: tape it to the main feed into the breaker panel. When power is restored, it starts beeping, and you know you can transfer back.
Do it the right way, because you aren’t the only person who might be doing it, and the people who learn from you might not fully grasp the concepts involved. They might get lazy, skip steps, and set their home and/or generator on fire.
My house has totally fucked-up electrical. For some reason, there’s a secondary breaker box in the basement which switches some of the outlets and lights in the house over to running off the generator outside. So when the line power comes back on, the lights that aren’t switched to the gen come back on (if I happened to have them on when the power went off, at least).
I’ve lived in this house for 15 years now and I’ve been without power here for a total of seven weeks during that time. I like how many trees we have here but that’s the price we pay.
Thats a transfer switch, and that’s exactly what you want here. You want only a few essential loads on the generator, not your entire home. The furnace should be on it, modem and networking equipment, a few outlets for charging phones, refrigerator and deep freeze. Sump pumps.
The electric hot water tank doesn’t need to be on the generator. The welder in the garage. Electric range. Dishwasher, Christmas lights, EV charger, pool heater, spa, or other big appliances that can be done without in an emergency.
That ain’t bad at all.
I’m baffled by people going without power being a somewhat regular thing. I’ve never in my life been without power. I grew up on an old farm, and not once did we lose power. Sometimes lightning would flip the breaker, but never more than that. I realise this is because of the difference in size and infrastructure between my country and USA, but it’s still wild to me, that some people in a rich country actually need a generator. I’ve only ever seen a generator once in my life. It was used at a beach party to power the music.
When you daisy chain christmas lights and just put up 1 of them backwards.
They’re typically used for backup generators
My wife was stringing up lights on the garage wreath and had one strand turned around and wanted me to make one of these to “fix” it so it could plug in. It took a second to explain to her the other end was just going to be an exposed line voltage plug.
There’s a type of power cord
You’ll touch the end and see the Lord
And you wouldn’t want that current going through ya
While male on male is usually great
You’ll find yourself in a sorry state
You’ll learn volts jolt but milliamps will kill you
hallelujah etc
You’ll learn volts jolt but milliamps will kill you
The whole volts safe amps kill thing is so stupid though, you can’t have any serious amps without serious volts, unless you have near-zero resistance, which a human body does not.
In fairness the sort of person who needs a song to remind them why male-male mains leads are an idiotic idea probably isn’t going to appreciate Ohm’s Law in any sensible capacity.
I find it similar to “the fall doesn’t hurt, it’s the sudden stop at the end”.
But it’s not entirely accurate, because we can be exposed to thousands of volts. For instant, most ESD are between 2k and 10k volts. Van de Graaff generators can generate up to 1,000,000 volts, yet they are regularly used in school classrooms.
Static discharge has a high amperage as well, but it lasts nanoseconds, plasma globes and tesla coils are way too high of a frequency to disrupt heartbeat. people want a simple thing, but electricity is not simple.
lethality of electricity means some amount of energy was dumped in a certain time-range, in a form that is disruptive to muscle function. any of that missing, and you’re either fine, or cooked from the inside depending on the current.
I like this, thanks
You see, if the device from the meme was ever plugged in, it’d blow the breaker immediately. This male to male cord, if plugged into two outlets would do nothing.
Hillbilly generator hookup. Backfeed hazard.
If I’m not mistaken plugging this in to the same outlet won’t do anything. And as far as back feed problems couldn’t you just shut off the the main breaker, i.e. where the power comes into the house?
It will either instantly trip the breaker or do absolutely nothing, depending on how it’s wired internally.
The real danger comes from when only one end is plugged in, though. With only one end plugged in, the other end becomes a 120V cattle prod.
You know its good satire when you gotta think for a minute about whether this was serious or not.
Well if it was real they would have realized the mistake the moment they plugged it in. Since it’s plugged in for the picture, we know they are doing satire
Oh hey it’s a felony tube.
Seems more like a flash light
While it will make a flash of light, it can only do it once.
What if a flash light was all at once?
I don’t get it
Toothbrush
Hand warmer.
Failed fleshlight experiment #13
The DIY Hot Dog Fleshlight.
At least this actually turns all those electricity into heat, it’s basically just an electronic kettle without the case
Just be careful when you grip the handle
Don’t stick your dick in that….
That’s what they want you to believe.
Every time I see US sockets, I get the heebie jeebies. Or any non-recessed socket really, but at least most add insulation to the base of the prongs. No such luck here.
Meh, that’s only going to “coulda killed you”. The one piece metal wire will create a dead short across the circuit and trip it out instantly. He IS going to need new underwear and possibly pants also. He’ll have some scorched fingers with maybe a bit of temporary tingling in them after pissing off the angry pixies. But as far as death goes, god would need to be looking down directly at him and go “Fuck this guy, right now”. Not impossible, but it would require an exceptional amount of bad luck.
US outlets are safe. Not only does this out show a bit of recess at the surface, but the metal contacts that are carrying the current are also recessed inside about 1/8"/3mm where you can’t see them.
I dropped a penny into the gap between the plug and the socket when I was a toddler. The sparks were FANTASTIC, and long lasting, like a sparkler shooting up the wall.
My dad tried to remove the penny with his metal pliers, my mom stopped him before he killed himself. She yanked the cord and it stopped.
We saved the penny for awhile, might still be somewhere. It burned two trenches in the penny, it almost made it all the way through.
Lessons were learned.
What are you comparing this to? Same in Japan.
Probably European Schuko and British outlets, they are WAY better.
I think schuko is much more likely the British ones are not recessed
Yeah, I forgot, thanks for the correction.
Same in Switzerland, the non-recessed ones mustn’t be installed anymore. But just in case devices are plugged into flat ones you also get isolation on the non-earth pins on the new cables
Japanese outlets don’t even have a ground pin, only live and neutral. While that’s not a problem on low-voltage or plastic devices, it can be shockingly (haha) dangerous in combination with metal casings.
Honestly, if it was plastic & around the block instead of the outlet, then that’ll be a pretty good idea. Plus, we have 3-D printers, so it should be easy
It’d be alright if made from plastic.
And yes, I’ve chosen to disregard that something between the connector and the socket theoretically makes it more unsafe; US sockets are an awful design to begin with, so it doesn’t make much of a difference.
What if it was plastic and on top of the charger block?
What a genius! Has he sent his CV to Elon Musk already?
A sparkling future indeed.
I was hoping for an unusual cause of demise on that plaque. Sometimes old gravestones list a cause of death with wry humor.
I imagine there could be a lot of gravestones that just read “engineering”
Just as well the us is only 110v, here in the UK you would blow the house fuse
This would almost certainly trip a breaker in the US as well
Not just the house fuse. They’d arc flash their eyeballs and probably develop tinnitus.
Some Americans would be dead in an afternoon if they had access to 240 at every outlet, and others would do it on purpose to try and get a settlement payout. If you ever wonder why there’s so many warning labels, this is why.Probably not though, 220v here and flipped the house fuse, still have my eyeballs, didn’t exploded
Same here, though mine was from a PSU that hadn’t fully discharged. Though it felt like it affected my taste buds for a few days… I stayed awake through it. Also made my balls tingle for an hour.
This is a continuous line of rather thick metal. It wouldn’t arc or electrocute anyone, it would get a fraction of a degree warmer before the circuit breaker tripped
It’s about the current though no?
UK we have 32A / 6A (e.g. lighting) circuit breakers, but our individual devices are fused at the plug at 1A / 3A / 6A depending on load. A single house has maybe 10 fuses max at the consumer unit.
US they have more circuit breakers, with breakers at 3A / 6A (?) without any fuses on their device plugs, so they have to routinely change the the tiny circuit breaker at the consumer unit, but because of this limitation, they typically have double the number of circuit breakers at the unit ?
In the above example, the short circuit would still happen through the plug and not before it, so in the UK we would just chuck the plug fuse
(Asking, because I genuinely don’t know)
Circuit breakers are not one time use like fuses. You can think of them as reusable fuses. An in device fuse only protects if the fault is in the device. If you were to put metal in the outlet, to stop current, you need a fuse in the outlet or somewhere else between the outlet and makns, which is what US has. Circuit breakers are typically 20A (or 15A) and multiple outlets are connected to the same circuit breaker.
Oh right, thanks for that. So fuses in the outlet are pretty typical in the US?
No, we don’t have an actual fuse in the outlet or plug. Some devices have an internal fuse, but not like the UK where almost everything has a fuse in the plug.
No. Our appliance wiring standards basically require every appliance to be able to tolerate a fault current high enough to trip a breaker. We put a 20A cord on a 500mA clock radio. If we get a short inside the appliance, it will draw enough current to trip the breaker.
The UK allows appliances to have much much lower fault current requirements than their household wiring. They can get away with this by including a current limiter (a fuse) in their plugs.
We do have provisions for fuses in plugs, but they are typically only used where we would use a lot of very low current wiring: Christmas lighting typically has a tiny fuse in the plug protecting very small wiring.
oh, very interesting – for the clock radio example, wouldn’t the radio fry the circuit board before it tripped the breaker?
It depends on where the fault is. Starting at the input power from the cord, the first component on the circuit board is going to be a factory installed fuse. It’s probably the same on circuit boards made for UK and EU devices because it makes good engineering sense to do it that way, even if the plug is equipped with a fuse. So if the fault is somewhere on the board, it blows the appliance fuse. If it’s somewhere before the appliance fuse, it blows either the plug fuse (if equipped), or the breaker.
true!
Depends on where the short was. If it was a frayed lead in the PSU contacting the neutral, that short might not even hit the board.
so they have to routinely change the the tiny circuit breaker at the consumer unit,
If I understand the nomenclature correctly, your “consumer unit” is our “load panel” or “breaker box”. We use 15A or 20A breakers for our typical outlets.
If you used unfused plugs, your lower-rated cords could potentially reach fire temperatures without drawing enough current to trip the breaker in the consumer unit. Which is why you use fused plugs: to protect the lower-rated wiring from higher current.
The US uses a different approach. If we used power cords rated to 5A for a 5A appliance, and we plugged them into a 20A circuit, we could have the same problem: A 15A fault current through this cord wouldn’t trip the breaker, but could start a fire. So we don’t do that. Even on our lowest current, corded appliances, we use a cord that is rated to carry a 20A fault current capable of tripping the breaker.
(You will occasionally find cords rated for 7A. This is 7A duty current, and the limitation is because of the specific appliance socket, which has a fuse immediately inside the casing, and other restrictions. The 7A rating is not on the wire itself. On these cords, the wiring is still required to have a fault current rating of 20A)
Oh that’s an angle I never thought of – protection via thicker wires designed to trip but not to heat. Very clever!
Boy are they gonna be shocked when he doesn’t make it.
I have to know whether this is a joke or not
It is a joke
Thank you, I’m choosing to believe you for my sanity
The left picture would’ve burned down the house otherwise
Isn’t the socket turned off?
Didn’t even notice that, in my country that doesn’t exist
Hahaha not funny
