We intentionally made suicide cords all the time at my old job lol
But you dont really care 'bout voltage, do ya?
Also known as a “nope rope”
I thought that was a snake…
I heard there was a secret cord.
you plug it in to meet the lord.
But you don’t really care for safety, do ya?
It goes like this, you plug it in,
And in a flash, the lights go dim,
The power’s gone,
and now it’s running through ya.I thought this was an anti homosexuality meme until I read the top comment.
I’ve got to stop using Lemmy. It is changing me…
I too have developed into a very politically correct person with lemmy, I kinda miss being able to make gay jokes
Gay jokes as in just jokes making fun of gay people? Why do you miss making that? I can just tell you that especially when I was a gay kid, I would have wished no-one would make such.
That’s pretty gay.
/shrug at least I’m not an asshole purposely hurting other people
Are you referring to me? Because I am not.
I guess you’re too straight edge for that.
God, straight edge is so old I literally had to get a consultation to understand the insult
I’m not American, Christmas lights aren’t a thing here like they’re in the US, can someone explain?
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.
The power can go through the female end just fine, that’s not the problem. The problem is people plug this “suicide cable” into the wall first, thus creating a 120v taser of sorts. Like someone else in this thread said, the only problem from cables like that is people tend to try to backfeed energy into the system with a generator or solar panels. Boom.
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.
Wouldn’t it come down to wattage rather than straight voltage?
My guess is even if the voltage is ramped back up (which does sound accurate), that voltage would droop quickly if anything tried to draw power from it. Probably still not a fun time for anyone on the lines, but Tesla coils go up to something like 20kV and I got shocked by those back in high school. It fucking hurts (actually, more like extreme discomfort) but isn’t fatal.
Not that I’m saying a generator or battery at 20kV is the same thing as a 20kV static discharge, just saying that even extreme voltages can be ok. It’s about the amperage, not the voltage. Would a home generator or car battery have the amperage if ramped up to thousands of volts, especially considering the whole point of the ramp up is to reduce the amperage to increase efficiency.
I’d also figure, unless the outage was just one house disconnected from the grid, wouldn’t any generator or battery end up powering the whole neighborhood and quickly overloading if it tried to send power back out to the grid?
as someone who has strung a ton of lights the wrong way around on more than one occasion… I can understand the desire for some magic solution that doesnt require undoing and redoing your work…
but fuck, You don’t mess around with electricity.
People also make these stupid suicide cables to plug generators into houses during disasters, often backfeeding power into the lines that may be down and can cause serious injury to workers trying to restore power.
FYI, you can just turn off the main breaker of the residence to prevent backfeeding into the power lines.
You can, but if forgetting to flip a switch can result in death, then you need a stronger safety control
Someone incompetent enough to forget to shut off the main shouldn’t be operating a generator anyway.
That’s not the point. Normal, sensible people make mistakes because they are tired or stressed or got distracted or just plain unlucky, so things have to be designed so that people can make a mistake and it not instantly create a potentially lethal situation
So if these are people wiring their Christmas lights wrong, assuming these are led lights, doesn’t this “solution” not work bc of the polarity anyway? Or is that only a DC thing with diodes? I only did okay in my physics electricity stuff lol
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.
I knew that much, I was more interested in how diodes work on AC lol
In AC, diodes work half the time, every 1/60 second. The “good” LEDs will have circuitry to fully rectify the AC into DC, drop the voltage properly, and smooth the peaks and valleys, so they will be continuously lit. So the cheap LED Christmas lights might have a slight flicker, and the good ones are steady. (Or get fancy with chasing colors, etc.)
All of that happens inside each of the “bulb” enclosures, or sometimes in a box at one end, so it technically doesn’t matter which end they are getting electricity from, since the socket at the far end is still just connected in parallel to the plug at the near end. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to link them together.)
It’s just a really bad dangerous idea to reverse them.
I used it to connect a generator to the wall and give me some temporary power in my house when I was renovating. It’s only dangerous if you are stupid.
Not smart. You could kill yourself or some poor electrician working the problem outside your house somewhere.
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.
I mean, driving a car is dangerous, everything has a risk inherent to it but you can minimise it by being prudent.
Yes, you minimize risk by being prudent and using reasonable and cost effective safety measures.
In a car, that’s things like seatbelts, airbags, and other safety features.
The equivalent for powering your house with a generator is the aforementioned transfer switch.
What you’re doing is saying that driving a car without seatbelts or airbags is perfectly safe, you just need to not get in an accident.
Stop powering your house with a generator plugged in via the dumbest possible cable and just install a fucking transfer switch. They’re not expensive and it keeps you from needlessly endangering people, or even just having a preposterously dangerous cord laying around.
You turn off the breaker. You plug your generator abomination into a receptacle. Your partner checks the panel – the breakers are off, it’s safe to work with the electrical! They kill themselves.
You could just not be a threat to yourself and people around you.
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.
There’s literally an approved solution to the problem designed explicitly to solve the problem.
Install a transfer switch so you can disconnect utility power, switch to your generator and people can see the situation at the breaker.
If you don’t have one, you use something called an “extension cord” to run power to your important devices for the duration of the outage.
If you don’t know how to power a few appliances with a generator and some extension cords, you definitely shouldn’t be thinking you can use a dangerous cable that people who do know you should never use in the first place.
