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.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.kitchen chair, not chain
Thanks. Fixed.
Also known as a “nope rope”
I thought that was a snake…
Those are danger noodles
What what’s a safe danger noodle then? I thought those were nope ropes.
According to the google, non-venemous snakes are nope ropes. Venemous ones are danger noodles.
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
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?
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.
But you dont really care 'bout voltage, do ya?
It goes like this, on the the 25th. A minor shock? No. Death madeshift.
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.
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
If your generator was connected to mains when they came back on it would probably just kill your generator. It is the least robust device in the chain. The next step is blowing up the transformer on the pole which is a spectacular light show. It is also very expensive, and will piss off your entire neighborhood who were just about to get power back and now have to wait for the power company to fix the transformer you blew up by being a dumb ass. Finally it is possible that you would trip out the switch yard which is going to make even more people angry. The biggest risk is you putting power back on the lines that people are working on. That transformer on the pole works both directions. It drops the usual 13.8kV on your local power lines to the 240/120V in your house. It will also turn the 120/240 from your generator into 13.8 on the lines that are being worked on. 13.8 will kill you before you even know you touched it. That is why line workers go through multiple tests before they get near lines they are working on. They will notice there is power on lines that are supposed to be dead. They will find where that power is coming from. They will fine you lots of money. There may be criminal charges.
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
I don’t think you completely understand what’s being discussed here.
Someone who’s not competent enough to install a proper transfer switch (or at least hire a professional to do it) shouldn’t be operating a generator.
We intentionally made suicide cords all the time at my old job lol
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
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
Just make pro-gay gay jokes.
Oh can you tell me one?
Gay men are fucking assholes
Edit: afterthought, it’s a joke I heard, I hope no one thinks this is an offensive statement I made
That is a sweeping generalization. You’re completely ignoring the Bottoms.
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.
Lame. You’re not doing it right unless it hurts your asshole
No problem.
I got these baddies
Memories. Me and my friends used to zap eachother with these before social media made everyone into cowards
I’m guessing your turn was last and that’s why you’re still here.
Nah but we did stop when we took out the neighbourhood’s power with our fooling. Just as well since I’ve since heard it’s quite dangerous
If I ever buy one of these, I’d only ever use it to encase in resin and put on a shelf as a comedic ornament.
You can also use them to test the voltage, similar to testing a 9v battery.
I’m not American, Christmas lights aren’t a thing here like they’re in the US, can someone explain?
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.
I’m struggling to imagine what the use case would even be.
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.
They very much do exist, though. Often used sketchily with generators.
How do you non-sketchily feed a generator’s power into your home?
Technical details and the social contract mandate that your generator is never connected to the main power grid. The generator should be wired to an enclosed AC transfer switch. This switch will connect either the generator or the main grid to your home, but never both.
Some detail: If the generator is wired to the main grid it can prevent restoration of main grid power. While an AC transfer switch will perform the task, many jurisdictions mandate additional safety precautions (which can be quite expensive).
It can also kill a lineman working on the power lines outside your house, thinking they’re not energized.
You get a qualified tradesperson to wire it properly into your electrical distribution.
The proper way of doing it is using what’s called a generator bypass switch, basically it’s a physical switch that runs before your fuse box, and it makes it impossible to have both the main and the generator being fed at the same time, so you can either have the main on or you could have the generator on. This prevents the electricity from your generator back feeding into the line and killing a line worker trying to restore power.
Sadly, like the other comments have said people tend to use these male to male cables in order to not have to pay the $2,000 to install the switch and instead choose to just turn the main breaker off and plug that cable in. But since it’s possible to have both the main and the generator on it’s not legal because if you forgot to throw the Main or if you did it incorrectly you could be putting workers at risk
Even disregarding the safety risk of using such a cable, not having a dedicated switch installed also means that you’re plugging your generator into usually an outside socket of the house, and those power lines aren’t usually meant to have a high load so you risk creating a fire from over straining the line as well
“risk a fire from staying the line with a high load”, wouldn’t the fuse in the line you plug it into simply open if you over load it?
Well, if you put them right in the normal outlet you bypass breaker and built in fuses, if breaker is open. If it is closed, then it maybe should pop if whole net outside house consumes more current than your house is allowed to (so maybe immediately), but still provides no protection inside. Or maybe if you have individual low-current rated breakers for every outlet, then yes, in this specific scenario it should technically work. Still, you know, generally bad idea.
Tell me you’ve never used a generator without saying you’ve never used a generator.
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…
Tell me you’ve never heard of turning off the main breaker before switching to generator power without saying it.
Interconnects remove an element of human error and putting Lineman at risk
I’ve used a suicide cord before in some rare instances. When I was finished I immediately took it apart.
