I'm imagining what led to this, and it can't be good

[ironphoenix]

Comments

[con-girl.livejournal.com]

Now i want to make one. As an art project

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Please leave the internal wires disconnected if you do...

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Could be useful for backfeeding on a limited basis, but only in some extremely controlled circumstances. (I've had a few of them on boats, where the wiring is often easy to isolate, say, between a gen set an shore power.)

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

It can be useful... it's not a very safe way to do it, though.

[foms.livejournal.com]

This leads me to think about unhailed standards.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Standards are both blessing and curse.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Consider: My house does not have power. It has been disconnected, because I have not paid my bill.

You are my neighbour, who pays your bills. YOUR house has power.

I sneak over and plug one end of this into an external socket, then back to my house and plug the other end into one of MY external sockets.

Poof: My house is now powered, on your dime. As long as I don't pull enough current to blow your breaker....

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

I think this falls under "not good."

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Then you get evicted, and a team of electricians comes to work on your former house before selling it.

They carefully shut off and lock out the power at the main panel. Every electrician puts a padlock on the panel lockout, so they are absolutely sure there is no power to the house wiring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockout-tagout

They then start to upgrade the supposedly-dead electrical system.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yup. Just, there is a real-world use for those cables and a reason people want them, and also why the hardware store in question, which is in the business of making arbitrarily-long outdoor power cords, wants to NOT make them.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

And that's why the proper procedure is lockout-tagout-CHECK.