Picture of a plug and a outlet captioned: "It's simple. Male. Female. Not both. Not a 3rd option. Any questions?" Below:"[laughs in Electrician]" Picture of various different plugs and outlets
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 58 points 1 year ago (12 children)
  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    hot damn. I once lived in a house that used a contraption like this to feed elctricity from one circuit into another. I didn't know and I touched one end... I did fall off the ladder, but I'm still alive.

    Of course this analogy is even more flawed than OOP's.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Can I ask, what's the (ill-advised) use case for this?

    I don't know anything about electronics but I readily believe this is a dangerous cable

    But what I don't get is what people want it for. I've never been in a situation that calls for this

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    They can be used to hook a generator to your house if your power goes out, but people will use them for things like if they strung up Christmas lights backwards so 2 female ends are next to each other.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    It allows you to move power from a live circuit to a dead one by connecting the outlets between them. The most common use I've seen is to easily hook a gas generator to a household circuit during a blackout.

    But yes, they're very dangerous and there are less-stupid ways to hook up a generator that won't make tripping over a power cable lethally dangerous or risk burning down the house by bypassing the circuit breaker and overloading the wiring in the walls.

    But this one is popular because it can be done very quickly and easily with minimal supplies.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    they exist and my coworkers kept buying them from somewhere and I never trusted them not to kill themselves so I did the one underpaid above and beyond the boss didn't deserve by fixing the idiotic wiring

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    When I was a kid our electricity got cut (yes we were poor). We found an outlet with power for some reason. Must've been wired to another unit in the 3 family home.

    So my moms boyfriend went out to the hardware store and made this cable. Then plugged in the working outlet to a nearby dead one and we got power again...

    I don't remember how long we ran that but nothing exploded.

    If I recall he was from another country and they did this all the time across houses when someone lost power or hooking up gas power generators.

  • source
  • parent