My wife plugged her portable whirlpool into the wall and then pooled. After she was done I tried to pull the plug out. It wont come. I have just enough room to slip a sharp knife under it. I have yanked away a couple times but it will not cooperate. Any easy fixes. Or do I replace the receptacle and rip the old one apart to salvage the cord?
Can you turn the breaker off and get a flat blade screwdriver (sturdier than a knife, perhaps) between the plug and the outlet, and pry it loose? Or maybe grab the plug with vice-grips?
Are you sure it isn’t a locking plug or something? I have a locking extension cord… never seen a plug that locks, but I suppose there could be such a thing.
I’ve seen plugs made with folded-metal prongs. If one of these got bent, and stuck in the outlet, you are going to have to break something to remove it.
Is this whirlpool new, or has she used it before, in the same receptacle? And she has never had this problem before? Perhaps there’s some trick to unplugging it, so it won’t come unplugged accidentally, since it’s used around water.
But I agree, don’t do anything without turning off the breaker.
The good news is that replacing an outlet is simple and cheap (a standard duplex receptacle is about 50 cents at the hardware store). You can do it in a couple of minutes with a screwdriver and needlenose pliers. As ZenBeam said, turn the breaker off before you monkey with it.
Once the power is off, remove the wall plate, unscrew the receptacle, gently pull it from the wall, make sure that hot/neutral/ground wires are clearly identifiable (should be by color but some old wiring is all “dirt colored”), then unscrew the wires and take the receptacle out.
Now you can fiddle with it to see if you can spring the plug loose without risk of shock or accidentally yanking a wire out of the wall. If you can do it, great. If you can’t you may have to either destroy the outlet (to free the plug) or snip the plug off and replace it. Replacing a plug is no harder than replacing an outlet and a replacement plug is also very cheap. If you do have to smash the receptacle to get the plug loose I’d be a bit leery of using that same plug again since it might get stuck again.