They may only create the device FOR THE EMERGENCY. Its easy to make - just create blades that join regular extension cords at the female ends.
Its simply not true that you can extend a government bodies emergency powers to the citizens in normal times.
You do see why the mobile command centre requires the gas station to have the female socket ? So that people /animals don’t stick their fingers /feet/ etc into a male socket.
It was unsafe to expect them to have a male device on the wall. The male part is then on the lead…
No not saying that the gas station is requited to have a male end ‘socket’, but the M.C.C. is equipped with the cord needed to power the gas pumps through a normal outlet (so the MCC would have the male end, the gas station would have a regular outlet). This is envisioned as a emergency refueling procedure for the M.C.C. that AFAIK has never been used yet.
As for your statement that they can only ‘create’ this device ‘for the emergency’, well I guess it depends on the interpretation, as the device is precreated for some future emergency. I don’t know if that qualify, I don’t know if governments always follow their own rules either.
If you really want to do this, replace the plug with an L5-15P round locking plug. Then use an extension cord with an L5-15 receptacle on one end and a standard 5-15 plug on the other end that you can keep locked up.
Wrong so wrong. 120 vac can kill you easly. Just depends where the two connection points are. Why do you think GFCIs are required in kitchens and bathrooms. Because people have been killed with 120. And as far as being shocked with 120 and not being killed by it goes I have been shocked with 480 many tmes and no perminate damage, and I have even ben shocked with 10,000 once and was not killed. That does not make it safe.
The most common danger of a suicide cord is having a hot male plug in your hand and coming in contact with both the hot and a neutral or ground pin. If you have a strong contact you will receive a strong burn to your hand. The greatest danger is being in contact with the hhot pin and having your body grounded creating a path through your heart.
They are called suicide cords because they are suicide using one. And I wish people would stop discounting 120 VAC as low voltage because it is not.
120 Volt A/C won’t kill you if you touch it, usually. I’ve been shocked twice when I was a kid, and I’ve heard from electricians who have been shocked by 120 A/C dozens of times.
To me the implication of that statement is it is not dangerous.
Over the years I have seen people do things with electrical power that scares me.
that’s not a true statement. getting shocked because your fingers touched leads won’t kill you but if one hand is grounded and you touch a live lead with the other then the pathway goes through your heart. You are most certainly dead when this happens. I have on occasion wired a live circuit and the rule is to use only one hand. And make no mistake it’s a very dangerous thing to do. I would say stupid but people take risks all the time so I would put it up there with rock climbing and hanging over a 1000 ft cliff by one finger.
good point. I was thinking just the same thing as I was posting it. didn’t know the name of the receptacle but you’d have to reverse it with the male end hanging loose and the female wired to the cord.
They’re handy if you want to detonate an atomic bomb.
True story: the day before the second atomic bomb (“Fat Man”) mission was supposed to be flown, the engineers in charge of the bomb were giving it a check. They discovered that there had been a screw-up in the assembly. There was a cable that was supposed to be plugged in to arm the bomb. But part of this arming cable had been installed backwards and the connection that was supposed to plug together had two female connectors. The engineers had to jury-rig the cable so it could be plugged in and armed the next day.
The engineers, of course, had no authority to modify the bomb. But they were aware that sending it back to the United States to be properly modified would delay the mission for weeks. So they went ahead and fixed the problem and then didn’t tell anyone what they had done until after the bomb had exploded.
Back when I did sound for a tour of a Broadway show, the equipment was supplied by Masque Sound, the biggest theatrical sound company. I don’t know if this is true any more, but at the time, the stagehands refused to bend down to unplug cables. They would always jerk a cable out by the cord - I suppose it was a way to increase the number of repairs needed, a type of idiot “job security”.
To accommodate this behavior, all of Masque’s equipment was modified to have the panel mounted connectors be the sex least likely to break, and the cable connectors the sex most likely to.
So all microphone cords were female on both ends. If you wanted to extend an XLR cable in their system, you needed a male-to-male XLR connector.
Yes, I’m serious.
All of their mixing consoles were similarly modified so all the inputs were male XLR.
The reason I bring this up?
The speaker connectors they used were two prong polarized 15 amp plugs. The input to each speaker cabinet was a 15 amp polarized outlet.
Every speaker was wired up with suicide cords. (And if you needed to extend them, you had a bag of outlets with the mounting ears cut off.)
Think of it this way: if you know what you are doing, and take proper safety measures, it is perfectly safe.
The problem comes from people who THINK they know what they are doing, who ruin it for everyone.
Another use not cited above: suburbanites are familiar with power outages that can be VERY localized. So while your street has power, the folks on the next street, some of whom share their back fence with you, have no power. And their freezer is full of melting ice cream.
Neither of you has a generator, or is set up to install one, and you can’t run dozens of extension cords across the back yard, and even if you had enough cords, you don’t have enough outlets to plug them into.
So, switch off his main breaker to cut him off from the power grid, then unplug your drier (or something else that normally draws a huge amount of power, but you can live without it for a few days) and plug in a heavy gauge cord that runs over to his house and plug it in there. Voila.
As I said, if you know what you are doing, and take the appropriate safety measures, that should be fine and not burn down anybody’s house.
I would be a good example of somebody who doesn’t actually know enough to do that safely.
The real issue here is that, unlike connecting both ends of automotive jumper cables directly to the battery (which they say you shouldn’t do), this particular short-cut places a lot of other people at risk, not just (or mainly) you.
Like the aforementioned line repairman working on wires that should be dead, and were dead just a minute ago, and there is no reason at all they should now be carrying current.
This.
I imagine they make those weatherproof outside receptacles that hide a male plug under them, but I have never seen one and they can’t be easy to find.
Portable generators tend to have regular outlets as their outputs, designed for a male plug to plug into them.
It seems perfectly sensible to run a male-to-male plug from the generator to the weather-shielded input port on the house.
But one needs to document that well, and ideally disconnect it before moving, as some future owner might do something stupid and dangerous involving that “outlet” without even knowing it.
The problem with that inlet receptacle is that if you just wire that in to your breaker panel, those pins will be energized all of the time (the very problem we are trying to avoid).
Yes, you must have a proper cutoff switch when wiring a generator to your house, no matter what kind of connection you set up. I was speaking only about the proper connector to use for the situation. (They also make a 240v version which is more useful for wiring directly into a panel.)
The other danger, besides energizing the pins of the inlet, is in connecting your generator directly to the lineman who’s trying to fix your power.
Along the same lines, my father-in-law was a prototypical mechanic/handyman. He could do most anything. Once when he was otherwise unsuccessful in finding a short in the car electrical system he used a penny to jump the fuse and found the short by smell.
I guess if you know what you are doing you can do lots of dumb sounding things for smart reasons.
You have excluded a huge middle. Plenty of people are able to use a suicide cord with no problems. The typical result of an error will be a tripped breaker or an attention getting jolt, rather than the worst case outcomes you have suggested. Further, electrical power may be needed to power life sustaining medical equipment or avoid property damage due to burst pipes * or basement flooding. When the water is rising in the sump pit isn’t the time to install a transfer switch.
The “right” ways of doing it makes it difficult for anyone to create an unsafe condition regardless of knowledge level.
Other ways depend on the knowledge and attention of the user to avoid dangerous conditions. There is also the problem of determining if a user has sufficient knowledge. The standard solution is to assume that none do, and base all instructions on that assumption. Dire warnings are also standard.
*Even gas or oil heating systems usually need electrical power to run controls, pumps, blowers, igniters, etc. only the rare floor or wall furnace will provide heat when the electricity is out.
In the power industry we call the “Smoke Testing”. As in, “The engineer specified a 12KV recloser control and had it installed on a 25KV line. Upon its first operation it was smoke tested and failed.”
I heard of someone in one plant where I worked who was a 600V conductor for a while. There were raising electrodes from the bath (live), each was about 600V. The guy inadvertently leaned against the other electrode while doing this. Normally - I’m told, it’s very safe, you can’t reach two electrodes at once. he was using the pushbutton for the motorized lift for the electrode. He backed into teh other electrode and started shaking. Fortunately, as part of his problem, he could not let go of the button; once the electrode cleared the bath the circuit was broken and he could move away from the electrode, very shaken up. And… the back of his leather jacket was smoking.
Whether you live or die is luck of the draw. There’s only one way to find out.
