this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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As long as it's not male-to-male electrical extension cord.
You know, I never thought about this. Presumably it would just blow a fuse or trip the breaker, right?
People want them to conveniently power their house during an outage. Plug one end into a generator, the other into a random socket, and poof! You have power (so long as your house isn’t drawing more than whatever breaker you’re plugged into)
Problem is unless you turned off the whole-house-breaker, you are now feeding electricity back upstream into the grid. This is very bad. The friendly linemen who are working to get your power back on can’t de-energize the lines they’re trying to fix and will have a hell of a time working out which house is causing the problem.
While that is true the main reason they aren't made is not because of your stated reason, the main reason they aren't made is because you have two live metal prongs ready to kill when one end is plugged into power.
You say kill, I say take a trip to the breaker box to reset it after a light taze.
You'll trip a gfi breaker, but probably won't breaker a standard 15a breaker unless you're quite wet and very touchy-freely with the ground.
I just saw this post before reading your comment about being touchy-feely with the ground. haha