Tell me you’ve never heard of an Interconnect and put the lives of every power line worker in your area at risk every time there’s a blackout without telling me…
I don’t really get it. Sure, the exposed prongs would be energized once you plugged one side in, but if you plugged the other side into a second outlet (assuming you didn’t cross live/neutral), nothing would happen. (those two outlets were likely tied together anyway)
Well, maybe it’s because you may die if you accidentally touched touched the prongs? The purpose of female plugs is among other reasons to prevent accidentally touching them.
In addition to the exposed prongs, it also means you are passing current into a circuit of unknown capacity without using a safety breaker. You may also be back feeding into your neighborhood power grid and can kill people in the street/other houses that were not expecting the lines to be energized.
You don’t work around dangerous things assuming you’ll never make a mistake, you work around dangerous things assuming you’ll never make three mistakes at the same time.
You are not immune to making one (or more) mistakes, no matter how careful you think you are.
Why would you “need” one of these if you could plug in the other end into a second outlet? The point is that idiots don’t plan out their christmas light layout and end up with the wrong end at the outlet. They decide that they would rather drive to the hardware store and buy/build a suicide cable rather then just taking the lights down and rehanging them or running an extension cord to where the male end of the lights are.
Double live is very bad and the cord becomes a literal short. If you’re lucky a breaker will flip or fuse burn out. If you’re not so lucky you have a cable thats either going to start a fire burning its insulation off and melting itself, or potentially exploding depending on quality and type of cable.
Two things: 1: there’s a high chance you do cross live and neutral, or even live and live on different phases. 2: using it to plug in a generator to power your house can kill electrical workers who are trying to restore a power outage. (If you fail to open your circuit breaker.)
What worked for me was starting out slow, but making sure being consistent was my priority. I forced myself to go on short walks at least 3x a week and stuck to it. It kind of grew on its own from there.
So if these are people wiring their Christmas lights wrong, assuming these are led lights, doesn’t this “solution” not work bc of the polarity anyway? Or is that only a DC thing with diodes? I only did okay in my physics electricity stuff lol
In household wiring polarity does matter, especially if you are assembling plugs. Only one of the three wires is carrying live current (hot), the other two are the neutral return path, and ground which is for safety. If you accidentally switch polarity, you can cross hot to neutral and cause a short circuit.
Switching the neutral and hot pins doesn’t matter except for appliances with exposed metal tied to the neutral pin, which is pretty much exclusive Edison screw lamps. This is why many plugs (especially those that immediately go to a rectifier) don’t bother with polarization.
Kinda, it’s half the power because the power goes like the temporal average of the current squared, the current oscillates like sine or cosine, and the temporal average of a sine or cosine squared is 1/2.
It would still work. But it is VERY dangerous. 1. The far end of the light string will now have exposed metal prongs that are energized at 120v, which can be fatal. 2. If the other end gets plugged into a socket, there is a 50% chance it will be a different circuit on a different phase, which can create a 240v direct short, across a wire that has no properly sized circuit breaker. 3. Using it to plug a generator into your house during a power outage can kill electrical workers trying to fix the outage if you fail to open your circuit breakers.
In AC, diodes work half the time, every 1/60 second. The “good” LEDs will have circuitry to fully rectify the AC into DC, drop the voltage properly, and smooth the peaks and valleys, so they will be continuously lit. So the cheap LED Christmas lights might have a slight flicker, and the good ones are steady. (Or get fancy with chasing colors, etc.)
All of that happens inside each of the “bulb” enclosures, or sometimes in a box at one end, so it technically doesn’t matter which end they are getting electricity from, since the socket at the far end is still just connected in parallel to the plug at the near end. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to link them together.)
It’s just a really bad dangerous idea to reverse them.
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