The lovely suicide cord.

Worth mentioning that it is plenty safe...if used appropriately (for attaching a generator to a house that doesn't have an inlet).

It's when it's not used appropriately that's a problem. And it's very easy to not use it appropriately.

Would that only happen if one outlet were wired backwards (hot to neutral and vice-versa)?

If both outlets are wired correctly, as I'm envisioning it, the extension cord is parallel to the existing branch.

Same if both outlets are wired (the same) incorrectly.

But if one outlet is wired correctly and one has its poles swapped, then you are shorting hot directly to neutral...

But also being a 3-prong outlet...assuming everything is wired correctly...the short would either be redirected to ground and either trip the breaker or trigger a GFCI...no?

IANAElectrician. Just a high dude thinking about circuits.

Worth mentioning that the point of a suicide cord like this isn't to connect two outlets together...really no reason to do that...it's usually used to hook up a generator (or other load-center, like say a campground plug) to a branch circuit when the home/rv/load doesn't have an inlet. It's also extremely dangerous if used incorrectly, and there are several ways to very easily use it incorrectly.

Worth mentioning that they are absolutely not safe as the exposed prongs are energised. They are called suicide cords for a reason. All it takes is to plug the cord into a running generator or working outlet first and the exposed terminals are now live.

Its also worth noting that they very often kill linesmen working to desire the utility because people use them to hook up their generators without turning off their main breaker which back feeds onto the grid.

Proper generator inlets are very readily available and if you don't want to go that route, just plug your fridge and other important devices into your generator with extension cords.

1. We have gotten use to having regular house fires in houses made of paper.

And that would all count as "not using it correctly".

As I said, they are many ways to very easily use it incorrectly. Being overconfident about it is one, which is why I have an inlet and an interlock.

Those of us that remember our grandparents getting away with it are a product of survival bias.

Murphy's law says it will be used wrong, and as such it is a bad design and a bad idea.

There are alternatives that are better, this has only the advantage of being cheap.

Only if you like murdering utility repairmen.

If both outlets are wired correctly, as I’m envisioning it, the extension cord is parallel to the existing branch.

You can't just branch and reconnect AC power lines at random points.

Or rather, you can, maybe only once though.

plugging this into 2 outlets on the same side of your electrical panel won’t do anything.

That's only true if your house runs on DC.

I think it's pretty neat to be able to attach one USB-C/Thunderbolt cable to the laptop and drive 3 external displays, 5-6 USB devices and receive power and networking at the same time. I'm shuddering just trying to think of the mess it would be with separate USB/HDMI/DP cables and a charger. The more cables you connect, the more the laptop becomes stationary. With one cable I can rip it off and throw the laptop away from my desk.

As for when using the laptop on its own... anything that doesn't have a native USB C is easy to adapt, but even then there are many devices that are wireless and don't need a USB at all.

It has the advantage of being easily made in an emergency situation.

Idk, I think it's a worthwhile thought exercise to know the wrong ways to do something, in case the situation ever arises where you need to.

Not legally, and if you're not careful it can go from a suicide cord to a homicide cord. If you're still connected to the grid while you use one, it can backfeed and fry a lineman who was working on what they thought was a disconnect line.

The proper way to do it is to get a transfer switch, which disconnects you from mains before you can connect to a generator.

Not doubting what you're saying but just a bit confused because wouldn't electrifying what a lineman works on end up overloading the generator because you're now powering everything up to where the circuit broke upstream? Saying this based on an assumption that the lines service multple households and the generators are designed to keep important things running rather than just replace power plants for even one house, let alone the neighbourhood.

How do they handle solar setups that are set up specifically to send power into the grid?

uhlala plugging two USB cables require an electronics engineering degree... /s

To a certain extent, yes.

Like it's a good idea to drink from a ditch if that's the only water. Better than dying of thirst anyway.

Well, I'm not saying the tech is bad, but why not also keep the old ports?

There are zero ways to use this cord correctly. Do not tell people otherwise. The proper generator connection is to, as you just said, use a proper generator inlet and interlock like you said you use. Anyone using a cord like this is using it incorrectly as there is no correct way to use it. Both the CEC and the NEC expressly forbid these. All it takes is for a child to unplug the wrong end and touch the exposed prongs and they will get shocked.

A proper generator inlet should have the male ends in a recessed inlet box connected to either a transfer switch or an interlocked generator panel.

They do keep them for some time. Think of how desktop motherboards still come with PS/2 ports even though 99% of mice and keyboards are USB. And with laptops, many new ones still come with a couple of USB A ports and an RJ-45.

However, as with everything in tech, some things have to get phased out at some point. From a manufacturer's standpoint it's probably 1) cost saving measures and 2) making space for new things (because you can't keep all the ports that have been there historically).

Unless the cord crosses hot to neutral, connecting two ends to the same outlet won’t do anything. In fact behind the wall, that’s how the two halves of a socket, or two adjacent sockets on the same breaker, are wired.

How is rj45 legacy? And why do the laptop manufacturers hate it so much?

Never even heard of this - is this an American thing?

It's not, but think of how many times it's used compared to the wireless. I think it would make practical sense to make this into a dongle, but maybe it's not cheap enough to make financial sense for manufacturing.

Is burning down your house or electrocuting the linesman fixing your power outage because you backfed onto the transformer with your cheater cord and energized the neutral to 25kv? Fuck yeah! It's an American tradition!

(I'm Canadian btw and we have much the same stupidity here...)

In a residential setting with reasonable extension cable length & gauge, and reasonable loads you actually kinda can. Impedance and phase mismatches won't matter on those scales. In fact, that's basically what a ring circuit is.

Anecdote: my grandparents basically had an "accidental ring circuit" in their old house for like 40 years. It was only noticed when they hired an electrician to upgrade the wiring for an electric stove

Not an electrician, I always imagined the downed power line being close to the house, such that when you backfeed the transformer it doesn't have a load on it until the lineman grabs it and becomes the load.

I imagine when your circuit that's still connected includes several houses or most of your neighborhood, then maybe you'd overload the generator? 🤷‍♂️ I don't know.

Solar systems I do know, though.
If you have a grid-tied solar system, that feeds power back into the grid, then when the power goes out, your batteries and inverters are all turned off automatically so they won't kill linemen. That's what's ironic about grid connected solar, you can't use it during a power outage. They only work when the power is on.

Now if you have a standalone solar system, with a transfer panel where you can switch several circuits in your house to either run on the grid OR solar, then you can use solar whether the grid is up or down. But you can never feed the grid to make money back directly in that fashion.

TBH one does not simply patch into a UK-style ring circuit. Those who do have chosen death.

etherkiller and friends

I don't get why people use that one version of solar where essentially the power company gets most of the benefit because they buy the generated power from you at wholesale and sell it by to you at retail and, as you said, you can't even use it when the power goes out.

Though do you know if there's automated systems that take both solar/battery and the grid as input and do load balancing such that it automatically uses the cheaper power when available and then falls back to the grid for whatever else it needs? Or even better, one that keeps a certain amount of battery power as backup in case the grid goes down?

Though what I'd really like to see are DC home circuits to avoid the energy loss from first converting DC to AC to match the grid, then converting it back to DC inside the power blocks of your device.