I Bought the Banned Death Cable (Do Not Buy)

Also yes I’m also going to trash the two cord pieces 🧐. The point of destroying it is to prove I won’t be keeping it, to emphasize there is no good reason to have one.

One way electricians can safely work on circuits that may become energized is by deliberately grounding/shorting them out while working on them. If someone turns it on, they will immediately blow a breaker.

As somebody who used to work in a hardware store, I cannot count on both hands and both feet the number of times I was ask to make one of these cables. Every time I would explain to the customer that it was illegal for me to do so and that it was dangerous not just to themselves but to anybody working with electricity in the vicinity to have that cable in existence. At least five times I had to get my manager to kick them out of the store

Linemen install GROUND leads when working on lines. This is because incase anyone accedentally back feeds the lines. What happens is it shorts out the backfeed to ground and causes the breaker at the feeding line transformer to blow. Then the power company will find it after they fix the lines and have a "chat" with ya.

I used to paint empty apartments for my father's business. They usually had no power. He had one of these cables, a very long one. He was super, super clear with me about how to use it. In fact, each end had a label so I wouldn't forget. One end said "DON'T DIE! Plug into unpowered end FIRST!" and the "DON'T DIE!" was much bigger than the rest of it. The end said "DON'T DIE! Do what the OTHER end says FIRST!" I didn't DIE. Thanks, dad.

Funny story. I know somebody that back fed the grid using a cord like this and then when the grid came back on it melted his generator down..... Nobody got hurt and I think the homeowner learned their lesson...

True story, about 20 years ago I was an engineer working at a large corporation. My boss told me the women on the assembly line were complaining about getting shocked when they touched certain equipment. I checked it out and there were about a dozen back-to-back plugs linking all the power strips together. I asked him who had wired up the work benches and he said it was a licensed electrician. It turned out the electrician had hired a trained assistant who had done the wiring job. The electrician came out the next day and rewired all the benches for free because he knew he could lose his license over this incident. I think he also fired the assistant.

I once got an old lady asking for a male/male adapter around december and immediately told her, "you need to re-hang your christmas lights" before she even got done explaining her story. She called her husband to try and explain to me, but I just told him the exact same thing. "We don't have it. No one has it. It doesn't exist. It's dangerous and illegal." Had to repeat that at least 5 times to both of them before they gave up.

If you use such a cable on Christmas lights you will end up with an energized plug at a random place. Some kid might find it.

I got shocked due to this insane cable. When I was teenager it was used for some equipment at a place I was doing some voluntary work. When I touched it, unaware it was connected to power, my hand immediately bounced away from it and spasmed for a couple of seconds on its own. I am lucky I was not electrocuded due to this. It probably helped that I touched it only with a single finger when it happened.

Real props for actually showing the legal basis. As a lawyer, it's refreshing to see - illustrative of the often complex way legislation works to give an industry code the weight of an enforceable law.

Ha! This made me laugh. Years ago a client of the company I worked for suffered an IT failure when the mains failed. My company was OK (broadcast TV with multiple UPSs and generator backup), but the client company wasn’t on it. Their IT guy (top bloke and very good with IT) decided to buy a UPS and install it himself; it didn’t work, so he asked if I could help him out. I looked at the only cable connected to it at that point, plugged into one of its outlets. I asked him where the other end was and he pointed to a mains outlet on the wall. I asked him to remove the wall end, and sure enough there was a male connector at each end and he’d fried the UPS by shoving mains up its output. He’d made up the cable himself, thinking it was how it was supposed to be. I reported a near miss and we issued a company-wide edict that nothing could be wired by any of our clients and plugged into the mains without it first being inspected and authorised by one of us.

My grandfather made such a cable for his lawnmower, which he built himself. He was a genius. When he repeatedly stepped on the cable and pulled the killer plug while pushing the machine, he secured it with duct tape. Fortunately, there was no accident. Used it like that for 20 years, then I grew up and threw it all away.

I have been told that first responders sometimes carry "suicide connectors" to power structures on an emergency basis such as energising a gas station to access the pumps. That said it is never the right way to do an installation.

When I was a kid I split the wires from a computer F to M cord and accidentally touched the wires on an exposed PC case panel (when they were all steel). It welded to case and sparks flew, scared the hell out of me. Thankfully I unplugged it and threw it in the trash.

Made one of these cables at a physics class back in highschool (together with a classmate in the '80s), put a switch between the two plugs. Teacher told we could install everything but he would look up the things we made and was the only one permitted to click the switch. So he did, within a second the complete building was out of power... Learned why circuit breakers are great things (and why they are mandatory - at least in my country). Teacher said he knew what we made but relied on the circuit breaker and would use it as a story why you shouldn't craft these cables, so he did flip the switch.

Actually have a story around such a cable. From a 230 volt mains country, which makes it even more dangerous. An uncle of mine had an electric lawnmower. And it was convenient to take a cable drum, replace its plug with a receptacle, and plug this receptacle into the lawnmower. And he also made one of these death cables with 2 plugs, to plug one into an outlet and the other one into the cable drum. To pretty much use the cable drum in reverse and be able to just spool up the lawnmower's cable. He was quite a smart, handy man, I totally believe he used this setup in a relatively safe manner. And as he told me (this is like 25 years ago), it was impossible to get an "inverse cable drum" with a receptacle at the cable end back then. But sadly, he passed away at the age of about 60. And his wife kept using this contraption. When I was visiting her and was helping her mow the lawn, I actually saw her putting one plug of the death cable into an outlet while holding the other plug in her hand, totally unaware of the danger she's putting herself into. I then told her to ideally not keep using this cable at all, and if she does, to ALWAYS plug one plug into the cable drum before putting the other one in the outlet, and vice versa, to make it a bit safer and never have an open plug that's powered. It's still not great, for sure. As far as I know, she never shocked herself with this. But still, when buying/making such contraptions, don't only think of yourself, also think of others who may use it one day.

Any kind of misuse of connectors intended for mains power can be dangerous. This reminded me of something that happened at a small church in our area many years ago. The amplifier sat on a shelf inside the pulpit so the mic cable could be short and the minister could reach the controls when needed. They wanted to make it easy to move the pulpit out of the way when they used the platform for things like the Xmas play so someone who probably thought they were clever wired the speakers to a standard 120V receptacle mounted in the platform floor right next to the live receptacle that the amp plugged into for power, then attached a cord with a 2 prong male power plug to the amp's speaker terminals. It worked OK as long as it was re-connected by the person who set it up that way but I'm sure most people reading this have already figured out what happened when someone with no clue about how things like that work tried plugging it back in. The only damage was totally destroyed power output transistors in the amp (which I ended up replacing for them and recommended changing to standard 1/4" phone plugs & jacks before it happened again). They were very lucky; One of the amp's speaker terminals was connected to the chassis so there was a 50/50 chance that the amp's housing would be live when someone tried to turn it on.

Also called a widow maker. The main breaker must be shut off first and the plugs must all be attached to CFI plug BEFORE starting the generator to prevent most hazzards and potential death. Just spend the 600 to 800 bucks and get a manual switch installed.

I like the meme that some hardware stores put by the electrical cables, saying, "These are not made. They should never be made..." As for these allowing generators to backfeed into the grid, linemen are taught to assume that the lines are energized and take appropriate precautions partly due to possibility of generators backfeeding into the lines.