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CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

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Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#281

Post by blaze33 »

Back in 1999 we had a huge storm that cut the power for millions of people across the country. Our home was not spared as a tree fell on its power line. The power company was completely overwhelmed by the scale of the damages plus it somehow forgot about us so that it took more than a month to get the cable repaired.

Luckily our neighbor still had the electricity running so I made a short male-to-male cord to connect a normal extension cord between our two houses. I knew what I was doing but I was definitely not comfortable with such a solution!

I had no idea you could actually buy such cords, I thought it would obviously be outlawed considering you can easily kill yourself if you're not careful... iirc I destroyed the cord as soon as it had served its purpose because it's a really bad idea to have such a thing at home!

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#282

Post by kwhitefoot »

tyingq wrote: post #14
h2odragon wrote: post #2

I recall a holocaust among hand crafted toys, a few years ago: They were enforcing "materiel origin" labeling or something and you couldn't sell home made toys without a lot of paperwork to certify they were lead free. Amazon is too big for laws to apply, and its umbrella apparently covers foreign sellers on its platform. Another fun toy they sell is the "heated shower heads", a tankless water heater element integrat…

There's a terrifying teardown of one of those heated shower heads here: https://hackaday.com/2018/08/25/electric-shower-head-tear-do... When he opens it, the ground wire is just floating in the enclosure, not hooked up to anything. Contacts that would mechanically fail to shorted, etc. He also mentions it flows ~24 amps of 220V on the high setting.

Electroboom did a video on the subject. It seems that they are actually safe. Not sure I'd be willing to try it though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06w3-l1AzFk

And bigClive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNjA0aee07k

diodeGoneWild

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo99U3nVCnA

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#283

Post by londons_explore »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #250
londons_explore wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that if you could design a faster breaker, more lives might actually be lost... Imagine you had an ideal switch that could disconnect a circuit instantly. Any devices powered on that circuit with transformers, inductors or motors in (think vacuum cleaners, power tools, microwaves, blenders, etc) will have a current flowing through them, and as that current is interrupted there will be a huge voltage spike - easi…

Isn't the solution a GFCI outlet at the wall, not at the breaker? Suppose you're in a bathroom; near water with a hair dryer, space heater, or some other non-inductive load. If there is a short, the circuit is cut from that outlet; inductive loads in the rest of the house aren't involved.

Well there can still be an inductive load that you're disconnecting... Like the vacuum cleaner you idiotically used to try and clean a wet carpet...

Luckily, the problem I described is almost a non-issue. Deaths due to electrocution in buildings with a GFCI have fallen to pretty much zero - there were only four deaths due to electrocution at home in the UK last year (where voltage is very high and RCD's are common). That figure includes deaths by suicide, lightning indoors, and deaths where an RCD wouldn't help such as poking around inside CRT's, so it's entirely possible an RCD is already saving every life.

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#284

Post by everforward »

thakoppno wrote: post #261
jffry wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your country's wall outlet designs. In the US it would be pretty easy to partially remove the plug from the wall outlet, exposing the bare prongs without disconnecting them from the outlet. Then you just supply A/C power of your own before unplugging fully from the wall outlet.

Interesting - surely then one would wire the faceplate in a way that it would disable the circuit should it be removed.

I think it would better and much safer to change your PC so that it shuts off if the PC is moved. Offhand, you could probably wire a relay into the reset pins on your motherboard, and use an ESP32 to trigger the connection based on an accelerometer or pressure sensor on the bottom of the PC.

I think there are some low-tech solutions that work as well, but I don't know them off-hand. If you wanted to go that route, you should check out the Harvey's Casino Bomb. That guy had layers upon layers of triggers that would probably work just as well for preventing tampering with a PC.

That would keep the meddling to low-voltage stuff that won't kill someone or start a house fire if it doesn't work correctly. Messing with mains voltage seems dangerous and unnecessary since most of the PC runs on low voltage.

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#285

Post by throwawy6969 »

bitbang wrote: post #269
sC3DX wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny seeing the /r/livesound link. Worked in live entertainment for a while. One cable we would use a lot is called a 'two-fer', it has one male and that splits to two female ends (so you can plug two fixtures into one outlet or dimmer). There also exists a 'suicide two-fer' that is the opposite, you can imagine why it has that name. I believe I've also seen some 'suicide' cable setups when we needed to make multi-p…

Suicide cable joins two 120v (from different phases) to a 208v. Most high powered lighting fixtures require 208. Super illegal, but often facilities do not have the correct electrical setup and people use this to get around it. I almost got cooked but one of those when a stagehand unplugged it without waiting till power was shut off. Contacted and electrified the whole truss.

No post body was provided.

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#286

Post by zardo »

ghaff wrote: post #102
guywithahat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean most people know it's a terrible idea, it's just that 0.1% of a population of 330 million people is 330k people, and I don't think that 0.1% is from a failure of our education system

Why would you think that most people would just know it’s a terrible idea? After all, the vast majority of (digital) cables that people use mostly work just fine so long as they fit—leaving aside vagaries of USB-C and Thunderbolt.

The problem isn't that it won't work, it's the exposed live prongs.

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#287

Post by jaredandrews »

I am reading this story about 6 hours after it was posted here.

Immediately after reading I went to amazon.com and search "male to male e" at which point I was provided several autocompletes:

- male to male extension cord 3 prong - male to male extension cord adapter - male to male extension cord 10 ft - male to male extension cord black

and so on. BUT when I actually completed the search ("male to male extension cord 3 prong", the first autocomplete for me), I did not get any actual "suicide cords" in the results.

Thus I am forced to conclude that Amazon reacted in real time to this story. Curious if people in other areas are seeing the same thing?

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#288

Post by inkcapmushroom »

chucksmash wrote: post #69
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't pretend that "liability reasons" is due to ethical concerns about the safety of the product. Someone would buy it off a shelf at Lowes, would take Lowes to court, and Lowes would lose. It wouldn't be profitable. Conversely, if someone bought a dodgy product from a drop-shipper listing on Amazon and got hurt by it, do you think that Amazon would be successfully sued? Empirically, that happens but they're still p…

> Don't pretend that "liability reasons" is due to ethical concerns about the safety of the product. Your view point is "the only reason any business might not want to electrocute people is because they've decided it won't be profitable after wrongful death suits"? Presumably you work for a business. Would you electrocute people if you determined it would be profitable after wrongful death suits?

Try asking this question to the Christopher Columbuses and the Purdue Pharma executives of the world.

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#289

Post by Old_Thrashbarg »

massysett wrote: post #247
Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UpCodes cofounder here, couldn't agree more. We're fighting the Law Publishers for free, ungated access to the law. They think they own the laws, it's insane. Previous Hacker News thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617073 We host a lot of laws based on the NFPA 70 BTW (see https://up.codes/codes/general ). We take a ton of heat for hosting the law, it's messed up.

I think your beef here is with legislatures, not publishers like NFPA. It takes a lot of work to write and maintain these codes. NFPA, a private organization, gets money to do this by charging for the code. Maybe legislatures should be paying NFPA to develop these things, rather than paying nothing for them and leaving NFPA to figure out a way to fund them. Then legislatures could buy a license for them, or demand th…

A significant misconception is about who writes the codes. I haven't looked closely at NFPA's model, but many of the Law Publishers actually have outside volunteers write the codes - government officials, industry professionals and interested third parties.

Another misconception is around where their revenue comes from. ICC for example (who we know the best given their 2 lawsuits against us), makes 80.0% of their revenue from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law (see their last 990). These non-profit organizations are extremely lucrative and pay their executives many times the median non-profit executive salaries.

We've had various laws based on ICC codes on our site since 2016, and they're making more money than they've ever made (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363...).

Re: CPSC warns consumers to stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon

#290

Post by TOGoS »

josephcsible wrote: post #277
TOGoS wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that flashlights are easy to find in any gas station, and NEMA inlets are not. Yeah, it's dangerous because some kid might take that double-male cord and plug it in somewhere problematic, but given the lack of obvious alternatives, I can understand why someone would do this. If we want to discourage it, we should make the correct solution more obvious and widely available.

How are they not widely available? Home Depot and Lowe's both sell them.

Looking at my local Home Depot's website, they do have a few different options for NEMA inlets in stock, but the options are pretty limited, and they're all larger connectors, not your standard 3-prong connector onto which you could shove the female end of an extension cord (which is what I really wanted for my power-strip-with-detachable-cord projects; I can't really speak to why others might want a male-to-male cable).
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