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My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

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Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#171

Post by unwind »

HalcyonCowboy wrote: post #162
terom wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But a 10 amp plug can still fit and sit snugly in a 15 or 20 amp socket, and a 15 amp can still fit into a 20 amp socket with no problems. It’s pretty clever. That sound dangerous. The larger fuse sized for the 20A socket will not protect the smaller conductors in the cable sized for the 10A plug, they can get overloaded. The three-phase / industrial CEE plugs and sockets used in the EU are sized for 16A/32A/63A/12…

It's not dangerous in practice. Reading through NEC in the US, there's plenty of leeway for mixing ampacity ratings on circuits, within certain limits. For example, it's fine to have 10x 15A duplex on a 20A circuit. It results in less wiring, and allows for logical grouping of circuits. Electrical code starts from the the most common causes of electrical failures, and tries to design down from there. The ampacity rat…

Is "ampacity" really a better word than "current"? And the unit symbol is just "A", like "30 A".

I realize I'm nitty but this is a technical-minded forum after all.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#172

Post by erikcw »

upon_drumhead wrote: post #138

ThermoWorks SmokeX and Signal both use a 12v usbc power adapter. My partner fried her phone on it once due to seeing the cable and assuming it was a normal charger.

I thought my ThermoWorks Signal had a dead/defective battery after trying to charge it on a standard USB power adapter. Device booted up and and functioned fine, except the battery wouldn't charge. Plugged it into the provided adapter and it started charging again.

Thanks for the PSA, I'll be sure to get that adapter off my kitchen counter right away!

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#173

Post by jcrawfordor »

unwind wrote: post #171
HalcyonCowboy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not dangerous in practice. Reading through NEC in the US, there's plenty of leeway for mixing ampacity ratings on circuits, within certain limits. For example, it's fine to have 10x 15A duplex on a 20A circuit. It results in less wiring, and allows for logical grouping of circuits. Electrical code starts from the the most common causes of electrical failures, and tries to design down from there. The ampacity rat…

Is "ampacity" really a better word than "current"? And the unit symbol is just "A", like "30 A". I realize I'm nitty but this is a technical-minded forum after all.

"ampacity" means "capacity in amperes" or more literally "ampere capacity." You could say current capacity too but it takes longer. Ampacity is the language used in the electrical code.

"amp" also seems to be more common to write than "A" for electricians. Remember that the SI standardization of unit abbreviations is actually a pretty modern thing, so lots of fields existed before unit abbreviations were standardized and continue to use existing practices.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#174

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

verandaguy wrote: post #90
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the thing that would let me stomach it is 1. Only legally mandating it for consumer devices / sold on the open market / commercial entities manufacturing it, or whatever the sensible way to structure that sentiment is, and 2. USB supports negotiating higher power settings, so you're not artificially limiting what's possible, just enforcing a safe worst case. If you need some USB connector that carries a kW yo…

Re: 2: as you likely already know, this is a (major, pretty well thought out) part of newer usb standards. Unfortunately there’s no realistic way to backport this to older usb accessories. You can’t push an OTA update to the author’s wall wart.

I thought it worked fine with devices that had never been updated because you start from the very oldest spec and the lowest power and then both devices have to negotiate up?

I mean, sure you won't get better performance or power out of an old device but it's at least safe which is good enough for me, and for bonus points it's likely to work at some reduced level.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#175

Post by upon_drumhead »

jamincan wrote: post #170
toddmorey wrote: post #107

> The idea of a water fountain for cats may sound odd Cats instinctively love & trust moving water as stagnant water can accumulate bacteria & disease. So a cat fountain sounds like a gimmick or novelty but it’s a great idea.

I got one after I noticed how much my cat liked to jump up to the sink and try to drink from the tap while I was using it. He loves it, and anecdotally seems to drink more than he did without.

Ours love direct from tap,but assumes the fountain is going to kill them.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#176

Post by npteljes »

pixl97 wrote: post #120
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s terrible . Why don’t they just use a barrel plug?

Not that barrel plugs are any better... I wish I would have wrote the model down posterity, but at one point I worked a trading company and a number of the users had ISDN at home. There were two 'different' modems, and I say different because only the model number on them notified you of it. One had a plug that output DC power. One had a plug that output AC power. They were the same size wall wart. Same size barrel.…

Barrel plugs are not better technically, but it would be better to use them with random voltages because people don't assume that they conform to a standard. With barrel plugs, the customer expectation is that every device has its own charger, and that's that. With USB, the assumption is that they are all compatible.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#177

Post by FireBeyond »

marcosdumay wrote: post #130
cesarb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just imagine if a small portion of standard-looking outlets did not output 220V (or whatever standard you have) and say 330V. We have something like that here in Brazil. On cities which use 127V as the standard voltage (some cities use 220V), you can get 220V by using a pair of phases instead of a phase and the neutral, and it's common to find a few standard-looking sockets which are 220V instead of 127V. They migh…

Yeah, the wiring code says the 220V outlets on 110V areas must be red. Marking is optional. But I've actually have never seen a red one.

That's odd, because in a lot of contexts (hospitals, EMS, etc.), red outlets are used to denote outlets that are connected to battery/UPS, i.e. critical loads, versus the regular, which can be 'sacrificed' in an outage.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#178

Post by upon_drumhead »

tkems wrote: post #151
forward1 wrote: post #149

I recently replaced my 120V receptacles with USB ones. Super convenient and it's allowed me to get rid of the dozens of various transformer plugs around the home. https://store.leviton.com/collections/usb-outlets

While I think this is a great idea, I've seen these in public places and the USB-A sockets almost always get damaged. I'd be worried about having to replace a $40-50 receptacle every year or two if I happened to bump the cable and wanted to keep using the USB part. Still a good idea overall and I can see them being used in a few places around my home to save space. Also, I'd love to see ones with 65w charging so I ca…

How about 60w?

https://a.co/d/eBLEVjC

There are a few no-name brands with 65w, but I don’t trust them.

Just note, they are much larger than normal outlets and can be a squeeze to fit in a normal box.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#179

Post by rollcat »

denotational wrote: post #2

This is the sort of thing that almost (but not quite) pushes me to support mandatory certification (enforced by patents/other IP protections) for consumer devices that use a familiar connector like USB. Consumers shouldn’t need to worry about the specific output voltage; the presence of a USB-A connector should indicate that it abides by the specification. The hacker in me hates the idea of enforcing something like t…

This.

Nintendo comes to mind; charging the Switch (the earlier models IIRC) with a third-party adapter was a lottery, and the losing prize was a fried console.

They've been guilty of this practice for as long as they've been making electronics - I think it was the NES or the SNES that used a standard barrel jack and voltage, but reversed the polarity, with no circuit to protect the console.

Also - using Ethernet ports/cables for serial console access is not even evil, it's just stupid. Granted the switches/routers that do this are not exactly SOHO equipment, but you need to let students in a lab near that, and it's just asking for trouble.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#180

Post by pests »

akx wrote: post #77

Lidl does this too – the rotary tool Parkside PFBS 12 B3 comes with a charger that's obviously not USB-PD, but has an USB-C plug and it puts out a solid 13 volts at all times. (See https://www.kompernass.com/en/accessories/2316/charger-8 for an image.) I sent Lidl a courteous and long mail about this and they didn't really care other than "please open a service ticket with your local Lidl", which I didn't care to do…

> long

People don't like to read. Short & concise wins the day here.

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