this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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The perfect dorm-warming gift:
There's a type of power cord
You'll touch the end and see the Lord
And you wouldn't want that current going through ya
While male on male is usually great
You'll find yourself in a sorry state
You'll learn volts jolt but milliamps will kill you
hallelujah etc
The whole volts safe amps kill thing is so stupid though, you can't have any serious amps without serious volts, unless you have near-zero resistance, which a human body does not.
In fairness the sort of person who needs a song to remind them why male-male mains leads are an idiotic idea probably isn't going to appreciate Ohm's Law in any sensible capacity.
I find it similar to "the fall doesn't hurt, it's the sudden stop at the end".
But it's not entirely accurate, because we can be exposed to thousands of volts. For instant, most ESD are between 2k and 10k volts. Van de Graaff generators can generate up to 1,000,000 volts, yet they are regularly used in school classrooms.
My friend worked in a hardware store for a couple years and he said that around Christmas time you get about a dozen people asking for these.
This tale is old, and I still don't understand what people try to accomplish with these?! Like, I know hanging like a trillion extenders behind each other is also a way to start a fire, but what are people trying to do with male-to-male cables? I'm at a loss.
They get requested around Christmas time because someone strung their lights the wrong way and now wants to connect the female end of the lights directly to the wall instead of reversing all the lights they just hung.
Oh, I was thinking the holidays were just really depressing for some people, but I like this explanation better.
I always heard they were for powering a house off a generator
There is a kind of person who knows how to do that safely, but that kind of person has already installed an actual load transfer switch to do it the right way.
I still do it, I have a lot of blackouts here, I have to close the breaker, turn on the generator and then every 15 min go downstairs to unplug the gen, and turn on the breaker to know if the electricity came back, I'm cheap but I'm also getting tired of the whole process.
This is what automatic generators are for. They come on after sensing the power drop out and when it comes back on, it shuts down automatically. I have such a system because I live in the middle of a forest and trees fall over sometimes. And for bonus points, it can happen when the outside temps are at -30F/-29C and be off for a few hours or days.
It is expensive, but worth every penny.
I'm going to have solar with island mode soon so I will not invest in a new gen
Yeah that should work or you. Not so good in the cloudy winters in forest for me.
https://interlockkit.com/
You have two bus bars in your breaker panel. It is designed to be fed from one main breaker. But, electricity can flow backwards through a circuit.
An interlock kit is a simple device that allows either your main breaker to be turned on, or a different breaker to be turned on. Not both at the same time. With such an interlock in place, you wire the auxiliary breaker to a generator inlet box, so you can plug your house into your generator.
A non-contact voltage detector is the rest of your answer. The detector is locked on, and placed where it can pick up voltage on the main feed into your house: tape it to the main feed into the breaker panel. When power is restored, it starts beeping, and you know you can transfer back.
Do it the right way, because you aren't the only person who might be doing it, and the people who learn from you might not fully grasp the concepts involved. They might get lazy, skip steps, and set their home and/or generator on fire.
My house has totally fucked-up electrical. For some reason, there's a secondary breaker box in the basement which switches some of the outlets and lights in the house over to running off the generator outside. So when the line power comes back on, the lights that aren't switched to the gen come back on (if I happened to have them on when the power went off, at least).
I've lived in this house for 15 years now and I've been without power here for a total of seven weeks during that time. I like how many trees we have here but that's the price we pay.
Thats a transfer switch, and that's exactly what you want here. You want only a few essential loads on the generator, not your entire home. The furnace should be on it, modem and networking equipment, a few outlets for charging phones, refrigerator and deep freeze. Sump pumps.
The electric hot water tank doesn't need to be on the generator. The welder in the garage. Electric range. Dishwasher, Christmas lights, EV charger, pool heater, spa, or other big appliances that can be done without in an emergency.
That ain't bad at all.
I'm baffled by people going without power being a somewhat regular thing. I've never in my life been without power. I grew up on an old farm, and not once did we lose power. Sometimes lightning would flip the breaker, but never more than that. I realise this is because of the difference in size and infrastructure between my country and USA, but it's still wild to me, that some people in a rich country actually need a generator. I've only ever seen a generator once in my life. It was used at a beach party to power the music.
There are still great areas that have very low populations. I live in such a place in the middle of a huge forest. Think 10,000+ acres of trees everywhere. They tend to fall over in bad weather. Living in an open farmland area where a wood fence post can considered a tree, power outages are rare.
When you daisy chain christmas lights and just put up 1 of them backwards.
I made one for the little generator at my camp. The idea was to plug the output into an outlet in my homemade shed and power it all, plus energizing an outdoor socket.
Never got around to wiring the shed and it was easier to simply not use the other male end and wire it straight into the outside outlet. Now I can fire up the genny and have a hot outlet outside the shed.
They're typically used for backup generators
My wife was stringing up lights on the garage wreath and had one strand turned around and wanted me to make one of these to “fix” it so it could plug in. It took a second to explain to her the other end was just going to be an exposed line voltage plug.
Made one of these on accident.
Threw one end of the cord out in the yard and put a new male plug on the other end. Went to plug my saw in and found a male end. Silly me! So I swapped the cord around the threw the other end in the yard. Went to plug my saw in and found a male end. Stood there a minute trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
I'm sure Freud would have something to say about that "mistake".
OK, that got a literal LOL over here. And that fact I tried to make it work twice!
I did this with sausages on plates once. I'd laid out 2 for me, 2 for my wife. She said she only wanted one, I swapped one of hers for one of mine, but I couldn't work out why there were still two on each plate. I tried again, same result. Had to take a pause for a sec and and work out what exactly was going wrong 😂
I just recently did the same with a set of patio lights. Was shortening a set of lights which hang over my porch. Measured out the length I needed, cut the cord, attached a new female end. Went to plug the other end in… also female!
Female-female is OK. It's male-male that's hot. Know what I mean? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Hillbilly generator hookup. Backfeed hazard.
You see, if the device from the meme was ever plugged in, it'd blow the breaker immediately. This male to male cord, if plugged into two outlets would do nothing.
That's not always true. If the two outlets are on the same electrical phase, you may be okay. If they are on different phases, it would be dangerous.
Also after plugging one side in, the other side is a fun little cattle prod.
Define fun
Fun for your nipples.
Know anyone withholding information?
you can just cut a normal power cord and have that.
If I’m not mistaken plugging this in to the same outlet won’t do anything. And as far as back feed problems couldn’t you just shut off the the main breaker, i.e. where the power comes into the house?
People usually want them so they can run Christmas lights the wrong way, either because theyve already strung them up backwards or they're too dumb to figure out a better solution, but the end result if one end is left unplugged is an enormous amount of power just running loose at the exposed end. Even if you just wanted to plug it into the same outlet as a joke, if you plugged one end and touched the prongs on the other end while in the process of plugging the other side in, you're pretty fucked.
It will either instantly trip the breaker or do absolutely nothing, depending on how it's wired internally.
The real danger comes from when only one end is plugged in, though. With only one end plugged in, the other end becomes a 120V cattle prod.
They're illegal and it's only safe IF the home owner remembers to turn off Mains.
There are legal ones for generators (especially small scale solar stuff) that turn off automatically when they detect no main power on the line, so grid workers can't get zapped. They are pretty common around here.
Those are called Interconnects, use "Inlets" to hook them up and are not illegal. The suicide cable with two male ends can electrocute the owner and the line workers.