Update: This How-To was written for April Fools’ Day. It is not advised you attempt to make or even use this cable. The comments have made it very clear how dangerous to you and others using this cable can be. The image above is not of a full male-to-male cable, only the ground is connected, and the generator is not running.
We all know Ethernet has the crossover cable, cars have jumper cables, and RS232 has the null modem. Well, it is about time our wall sockets get their own crossover cable. This crossover cable is great for running power to a circuit disconnected from power. Maybe you are out of fuses, the breaker is broken or you just don’t want to go check the fuse box when there is a murderer about. This cable makes a great gift for even the most loathsome of acquaintances.
This an April Fools’ Day post. You should not do this!!!
Warning: These are Mains voltages and currents we are working with. If you do not know why you should not attempt this, you should not attempt this.
You will need:
- 1 Extension cord.
- 1 Male extension cord repair connector.
- Tools to strip the extension cord, and attach the connector: Knife, wire strippers, and screwdriver.
- Respect for mains voltages and currents.
If your extension cord has warning labels, read them.
Cut the extension cord to the desired length.
Strip about one inch (2.5cm) of the outer insulation from the part of the cord that has the male plug.
Strip about 3/8 inch (1cm) of each of the conductors. If there is a strip gauge, use it for a guide instead. Twist each of the stranded conductors to prevent fraying and possible shorts later.
Slide the shroud over the cord.
Screw the conductors into each of their respective terminals on the connector.
- The Green or bare conductor goes to the ground conductor terminal. It often has a green screw.
- The White conductor goes to the grounded conductor terminal. It often has a silver-colored screw.
- The Black conductor goes to the ungrounded conductor terminal. It often has a gold-colored screw.
Use a multimeter to check continuity and make sure there are no shorts.
Slide the shroud up to the connector and fasten the two parts together.
Secure the cable clamp.
There you have it, a finished Mains crossover cable.
There you have it, a Mains crossover cable. How might you use this crossover cable?
You know, it seems like all the pansies in here who go into cardiac arrest when they lick a 9 volt battery are all also quoting British regs. How did your island go from running the world to needing a 40 hour class and 9000 pages of code on how to open a juice box?
Has anyone considered the prank possibilities of this device yet?
1. Simply cut off a circuit you wish to prank at the breaker, then plug this in with a switch to an active circuit.
2. Cut the power intermittently to screw with people until they go crazy.
…
5. Profit
Although couldn’t you just install a remote cut-off on the line as you were doing this, or one on the soft-power of the device you wanted to mess with, etc.
Also, if you wanted to do this shouldn’t you have covered the more important part of isolating the circuit with a picture at least?
Not to mention that the only good reason for this would be to have normal house lighting, but lights and outlets shouldn’t be on a circuit together, so it is a huge fail. (If you can afford a generator with enough power to feed a circuit in a normal house you could afford a mains switch.)
@ too many to list, esp. Electrical engineers!
April fools, but that’s been said.
Instead of maligning them about being out of sync, and the inherent dangers of this, how about directing on appropriate methods to sync signal. Why aren’t there more homebrew green power systems on here? We are hackers, we don’t want to spend $3k on a good invertor to connect our homemade solar and wind generators (geothermal, hydro, nuclear, waste oil, methane, trash burning…) I’d already have at least two systems in place if I could find how to tie it in without blowing up, burning out, burning up, or making my clocks run fast.
If you have the know how, SHARE IT, or don’t come here. Your knowledge could save a life.
Dangerous? yes. Stupid? no. My family has lived all over the place, and sometimes the power isn’t as steady as you’d like. These things can be useful, since they’re fast and easy. Of course, putting a proper interlock in is the best solution. Sometimes you don’t have the parts, or the time.
For april fools this year I gave pocket knives to some kids at the middle school across the street, it was hilarious! This one kid cut his teacher’s face up so bad, hahaha!
Unfortunately my electrical mind control device just doesn’t seem to be working
Wait, now pocket knifes are too dangerous to give to middle schoolers? When do they get a folding knife now? When they are juniors in college (if they have declared knifery as a major?)
I got a swiss army knife when I was six. Never carved anyone up with it. Heaven forbid we give a tool to a child. They might make something.
Uh, naval ships have had this for pretty much since they had electricity. Only all the power is three-phase 440 in a Wye configuration, so it’s a wee bit more complicated to hook up.
The important thing to remember is that you can’t have supply power as well as crossover power… that’s when things go boom.
Vonage has a similar thing with phone lines. You can simply plug the vonage box into the wall jack and give your whole house coverage, but you have to make sure to disconnect the NID from the outside lines otherwise you’ll blow up your Vonage box.
Wow. I know it’s an April Fool’s joke and all, but this is absurdly dangerous. It’d be funny if the instructions were to tie all three pins to ground, but this writeup’s a tad too serious.
If your generator gets wired into the mains by accident, and you’re (un)lucky enough that your generator is running at a full 180 degree phase shift from the main, you’ve just made your mains TWICE as deadly.
Im quoting british regs because I just so happen to like and work in Britian!!
Oh, and yes I am an EE, so don’t say that all EE’s are against this.
@Torque, it’s really, really hard to synch properly. If you’re generating DC and want to use solid state conversion, you need some heavy duty semiconductors, which will set you back thousands. A three-phase generator needs synch electronics, a mechanical governor, and hardest of all, a balanced load on each phase.
It’s a good idea, it’s just harder than your average hack. And since you’re talking wall juice, it’s also got to be safer. Fail safe and fail soft systems are also a lot harder to make.
It would have been more useful to show how to make a dryer-plug ‘crossover’; the problem with the standard three-prong cable like this one is that it will only supply power to half of your electrical circuits in the house (only the breakers on the same side of the electrical panel). In order to power up the whole house, you need to supply power to both sides of the panel, which can be done through your dryer or electric range plugs (in North America, those are 240V outlets).
As others have said, MAKE SURE YOUR MAIN BREAKER IS OFF! Typically, if you leave it on, you won’t even be able to start your genset, as the load will kill it- but if you did manage to fire it up, you’ll be feeding power down the mains into the grid, potentially killing any linesmen working on the system.
If you live in an area with frequent power disruption (like I have), you can have a generator plug installed by your electrician. It’s a recessed male plug that lets you use a regular extension cord to connect the generator- no crossover required!
Hi All,
I agree that putting together a step-by-step howto, lowers the bar to include ppl that won’t think about/understand the consequences of actually doing this and so is inherently a ‘bad idea’.
_But_ I have personally used this kind of cable to backfeed a rack from a different circuit, when the local circuit developed a fault in our data center. I plugged the disboards male connector into a free slot on the same disboard to make the flying male connector safe (& also isolating the rack), and used a male-to-male cable to power the rack from a circuit in a different room (could have been a gen!). This avoided an 18-hour outage on the services running on this rack.
One last point, that I haven’t seen mentioned, is that using a male-2-male cable is ‘very’ dangerous as we are all conditioned to think that the pins on a male plug are safe – muscle memory is a powerful thing to overcome, and raaching out and grabbing a male plug is the most natural thing in the world!
Preaching to the choir, but knowledge is power, with power comes risk!
Just be careful out there you crazy kids :oP
We’ve done this several times when the power’s out. Just make sure the main breaker is pulled, no problems.
This.
What is this?
This is madness. Are you trying to hurt someone?
This method does work, but it’s definitely not the safest setup. You can also get a power transfer switch installed (Call an electrician for that one), and have your generator connected to the emergency side of the switch. Much safer.
Wow, This stired up a shitstorm,
We used something like this a whiel back, we had a bunch of servers on a powerstrip that was on an outlet that needed to be replaced, so we checked another outlet to see if it was on the same phaze, plugged a widomaker cord like this into the powerstrip and the new outlet, (keeping all the equipment powered while we move its main plug over.
No zaps no zarks, no death. the whole thing was treated with respect, Don’t do it if you don’t know how to be safe.
years ago there were some punks squatting in an old house nearby, they used this technique to power the kitchen circuit every night when the nextdoor gas-station was closed, allowed them to keep foodl cold in the fridge and run some lights and a boombox.
you wouldn’t forget. if you try to power a block, or even your whole house. the generator would die, or the extention cord would melt/explode.
This isn’t madness. THIS. IS. SPARTA!
[sarcasm]
If you’re doing this, at least get a generator big enough to power your neighborhood. Don’t be selfish.
[/sarcasm]
Anyone that thinks this isn’t illegal, I’m talking to you @Phelps, think again, as people have already expressed you won’t just kill yourself screwing this up you could kill the electrical companies repair man that’s fixing problems outside, this is illegal in not just all states but MOST COUTNRIES, it is a double ended male cable…. illegal. Don’t try it, don’t think about trying it, don’t spread this stupidity by telling others what a great idea it is. DO NOT DO THIS ANYWHERE ESPECIALLY AT HOME!!!!!!!!!
wooo, so many comments for a post about how to screw a plug on a cable !!
1 april ???
Nonya: Actually, the on-board breaker would trip.
April fools aside, if anyone actually decides to try this, TURN OFF YOUR MAIN BREAKER FIRST! If the power comes back on with the generator turned on, BAD THINGS can happen.
That said, if you are not an electrician, don’t try it anyways. And if you are an electrician, you probably know better :P
Preston, try to follow me here.
Killing people is illegal.
Having a particular piece of electrical wire is not.
Are you going to get it UL listed? Nope. Does that make it illegal? Nope.
Being free means having the right do stupid things.
I have to agree that it is irresponsible to even post this. There is no skill required to make such a stupid apparatus with no safe application. If anyone wants to take it upon themselves to build something so simple and yet so dangerous, it should be obvious enough. What were you guys thinking?
This hack has saved me thousands of dollars! I ran one of these over to my neighbor’s house!
Now I leave my electric furnace turned up to 85 degrees – even on the coldest winter days!
Wow, this is worse than the Sterns Orbo device.
@Morgen – brilliant site! I know a lot of people who could use those.
Listen folks, this is the site of homemade fusion reactors and tesla coils, and yes, those don’t have such an easy writeup, but those guys did it without a write up and prolly fried themselves once or twice in the process. I do live sound and lighting and have had to tie in generators (WAAAY bigger than that) to the main power line once or twice in my life and lived to tell about it.
As far as linemen are concerned, don’t you think they’d notice the lights being on or the loud as geny in the background or maybe the DAMN EXTENSION CORD FROM THE GENY TO THE WALL!!! If you miss all those signs, then I’d guess you need to go back to the shop and let an aware and observant linemen take over for you.
Regardless folks, if some moron wants to try this and blowns up himself or his house, then that’s Darwinism at work and I’m all for it. One less person wasting our air.
Great post Hackaday, sorry more people don’t have sense of humor or willingness to weed out the idiots.
Oh yeah, irresponsible. While we are at it, let’s ban paper clips! And let’s ban breadboard jumpers, those will fit into an outlet and burn someone almost immediately! Let’s weld all the microwaves shut, seal all the electronics, put a sign in/out sheet beside all the outlets, and put Depends on all the crybabies here who poop themselves at the idea of anyone doing anything that could possibly in any way go not absolutely right.
Anyone know where I can find instructions for a UK plug version? :D
It’s the same, just give it yellow stripe up the back and put a frilly pink bow on it.
Troll.
FUCK YOU PERRY VALE.
… now how to work an arduino in to this cord….
There is an application for this cord. It is to back feed your circuits with power. this should only be done when absolutely needed(like in a power outage due to a storm when your house may flood with out power to your sump pump). before you connect the cord to the circuits of your house or garage you MUST turn off the power at your circuit box for the whole building and unplug all devices that dont need to be plugged in. One of these cords saved me plenty of times, You Just need to know how to use it safely.
These aren’t just useful for hooking up a generator.
My garage doesn’t have power run to it. Running a power line there permanently isn’t really an option. So I just wired the garage with lights and outlets and use this cord(commonly called a widow maker) to provide power to the garage when I need it.
Yes, these cords can be dangerous. So can 90% of the other tools we use however.
I’m going to make one of these just so the whiners will have heart attacks and stop posting.
This is just bad. Not even funny for April 1st. If you even accidentally forget to flip off your main breaker and run this you can kill someone. That 13.2KV or 4800V to 240V step down transformer in your neighborhood all the sudden becomes a 120V to 4800V or 13.2KV step up transformer. Whoever is working on the lines outside (either in your neighborhood, or several miles away if you live in a rural area) can get killed.
They don’t call this a suicide plug for no reason.
You guys said it was a crossover cable, but the is clearly a straight through!
To make a cross-over cable, the ‘neutral’ and ‘hot’ should be swapped, while the ‘ground’ stays where it is.
Otherwise you just have a normal double ended power cable!
Clearly this is a joke.
A) there is no arduino
and
B) there is no instructable.
These are two key elements of a successful project.
@ everyone who thinks this isn’t a terrible idea:
You obviously either have much more experience with Mains power/home wiring than the average person, in which case I would caution you that most people don’t have the knowledge and experience you clearly take for granted and would likely fuck this up in ways that are too retarded to even imagine.
Or, you are a know-it-all idiot, in which case, I invite you to go ahead and try this one out yourself, after all, the gene pool needs a good scrubbing. D:
In all seriousness, if you haven’t already done something like this, now isn’t the time to start. Main Power is not to be screwed with. Yea, if you /really/ absolutely know what you’re doing, you can probably get away with doing some retarded shit. I’ve seen guys work barehanded on hot lines before with no problem too, I’ve also seen guys grab a hot line and get fried through insulated gloves. it’s not than electricity is unpredictable exactly (though it certainly can be) but there are just so many little way you could fuck up that you wouldn’t notice until you woke up at the pearly gates.
It’s one of those things, electricity won’t kill you ’til it kills you, but when it does, you don’t get a warning and you don’t get a second chance.
It’s one of those things, pretzels won’t kill you ’til it kills you, but when it does, you don’t get a warning and you don’t get a second chance.
Ban pretzels.
Please, please, delete this after today…
Someone searches on the internet in six months and finds this idiot’s step-by-step guide is probably not smart enough to heed your relatively subtle warning. They probably won’t even notice that it was posted on April 1st.
A for effort guys, but you get an “Incomplete” for thinking it through.
Maybe next time you can show how to make a plasma globe powered from an orange… something more harmless, please!
I’ve had to use this exact thing a few times before. When I kicked out a renter who hadn’t paid the bills in a while, I had to get the lights on so we could clean up the disaster left behind. Defiantly not recommended, but in a bind, this will make your life a lot easier, provided you live of course. ;)
1. TURN OFF YOUR MAIN BREAKER. If you don’t you’re a fool.
2. Leave a note on your breaker panel, indicating that you have the house on generator power, and not to flip the main. Any utility worker would much rather see a note that you’ve done this, rather than find out later the had way.
3. Turn off all non-essential breakers. Heat/AC, pool, whatever.
4. Male to male connect the generator to the highest amp socket you can find. Use a surge protector if you can. And fire it up.
If you need the other phase working in the house, get another male to male cable and link a working socket to a non-working socket.
I’d advise unplugging anything electronic, computers and whatnot. This setup isn’t extremely safe, but if you need light, and you can’t have your food go bad in an emergency, this might be your only good option. Be safe.
This is a good but old idea and it works well IF YOU USE COMMON SENSE, which we know that most of the readers here do not have.
All the whiners that say take this article down are wrong, leave it up in hopes that those lacking in common sense will use it and cleanse the gene pool.
When we used these in college we called them ‘suicide cords’. Dangerous but if careful, not fatal. Just don’t turn the mains back on until you unplug the genset.
There is a reason these are illegal to sell in the United States.
April Fools or not, you should take this down before someone gets hurt.
Stop whining and have a sense of humor.
we refer to these things as “cables of death” as all they provide you with any amount of ways of scoring yourself a darwin award,and possibly your family and friends too.
this is a april fools joke right?
cause’ if its not, this is some sick, twisted shit.
even in the Federation we don’t crossover plasma conduits while the warp core is still on!
the important thing to learn here is that not only do electrical engineers not read for comprehension, they also don’t get jokes.