When the electricity goes out, it goes without saying that all the lights and sockets in the house stop working. Clever cottage owners stock candles, batteries, LED lights, and transformers. More reckless people are simply connecting their home electrical system to a generator using a mains wire with a plug at one end between the generator and a wall socket. This should be too dangerous to be necessary, but it has become widespread enough The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a warning about this practice. In particular, they worry that there is no need to even connect the lead, as it is readily available on Amazon.
The dangers they refer to include electrocution, a fire risk from circumventing the home’s electrical protection measures, and even carbon monoxide poisoning because the wires are so short that the generator must be next to the socket. Hackaday readers will not need to talk about these risks, even if only in very few and very special cases We’ve seen people from our community do that. Perhaps there is a flaw in the way we wire our homes, and we have to provide a way to disconnect our low-power circuits when the power goes out.
It’s possible that over the coming decades, the growth of in-home battery storage after the likes of the Tesla Powerwall will make our homes more resistant to blackouts, and no one tempted to use a plug-to-plug wire instead would notice their home switching to stored energy or solar. while, Some of us have our own ways of dealing with blackouts.
Delivery photo: Evan-Amos, public domain.