this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
192 points (98.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36188 readers
1169 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"never plug extension cords into extension cords" is probably the most common piece of electrical related advice I've ever heard. But if you have, say, 2 x 2m long extension cords, and you plug one into the other, why is that considered a lot more unsafe than just using a single 4 or 5 meter cord?

Does it just boil down to that extra connection creating another opportunity for the prongs to slip out and cause a spark or short circuit? Or is there something else happening there?

For that matter - why aren't super long extension cords (50 or more meters) considered unsafe? Does that also just come down to a matter of only having 2 connections versus 4 or more on a daisy chained cord?

Followup stupid question: is whatever causes piggybacked extension cords to be considered unsafe actually that dangerous, or is it the sort of thing that gets parroted around and misconstrued/blown out of proportion? On a scale from "smoking 20 packs of cigarettes a day" to "stubbing your toe on a really heavy piece of furniture", how dangerous would you subjectively rate daisy chaining extension cords, assuming it was only 1 hop (2 extension cords, no more), and was kept under 5 or 10 metres?

I'm sure there's probably somebody bashing their head against a wall at these questions, but I'm not trying to be ignorant, I'm just curious. Thank you for tolerating my stupid questions

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lime@feddit.nu 23 points 1 day ago (4 children)

lol "gauge"

americans will use anything except the metric system

[–] Kaput@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

What is the metric unit for cables?

[–] lime@feddit.nu 3 points 13 hours ago

for cross-sectional area? mm^2^.

[–] Thavron@lemmy.ca 11 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I've always found gauge to be especially odd, because the number gets smaller as you go bigger, so at one point you can't go any further even though you can go fatter.

[–] spizzat2@lemm.ee 9 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Oh, you can get bigger! Just keep adding 0s. It's fine.

[–] Thavron@lemmy.ca 6 points 15 hours ago

Oh ffs I should've known.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 8 points 16 hours ago

Yup, I work with 4/0 (0000) cable pretty regularly, for things like generators or powering large systems. We have a few trunks full of cable, and it takes a crew of 2 or 3 to actually lay it because it’s so heavy. Usually one person pushing the trunk along, one focuses on uncoiling it from the trunk, and one focuses on actually laying the cable. We use five conductors at a time (one neutral, three 120v hots leads, and a ground,) so it’s a big bundle. Each cable weighs a little over a pound per foot, and there are five bundled together. So a 150’ coil can easily weigh 750-800 pounds.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

16 AWG – 1.3 mm^2
14 AWG – 2 mm^2
12 AWG – 3.3 mm^2
10 AWG – 5.2 mm^2

For us from the civilised part of the world ;-)

However, as in Europe we have 230 V system, approximately half the cross section, as stated in the table above, is sufficient.

Edit: This is how the above text should be displayed:
Screenshot_20241227-221529_Eternity_1

[–] Wolf314159@startrek.website 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Both are measurements of cross-sectional AREA and are defined in terms of square millimeters (mm^2), not mm.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 5 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

That's exactly what I wrote. mm^2 should be rendered to square millimeters (mm^2 ) by the browser / app.
In my understanding, 'cross section' always referrs to an area. The other property would be the diameter which is measured in units of length.

[–] Wolf314159@startrek.website 0 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Sorry, that's not what I see.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

Interesting, what do you see then?
Screenshot_20241227-221529_Eternity

[–] reattach@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago

Fwiw, it looks fine using Voyager