Myself, and everyone I know, do not buy an extension cord then use it for one purpose for the rest of its life. They get moved around. You cannot predict what you will want to plug into it in the future. And they are so cheap you may aswell get the 13 amp ones.
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That's just foolish. If I need a ten foot extension cord for a
floor lamp burning a 100 watt light bulb I certainly wouldn't need,
or want, a 13 amp monster with a fuse in it when #18 zip cord and a
15 amp breaker in the service panel would be perfectly fine for my
use.
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It's not useless at all. It prevents the extension cord from overheating, that's what the fuse is for. The fuse in the equipment's plug stops its cable catching fire. To put a fuse of the full capacity of the wall outlet off in the fusebox is stupid, because you will most likely plug a device into that outlet with a low power consumption and a thin cord, which is now not protected.
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By the same token, if I plugged my 100 watt lamp into the wall with
your 13 amp fused monster extension cord, the thin wire in the lamp
won't be protected and could easily set fire to something if, for
some reason, 13 amperes was was allowed to flow through it for an
extended period of time. If you want _real_ protection, fuse the
lamp.
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Yes more modern houses here have circuit breakers instead of fuses in the fusebox, and people who are obsessed with safety, I just have fuses.
My point is the circuit breaker or fusebox fuse doesn't know what an overload is. It breaks at the rating of the outlet, not the appliance and it's cord.
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And your 13A extension cord does essentially the same thing when
supplying a low-amperage appliance with a 13A supply.
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What does your smug: "I don't think I've ever read any instructions,
fineprint, terms and conditions, or policies in my life. I have
more important and/or more interesting things to do with my time!"
sound like?
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Ignorance of
How dangerous American electrical systems are?
They are more or less exactly how we used to do things. Now it's illegal here.
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All that means is that you've taken a step "forward" into more
dangerous territory. We still have 240 V coming into every
household for use by high-power appliances (A/C, clothes dryers,
water heaters, electric ranges, and the like, but we also have the
transformer secondary's center tap coming in as well. That allows
us to use a much safer 120V for all our other needs. It's also
cheaper to make smaller appliances that run on 120V since, for
example, 120V transformer primaries need only be wound with half the
number of turns as a 240V transformer for the same output voltage.
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Because you have circuit breakers. We do too. I don't as it's an old house and I haven't changed them. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether the extension cord is fused or not. If I removed the extension cord fuse, I would be no more likely to survive.
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You don't have much of an attention span, do you?
You broached the subject of our choosing 120V for reasons of safety,
and I was pointing out that whether we did or not, 120V is
_inherently_ safer than 240V. The extension cord, circuit breaker
and all the rest of it have nothing to do with it, since the fact
remains that a 240V hit is harder than a 120V hit. Four times
harder for the same body resistance and same contact time if you
consider the power being dissipated in the body. Also, 240V will
cause much more violent muscle contraction, leading to the greater
likelihood of secondary injury.
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Electrocution occurs when you have a weak heart.
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No, electroction occurs when you are shocked to death as was pointed
out by another poster.
It's also entirely possible to have a fine heart but to die from
fibrillation caused by even a moderately weak shock.
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In fact statistics show that most injuries and deaths occuring from electrocution occur due to >secondary accidents.
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Then the cause of death wasn't electrocution.
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Electric drill electrocutes you and you fall off your ladder, etc.
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In that case the cause of death (if you weren't dead before you hit
the ground was a broken neck, a concussion, whatever. But _not_
electrocution.
To belabor a point, since being shocked by 240V is a much more
physically dramatic event than being shocked by 120V, it's much more
likely that you'll be thrown off the ladder by a 240V drill than by
a 120V one, which bring us back to the _fact_ that 120V is safer
than 240V.