Electric Cheater Box
We have a cheater box hook up to 20 & 30 amp receptacles. The 20 amp has trip a couple of times and the AC has quite working! So I am thinking the air is working off the 20 amp. If I switch the 30 amp...
Forum Discussion
RoyB wrote:
Here is a neat discussion about your subject line...
CHEATER ADAPTERS
I added some diagrams of the various cheater cords in this link...
The one that scares me the worse is having two MALE PLUGs on one end and a FEMALE SOCKET on the other like when using one of these adapters.
What you don't want to happen is plug in one MALE PLUG to a 30A Pedestal and then read a 120VAC potential on the open OTHER MALE PLUG on the 20A Plug. Having a HOT MALE plug laying around can be real dangerous...
Roy Ken
I don't disagree in the least that having a hot male plug is a very dangerous situation (and not permitted by code). However, assuming everything is wired properly and there are no 240V appliances in the RV, this cheater cannot create a hot male plug under any usage condition. If one or both of the outlets are miswired, say by having their hot and neutral reversed, then it can have a hot male plug, and cause other problems like producing a dead short when both plugs are inserted. That's true regardless of whether there's an RV connected.
The bigger problem is that these create a sort of ground fault by bridging the neutrals. (It's not technically a ground fault, since it's not current flowing through the ground that shouldn't be, but it properly trips a correctly working GFCI.) Should one of the neutrals to one of the campground sockets be open or have a high impedance, it's quite possible to significantly overload the other neutral, particularly if the two sockets are on the same phase which is quite common. You could have a 50A current on the 20A neutral line without tripping any circuit breakers.
I would not feel comfortable using one of these cheater cords. I'm rather surprised they're permitted at all, to be honest.
