[solvedit]

I sincerely hope they win.

Amazon is known to be a disgusting swampy wasteland of intentionally deceptive knockoff garbage. Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice, and they know it, and they do nothing about it.

But that's not the interesting part. Consumer public need assurance that what they're being sold, NOT what they're buying, is safe. The difference is perspective. Regardless of provenance, it should never be the buyer's responsibility to gamble correctly on product safety.

[chx]

You can buy a power strip with a two prong "figure 8" connector providing three grounded outlets. Try to sell that in a brick and mortar store, it would be closed, razed and the ground salted so they won't even try it next time.

[brandonwamboldt]

Genuinely curious, can you expand on why that power strip is bad, and who exactly would shut down the brick and mortar store?

[sveiss]

A power strip like that isn't connected to the electrical ground in your house -- that would need a three-pin connection, and it only has a two-pin connection. Despite this, it has three-pin grounded sockets for you to connect appliances to it.

Three-pin appliances require a ground to be safe. By using a power strip like this, you're creating an unsafe configuration with a high risk of electric shock if there's a fault with an appliance.

Also, the little figure-8 connectors can't pass a high amount of current safely, and lots of 3-pin appliances are relatively high draw. That's a fire risk.

I'm not sure who's responsible for the enforcement in the US.

[aianus]

> Three-pin appliances require a ground to be safe

Can you elaborate on this?

My MacBook charger has both a two-prong and a three-prong cable. Why would it be any more dangerous to plug my MacBook into this power strip using the three-prong cable than to connect it directly to the wall with the two-prong cable?

[chx]

Your MacBook then is prepared for ungrounded operations. Now take a laser printer, it uses very high voltage on the inside and if something gets dislodged and touches an outer facing metal part and you touch that in turn, you are dead. That's why the outer parts are connected to a safety ground. Do note Xerox warns you not to use a "cheater plug" http://download.support.xerox.com/pub/docs/4400/userdocs/any... . Laser printers are also a great example of when that C7/C8 connection is a fire hazard because laser printers need a lot of power when heating up their fusers. This is also why you must not connect a laser printer to a UPS.

[spoiler]

It's also possible that op has a socket like this, so the grounding is on the side: http://i.imgur.com/lLM3gQO.png

However, there is also this: http://i.imgur.com/ftPT7sC.png, which grounds from either sides or in the middle for sockets like these http://i.imgur.com/FnXMndC.png

[chx]

Exactly! I do not even know whether it's a bigger fire hazard or shock hazard. In Canada, curiously enough, it's Health Canada who would enforce a recall notice and fine you into oblivion. Look up the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act for more.

I presume in the USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Consumer_Product_Safety_C... would get involved or the FDA.

[cbr]

They're describing a power strip that has a 2-prong wall connector and offers three 3-prong outlets. This is dangerous, because equipment with 3-prong plugs needs to be grounded, and this power strip misleads you into thinking you've done that.

[didibus]

I rent an old apartment in the US, and no law requires the landlord to ground the wiring, so I actually need a power strip like that so that I can plug the strip into the wall and also plug 3 pronged electronics to it.

I know that it offers no grounding, that's a risk I have no choice but to take on my equipment because my building is not grounded. So I'm not sure someone selling a strip like that would be fined if my landlord isn't even forced to ground the building.

[cbr]

In that situation there are three safe and legal answers:

* Replace the wiring with grounded cable. Expensive.

* Replace the outlet with a GFCI and label it "no equipment ground". Gives most of the safety benefits of a proper ground, and is up to code. Not that expensive.

* Use a cheater plug [1] and connect the external ground tab to a pipe or something else grounded.

What you're asking for is basically a cheater plug plus an ordinary power strip, sold as one integrated unit. Better to keep them separate so that people know what they're dealing with. Also, what the poster upthread was describing didn't have a grounding tab, so there was no way to hook it up safely.

(The landlord isn't required to set up grounded outlets out of a general principle that you only need to bring things up to code when you're modifying it, and that something that was legal at the time it was installed stays so. Your unit could legally have knob-and-tube wiring if it's old enough!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheater_plug

[chx]

You can use cheater plugs to connect the third wire to piping. That should be safe. I am not your electrician, however, just a random stranger.

[spoiler]

You have 3 "holes" in your power strip outlets: Line, Neutral, and Ground. Now, a figure-8 can only have 2 wires inside it.

So, it's likely that you have Line and Neutral connected, while Ground is "floating" (not connected). Which means that, if something goes wrong inside the appliance, it can be dangerous for other appliances, and more importantly for you, too.

Especially if there are exterior metal parts inside the appliance that are grounded and a wire is touching the metal from the inside, too.

[wlesieutre]

What's the difference between that and something like this? https://www.walmart.com/ip/Axis-45086-3-Prong-to-2-Prong-Ele...

Is it that plugging multiple 3-prong devices into one power strip would connect their grounds together, and if one has a short they all go hot?

[sveiss]

The little circular lugs sticking out of that adapter are grounding tabs. You're meant to connect them to an electrical ground (which is sometimes possible in the US by screwing it into the faceplate of the wall socket). That lets you safely use 3-prong devices in a house that only has 2-prong sockets.

Of course, lots of people mis-use them, and when they do they're unsafe. I assume they're still on sale because they have a safe and appropriate use.

EDIT: I, personally, would never have one of the linked adapters in my house, simply because the risk of someone being an idiot with it without realising is too great. (I also come from the UK, where our plug and socket designs are nothing less than straight up paranoid when it comes to safety, and the US electrical setup seems unnecessarily risky to me. At least it's lower voltage...)

[codedokode]

By the way this american type of plug looks pretty dangerous as it must be easy to acidentally or intentionally touch the pins while inserting it into a socket.

[qbrass]

It conditions you to be more careful while using it.

[scoot]

"Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice"

There isn't a "warehouse policy" per se. As a seller, you can choose "Stickerless commingled inventory" as an alternative to individually barcode labelling each item before you ship it to the Amazon warehouse (or paying Amazon a handsome premium to label them for you).

The risk as a seller is that your items are commingled with counterfeit equivalents, and that your seller reputation could be affected as a result.