The Lamp Room

Spotted last night on the exterior wall of a private apartment complex - in the public entrance area of the large complex (meaning it was 'installed' by an employee of the site rather than on someone's private apartment) in Colombia, south America to run the Christmas lights. Note the live plugs with cables taped to the pins while part of the bare metal pins are still exposed. This is within reach of anyone, including kids and fully exposed to the elements. Nice

Quality that.... ....NOT! About the same standard as stuff I saw in Cuba when I went there a few years back!

Its great isn't it. There's nothing better than half-arsed shit jobs that are dangerous and would actually have taken longer to do than cutting the plugs off and wiring them in to a proper junction box.

You know what this means - That on the other end of one of the light strings there is another live plug...

And no, the fastest half arsed way out for this would be to just stick them both into a duplex socket (not wired to anything). What's seen here is much more elaborate

Probably is a live socket on the other end. Likely supplying someone's cooker or something. Quickest way out of this one is in a box ...the type they bury people in

The US strings are like extension cables. If there is a live plug on this end it means that there is a socket on the other, getting power from the live plug before it etc.... The meaning is that somewhere else in the snakeball there gotta be a cable with plugs on both ends

Highly likely - all christmas lights in the Americas have the dodgy US connectors on them with connections at either end for daisy chaining ...and of-course no fuses in the plugs. Wall sockets rated usually to 20amp breakers with unfused plug-in Christmas lights with quality Chinese 0.000000000005mm cable on them. Still, on the bright side, daisy chain enough of them and the cables on the Christmas lights will keep you warm ...as your house burns down

Back in ~2008 there was a batch of PC power cables (wall socket to IEC320) imported to here, where the conductors were made of some 0.0005mm2 hairlike strands of some very blackened metal (new from the packaging !), that felt more like steel than copper - it was springy-ish. It was pulling to a magnet too...

The conductor was pre-broken in some spots throughout the cable length (i guess all strands were broken, but usually not all in the same place, so the cable as a whole was still conducting enough to power a PC with, with the current going from strand to strand along the wire where strands were broken)

Those cables had the feature of bursting with a shower of sparks out of a random spot in the middle of the cable, either on their own or when moved or disturbed - As the strands were losing connection. A PC power supply is quite supportive of arcing on a series bad connection (inrush current of capacitors....) That then melted the isolation and escalated into a short

The 0.005mm2 steel or whatever else they put in there have significant resistance, so prevents the current from reaching anywhere near 130A when a short is down the cable, so would not let a C16 trip on its magnetic range (typically at some 8x In or so), but only on the thermal. And there, the cable would probably be already fused open by the time the breaker even starts to warm up

Quite a few house and office fires were reported as "started by a PC" during that time and few years after that timeframe - None of them mentioned the cable specifically, but i think atleast some of them were from those cables

Highly likely the fires were from those cables. I've noticed that Chinese-made cables (including on Christmas lights) nowadays have a copper colour to them but seem to go rusty ...hmmmmm, funny that.

Someone made a 'dead mans cord' All they would have needed to do is put a female end on the end of that!

Highly likely - all christmas lights in the Americas have the dodgy US connectors on them with connections at either end for daisy chaining ...and of-course no fuses in the plugs.

Incorrect! Nearly all US Christmas lights have fuses in the plug:
3a for standard mini lights(if you run anything more than 2a through them you'll pop the fuse)
5a for commercial mini lights
7a or 5a(depending on age) for the larger C7 & C9 sets

But the older C7/C9 sets did not have fuses! (old minis also didn't, but they also didn't have an end-plug for daisy-chaining)