Tl;DR - Hurricane coming and I want to power a bedroom ceiling fan and outlets. If I turn off all the circuit breakers and had an extension cord with two male ends..... can I plug my Honda generator into a wall outlet to get power to a ceiling fan?
Tl;DR - Hurricane coming and I want to power a bedroom ceiling fan and outlets. If I turn off all the circuit breakers and had an extension cord with two male ends..... can I plug my Honda generator into a wall outlet to get power to a ceiling fan?
Always, always, always turn off the main breaker first if you are messing around like this with a generator.
This is the kind of stupid E36 M3 that kills firemen.
what can possibly go wrong with a male end powered by a generator putting 500watts?
Yes, however please read below. Read it and fully understand it. If you don't or can't, do not back feed your house from a generator without a properly installed transfer switch.
Cords with two male ends are called suicide cords for a reason. They can and will kill you, and any unsuspecting soul that happens to touch it.
Make damn sure the main breaker in your panel is OFF. A AC transformer will work in both directions. If you feed 110V into the low side of a power line transformer, it will feed many thousands of volts into the overhead or underground power lines. (Edited to add: This voltage can travel miles from your house.) It can KILL OR SERIOUSLY INJURE the lineman that is trying to get your power turned back on. This will piss them off. The cops will be called. You may go to jail. Your power will be the last on the list to be turned on, many months after your neighbors get theirs.
Technically it will work, but as an electrical engineer I have to side with the others - don't do it. If all you're worried about is a fan, just get a box fan from the big box store and plug it directly into the genset.
Also, I've never been in a hurricane zone but I've been told that when linemen come into a neighborhood to do repairs they may track down any gensets they hear running to make sure no backfeeding is going on.
I know with our generator that we can realistically only power one thing at a time. Run the fridge for a while, run the well pump so we can flush & rinse (notice I did not say bathe, the water heater is a second thing). I am charging up my backup power supplies now and getting gas while it's still kinda cheap. Gathering buckets for water and other supplies as I can, such as steaks and beer, and charcoal. Hmm, need to run to the liquor store too. 
Yeah, I know, I'm not much help. Hope you fare well in the storm!
I was thinking about non-portable gensets earlier. Anybody make a nice natural gas powered one?
If you screw up, you will kill someone. Is that worth the convenience of using your wall outlets and ceiling fan? Either get a proper switch (whole house or the sub-panel kind) or just run an extension cord.
In reply to mad_machine :
Yes they do, but they're not cheap. I looked into them several years ago, and IIRC at that time it was something like $4-$6k for a whole-house unit, transfer switch, and installation.
Why not just run an extension cord with a outlet strip at the end? Surely that would be easier and wayyyy safer to accomplish the same thing?
Get a box fan and some LEDs battery lights.
Don't do what you've asked about! Just too dangerous! Wiring is not a hobby.
Sounds good, the only reason I'm asking is we are potentially going to have my inlaws over (7 people total, 3 elderly ) and it would be great to run my ceiling fan in the master bedroom where we will likely all be staying. Looks like it's not worth the risk. If I'm feeling real ambitious I'll climb up there and run power straight to the fan.
Yeah, as others have said don't do it. I'm good at wiring. I wired my entire 16-circuit garage from scratch and buried the feed line myself. I totally understand everything happening in a circuit when you backfeed with a generator.
But I'd still never backfeed. Sure, I'm awesome and wouldn't make a mistake, but I don't want my fiancée or grandmother or cat to unplug the cord looking for an outlet and die while I'm out cutting down a tree or fighting the hoarde for water or whatever. It's just not worth it, too much can go wrong.
Between the shock hazard and fire hazard (the only overload protection on the backfed circuit is the generator's onboard breaker) I wouldn't aside from a "grandma will freeze to death" level emergency. Though I've considered doing it through a range/dryer plug, that addresses all of the hazards (dedicated circuit, big 240 plugs are hard to pull out) aside from having to remember to flip the main. Some breaker boxes have a kit available that's by far the cheapest transfer switch solution and works along similar lines, you wire a male twistlock receptacle to a 240 breaker and the kit is just an interlock plate so you can't flip that breaker on unless the main is off.
Several years ago during an ice storm outage I made up a supply cable with a male end to the generator and big alligator clips for the house end. Pulled the meter base off and hooked up my house lugs directly, the lugs to the street feed are air gapped away from the power that way.
Just threw the breakers on the panel for things I couldn't run (heat pump) and kept track of the total draw so the house stayed livable. Sort of a poor mans disconnect I know but it's what I had at the time.
Sold that generator not long after, it was insanely loud.
As someone who also plays with this sort of thing for a living, if you are asking questions like this on a forum, don't do it.
Yes. We all have to learn from somewhere. Internet forums are not the place to learn electrical design where getting it wrong can kill people.
In reply to Tom Suddard :
True good point. I redid the wiring in my kitchen and so I'm comfortable that my plan of turning all circuits off/master would work but I didn't think about the potential hazard of someone unknowingly grabbing the hot male side (don't get too excited).
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