Power strips

[DrKoob]

For safety purposes, power strips, extension cords, or similar items are prohibited from being brought on board.

 

An extension cord may be provided for medical reasons only. For further information, please contact our Access Department at 1-866-592-7225.

 

Really? Seriously? In this day and age? I travel with my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, my iPad, my wife's iPad, her iPhone, my Kindle, her Kindle. How do you propose I charge all of these with one US socket in my cabin?

[trbarton]

from a Electrical Engineer in the Coast Guard:

 

"I don't know if it explains it well. Basically ships do not use a grounded systems to get 120V. In your house, you have three hole in the outlet. 1 is hot (usually the left), one is neutral (typically the right), and the other in the bottom middle is the ground. if you stuck your hand in all the holes, only one of the holes would shock you (assuming a proper system- who knows how jacked up your grounds and distribution system may be). This is important to understand, only ONE of the conductors can shock you.

Now, let's say that I'm an electrical component manufacturer, and I want to save money by installing an automatic breaker in the protector (like most have). Why would I ever want to install more than just the one on the hot lead? Why waste the money installing a pointless breaker for the neutral line, when I can electrically isolate the entire strip by breaking the one wire?

Now, here it comes! On a ship, there is no "neutral" line in the traditional sense. In a house, you have a grounded center tapped transformer. Now a ship is a big hunk of metal that rusts quickly. You can't have a ground to the hull of the ship (or the ocean), because the electrical potential in the hull would rust the entire ship. very fast. To mitigate this (along with other, more confusing benefits) ship use an UNGROUNDED system. The consequence of this is that instead of having one line that jumps up from -120V to 120V, you now have two lines that are both -60V to 60V. This is really hard to grasp for some people. The two lines are completely out of phase, and that means that when one line is at +60, the other is at -60 (creating a potential difference of 120V). This is how every outlet on a ship is. If you stuck your finger in a ship outlet, 2 of the holes would give you a shock (albeit a little less painful).

Now, let's take your single breaker power strip on a cruise, and plug your toaster into it. Now remember, that third bottom center prong still exists, solely for safety. Being plugged into a normal outlet (surge protector not in the system), if a hot wire inside your toaster comes loose touches the metal shell of the toaster and you touch the shell, bad day. If the shell is grounded to the hull (connections inside the toaster run to that middle bottom wire), the hull is a better conductor than you, and will dissipate the current, until some grumpy electrician onboard hunts your toaster down as the ground in his system (and the culprit who is rusting the ship).

Now take that same instance and plug your grounded toaster into the power strip into the ship system. Right off the bat, the breaker in the power strip trips (and your ground-wire is touching the tripped hot). There is still half of that 120V bumping around in your toaster. Since you have effectively made a new path (hot wire, to the shell of the toaster, through the ground wire, into the hull), that 60V's worth of current will be traveling through your toaster, and into the hull. This would heat up the toaster, and depending on the location of the ground, could melt things and cause fires. Hope you learned something!"

 

Thanks for the information. On another thread someone posted that the crew were working in the stateroom next door and there was an apparent spike in the electrical circuit and he claims that the mother board in his 2 lab tops were fried. Is this possible?

 

Thanks!

 

Tom😎

[florisdekort]

Really? Seriously? In this day and age? I travel with my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, my iPad, my wife's iPad, her iPhone, my Kindle, her Kindle. How do you propose I charge all of these with one US socket in my cabin?

 

 

You have at least 4.

[florisdekort]

For safety purposes, power strips, extension cords, or similar items are prohibited from being brought on board.

 

 

 

An extension cord may be provided for medical reasons only. For further information, please contact our Access Department at 1-866-592-7225.

 

 

Thank you for the clarification.

 

I can't help but smile about how many people on Cruise Critic love to report how they manage to get prohibited items on the ships "because nobody was checking", but then complain loudly in other threads about people who don't precisely follow the dress code and show up for dinner with a wrinkle in their pants.

[jeffsnoy]

I just got off of the Infinity yesterday. Our bag did not show up at our room. We were told to see security. They found our power strip and confiscated it. They had about 10 others that they found. We got the strip back yesterday as we disembarked. We bought a 3 outlet plug at our first port stop and had no problem bringing it through security.

[NorbertsNiece]

In December, boarding at Auckland, they were letting them on. There was no sign of any checks for them.

 

No consistency eh? I too boarded in Auckland though those strips in my pic from Sydney may actually have been the result of passengers embarking in Perth. (was a B2B....we'll never know....)

[ghstudio]

I travel with an ipad 2, iphone 6, kindle, garmin gps, android phone, 7" android tablet, a full sized asus convertible laptop (quicken and processing pictures) and I wear a pebble smart watch which needs charging...all of which charge via USB. I don't use a power strip...I use a 5 port Anker 40W USB charger which uses a single 110 or 220V outlet (the power cable can connect to either a US 110V blade connector or a european 2 round pin connector using the built in adapter). I use which ever one my wife's hair dryer doesn't use (celebrity seems to randomly provide both 110V or 220V hair dryers).

 

You can easily charge 5 or 7 devices at the same time if you buy the right charger. I suggest using color coded cables because without them you wind up with a mess of black or white cables on your desk....but it's still easier than having 5 or six chargers hanging off a power strip.

 

If you do need more than two 110V outlets, just bring a simple grounded three way plug from your local hardware store....anything more is overkill.

Edited May 24, 2016 by ghstudio

[sand piper]

I just ordered this from Amazon. Hope it will solve my problem without endangering anyone. Got orange so perhaps I won't leave it behind Lol.

Found it and the code on the Hip2Save site.

Amazon: Lumsing 4-Port Wall Charger Only $5.59 (Regularly $29.99) – Charge 4 Devices

 

The links in the post below may be affiliate links. Read the full disclosure.

Need to charge your electronic devices quickly? Hop on over to Amazon.com to score this highly rated Lumsing 4-Port USB Charger available in grey, orange or blue for ONLY $5.59 (regularly $29.99) when you enter promo code 34HOVSII at checkout. This Lumsing charger is equipped with intelligent fast-charge technology that detects and automatically switches to the proper charging mode for connected devices with full speed 4.2 amp charging.

[U2_Rocks!]

Thank you for the clarification.

 

I can't help but smile about how many people on Cruise Critic love to report how they manage to get prohibited items on the ships "because nobody was checking", but then complain loudly in other threads about people who don't precisely follow the dress code and show up for dinner with a wrinkle in their pants.

 

Oh, the irony! ;)

[cbradley1209]

Is the determining factor whether it attaches to the wall with a cord? I have one that uses a cord - no surge protector. It looks like all the ones pictured out the table had cords. I leave in two weeks and I'm trying to figure out whether I need to get something new.

 

Thanks-chris

[gopro63]

that may not work if the Polarity of the plug is wide on one side.

Desk outlet is upside down and to close to the desk 2 inches off the base.

 

reasons why a extension cord is brought on.

 

 

Yes people love complaining Lol:D

[love2driveinct]

I just ordered this from Amazon. Hope it will solve my problem without endangering anyone. Got orange so perhaps I won't leave it behind Lol.

Found it and the code on the Hip2Save site.

Amazon: Lumsing 4-Port Wall Charger Only $5.59 (Regularly $29.99) – Charge 4 Devices

 

 

Thank you for posting this sand piper. I just ordered two of these using that coupon code. Reviews on this item were pretty good overall, and at $5.59 I figured why not? Even if they don't work on the cruise for some reason, we will be using them around the house.

[ghstudio]

If you are going to order that charger, do yourself a favor and buy the 35W version...or better yet, buy the 5 outlet 40W model. The one on sale really doesn't have any future charging devices like ipads/iphones that charge at higher rates....and none of them offer quickcharge technogy which is rapidly finding it's way into phones/tablets.

 

Cheap is somtimes not the best....

[love2driveinct]

If you are going to order that charger, do yourself a favor and buy the 35W version...or better yet, buy the 5 outlet 40W model. The one on sale really doesn't have any future charging devices like ipads/iphones that charge at higher rates....and none of them offer quickcharge technogy which is rapidly finding it's way into phones/tablets.

 

Cheap is somtimes not the best....

 

Funny, I was SO close to doing just that! Darn. Maybe it's not too late to cancel my order.

 

They do make some with QuickCharge, but I don't think the QuickCharge port works or works well for apple products from what I can see in the description and reviews, so I wouldn't buy the one that has that.

[neverbeenhere]

I heard this was the new plan for Edge ships.

[oroszdb]

Really? Seriously? In this day and age? I travel with my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, my iPad, my wife's iPad, her iPhone, my Kindle, her Kindle. How do you propose I charge all of these with one US socket in my cabin?

 

 

Well I have the Belkin charger and a USB multiport charger and the USB ports on the MacBook Pro (and the international adapter for it that also has 1 USB port) so I'm covered for 3 iPhone, 2 iPads, 2 apple watches [emoji847]

[oroszdb]

Thank you for the clarification.

 

I can't help but smile about how many people on Cruise Critic love to report how they manage to get prohibited items on the ships "because nobody was checking", but then complain loudly in other threads about people who don't precisely follow the dress code and show up for dinner with a wrinkle in their pants.

 

 

[emoji106]

[oroszdb]

I heard this was the new plan for Edge ships.

 

 

Rofl love it