So I think of myself as a careful person, and someone who researches the safety of things before doing them.

However, in terms of electrical safety, I am hampered by two things:

1. my brain is somehow extremely challenged in the field of understanding how electricity works, and

2. There are not any resources easily available to me for trying to improve this understanding.

By which I mean that everything I’ve ever found to read about electricity is written in a way that is… somehow utterly incomprehensible to my mind.

I don’t know why! My mind tends to be good at understanding things most of the time! But even the most condescending explain-it-to-a-beginner guides seem to assume knowledge and understanding that I don’t have.

However. I am a person who uses a fair number of electric devices, for various things. And whenever I set up a living space, I am faced with the task of connecting them to the electric outlets. So I have to start somewhere.

And very early in the process, I always come up against the problem of “there are more electrical devices than there are outlets.”

The solution that seems obvious is, get a power strip, preferably one with a surge protector. Until recently I’ve had only the vaguest idea what a surge protector does, but I understood that it protects things, so it’s clearly a good thing to have.

Except. Once I had a power strip with a surge protector…. obstacle 2 would come up.

My electric devices had cords of limited length, and they still would not all reach to the location of the power strip (which seems to be required by safety to have a rather short cord).

I could only rearrange my space so much; sometimes a thing HAS to be where it is, and sometimes that CANNOT be within cord distance of that surge-protecting power strip.

So how do I get it plugged in?

Well, here is where I made what seems to have been my mistake. I researched extension cords, and whether it is okay to plug them into a power strip with a surge protector.

And every time– and this was back when the Internet and search engines even still kind of worked! – every time, I’d get a mixed bag of results, with some people saying it was okay. But a VERY high percentage of the results (including most of the Official Informative Website type of results) would say NO. NO THIS IS NOT SAFE. HERE ARE ALL THE BAD PROBLEMS IT CAN CAUSE. DO NOT DO THIS. EVER.

And– since I’m old enough to have gotten some of my education in a time when Internet search wasn’t considered valid research – I looked to other sources as well, but… what could I do? Any printed book on electrical wiring would be as impenetrable to my brain as online articles.

The only non-internet materials I had a chance of both understanding and trusting were the actual tags and manuals for my extension cords and power strips themselves, and the devices to plug into them.

Which always, always said the same. Do not plug an extension cord into a power strip of any kind.

I even asked some actual people! The people who were around when I had such questions tended to be people who either didn’t know, or didn’t feel like answering in much detail. But still I asked. And I managed to glean a few bits of information along the way – like “a thick heavy-duty cord is safer” and “a shorter cord is safer” and “plugging into a splitter that plugs right into the wall without a length of cord is just as safe as plugging directly into the wall.”

I filed away whatever answers I could get, as best I could. But the common theme throughout it all was “don’t plug an extension cord into anything that’s already on a cord.”

Was there a difference between the risk of doing this in a power strip with a surge protector, or in one without? Probably! But the answer was blocked off to me. Even when I sought answers specifically for the option with a surge protector, I still got the same diatribes against the danger of daisy-chaining. None of which really seemed to address any difference in the risk.

So I was forced to conclude that both the daisy-chaining options– surge-protected or not– were just unacceptably dangerous– and that the only safe option was just never to plug extension cords anywhere except directly into walls.

So, with my problem still requiring a resolution, I did what I could with that input.

I got thick, heavy duty cords, long ones, but each splitting into no more than three outlets at the end.

I plugged them directly into wall sockets if I could, and into direct wall-plug splitters if there simply weren’t enough outlets – but never, never into a corded power strip of any kind.

Because I would spare no expense for the necessity of being safe.

And– very recently, when I for the first time ended up in a situation where someone with basic electrical knowledge got to look at my outlet-and-plug situation–

Well, he told me it looks like a godawful fire hazard and I need to get some surge protectors as soon as possible before my house burns down.

So. I’m not sure just what I’ve learned here.

But maybe it’s that sometimes, no matter how much you research, there is just no substitute for talking to a person who knows the subject.

Or maybe it’s that there is no safe option and every possible thing will burn my house down and I’m just doomed to die in a fire! Who knows!