So the power cable of my PC stopped working and I’ve had to replace it, and looking around our stash of spare cables I found one, but this one says 10A=250v whereas the original cable was 10A=125v. I’m just wondering if this is important and if I should only use same A=V cables? Because I plugged it in and my PC works just fine but I’m a little concerned it might damage something internally.
In: Technology
It is **potentially** harmful:
An AC adapter for a device eg a laptop will have two sets of numbers: input and output. There’s also a polarity indicator. I’ll skip that part.
The input is what the AC adapter can take from the wall. The voltage ie the 125V or 250V is typically the voltage the adapter needs or can accept. The current ie the 10A is how much current the adapter pulls from the wall.
You adapter can most likely accept up to 250V wall voltage before the adapter gets damaged.
The output voltage is what the adapter sends to your device (usually DC, not AC otherwise you wouldn’t need an adapter). It should have a voltage and a current as well. The voltage is what the adapter sends to the device; if that output voltage is higher than what the device can accept, you can damage the device.
The current is the max current the adapter can provide; if it’s lower than what the device needs, often the device won’t work or won’t work properly.
Let’s take a laptop I have as an example. My laptop says it’s rating is 19V, 3.42A. I have the originals adapter which matches that perfectly. I also have a second adapter that has an output of 19V and 4.74A. The current rating on the second adapter is higher that what the laptop needs, and that’s fine; the current output is the MAX current the adapter can supply. If my laptop needed 6A, the adapter wouldn’t be able to provide enough current.
However, if the adapter had a voltage output a 20V, 25V, etc, anything higher than 19V, it could damage the laptop. If the voltage output were lower than 19V, the device probably wouldn’t work right but most likely wouldn’t be damaged (no guarantees tho!).
I’ve destroyed a device or two (fortunately only small easily replaced devices!) by connecting them to AC adapters that had a connect that fit the device but had too high a voltage output for what the device could take.
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