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How insulating is electrical tape?

T

Tudz

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 15, 2008
Messages
7,434
G'day all,

Short story: I need to separate an inner wire from an outer wire on a laptop charger that goes into a 120/240V socket, but is stepped down to 12V DC. Is electrical tape gonna cut it?

Long story:
Recently I ran over a charger cable with a chair and it managed to slice through the insulation with enough force to make the wires touch and the thing cut out. Worried I'd caused some irreparable damage I yanked the socket from the wall and inspected the cable. It has an inner bunch of wires with a layer of plastic insulation then an outer layer of wires spiraling around that, with the outer insulation around that. So my chair managed to slice the outer insulation, move the outer wires a bit and then slice the inner insulation so the inner wires and outer wires touched.

I pulled back the outer insulation to inspect it and managed to separate out the wires and then very carefully plugged it back in and it works... but obviously, even by my low safety standards, exposed live wires aren't a great thing to have lying around! It is downstream of the transformer/rectifier, so it's not 120V going through it, only 12V, but still it's not a good situation.

My plan was to wrap the inner wire with electrical tape to mend the slashes in the insulation, then rewrap the outer wires around them and either use a length of heatshrink or more electrical tape to cover that up. Would that be sufficient or is the very thought of it making you have a heart attack thinking I'm about to burn down my house? :D
 
I used multiple layers of electric tape to "repair" the flyback on an old TV once.

The flyback had melted through and was shooting a large solid spark to the chassis of the TV.

It worked fine once I piled the electric tape on there.

For something like what you are wanting to do, it will work just fine.

Definitely use heatshrink on the outside. Electric tape will get all gooey, make a mess, and come undone in a pretty short period of time.
 
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