Power Cords, Milliamps, and Current: the Dummy Version

200mA power supply

There's a special brand of cluelessness that almost never fails to draw the ire of a certain one of our staffers; and that's some freelancer mangling the basics of electricity. If, however, you were to take a brief stroll down a certain list of topics "covered" by our DotDs, you might find that quite a few people have managed to get that staffer's dander up. To that list of dummies, we add one more today: she's eHowian Jennifer Kimrey, and her HomeSteady.com post is titled "What Is the Difference Between 200 Ma [sic] & 300 Ma [sic] on a Power Cord?"

Kimrey, trained in linguistics and English, did yeoman service in defining the term milliamp, even managing to correctly abbreviate it as mA on a couple of occasions. Once she'd gotten the basics  out of the way, however, Jennifer was most assuredly out of her depth. Witness some of these statements:

• "When it comes to the difference in power cord strength, you can check what kind of milliamp, or mA, potential a cord provides." – That's a gross misuse of the word "potential" in the context of electricity.
• "Understanding the difference between a 200 milliamp and a 300 milliamp is simple..." – Sorry, Jenn, in this usage "200 milliamp" is an adjective, not a noun.

• "An amp is the current required to produce a force between two parallel, infinitely long wires separated by one meter's distance." – Lord have mercy; this woman's trying to derive the definition of a Coulomb! And not doing very well...
• "A 200 milliamp power cord does not put out as strong of a charge as a 300 milliamp power cord. This means that the current required to produce a certain force in a 200 milliamp power cord is less than that of a 300 milliamp power cord." – Say what? "[A] certain force"???
• "A power cord's charge should meet the requirements of that which it charges." – Shouldn't a power cord's capacity meet the needs of that which it powers? After all, power cords don't have charges!

So what is the difference between a 200mA power cord and a 300mA cord? Well, first off, it's an adapter, not a cord. Second, the (maximum) amperage of the power supply equals the wattage divided by the voltage. If the voltage is held constant, the 300mA power supply can support a wattage about 50% higher than that of the 200mA power supply, but it's still not very much...

Of course, you'd never be able to figure out even that based on what our Dumbass of the Day had to say...

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