Most of my poor shopping habit can be attributed to my pristine choice of clothing. You see, wool sweaters, thick winter coats and long underwear work great for keeping the heat while you take the 20 minute walk to the store in the snot-freezing winter cold. The problem occurs when you leave the cold and enter your local mall. Now you suddenly need the complete opposite. You need to get rid of that excess heat or you risk a heatstroke, and since it's impractical to bring a trolly just for that indoors tropical heat shopping it's easier to just try to speedrun it. And that's where the bad purchases happen.

The cable

If you live in an area where neither the sun nor polarbears would ever set their foot then this cable will look familiar to you:

It's an engine block heater cable so you can connect your car to your wall outlet and pre-heat the engine when there is a complete lack of outdoors atomic movement. This is useful on diesel engines which do not like to run cold, and for heating the interior so you are still able to feel your non core body parts while driving.

When my wife took off with the heater cable connected we both lost the cable and made a really cool scar on the car's chassi. I later on headed out, fully winter geared, to purchase a replacement cable and to get some much needed exercise. When I arrived the store presented me with two choices; one which looked like a complete cabling setup of the engine interior (more on that later) and one which looked like the one we had before. They both cost the same, around $36, and since we had no need for full cable system replacement I opted for just the wall socket to car connector. This was also in line with the "you get what you pay for" mantra that people keep throwing at me whenever my Chinese purchases fail. I figured since they cost the same then surely more money's worth had to go into the single cable?

The next morning my wife asked me to hook the car up so she could go shopping groceries later on. So I grabbed the cable and headed out in my jammies, but no matter how I tried the cable wouldn't fit. I kept rotating the 3-pin connector, trying to get rid of all the imaginary stuck ice I could find, though no matter the angle of attack it just wouldn't connect. By this point I was getting numb, so I went back in, got fully dressed and tried again. The outcome was the same as before, no connection.

After some researching I discovered that there are two different standards, at least in Sweden; DEFA and Calix. Apparently they are so similar that there are simple adapters available for purchase.

I'm assuming that the heater systems did not come out exactly simultaneously, so one of those two manufacturers looked at the competitor and then decided to change the connector. Imagine if one wall socket manufacturer decided to go in guns blazing and offset one of the pins just to make the rest of your region incompatible. And oh, DEFA is apparently the more common one but not common enough for our car.

The alternative cable

The solution to the cable debacle was to go back to the store and pick up the cable I initially didn't choose. It turns out that the schematic shown on the box with the 10 device picture didn't actually reflect what was inside the box. I'm not sure why they did the elaborate cabling setup, but the box only contained the wall socket cable.

To put icing on the cake I was going back to the store to return the cable and buy a new compartment heater but I noticed at the halfway point that I had forgotten the cable at home. Now I just need to forget it for a few more weeks and the cable will be non returnable.

Lessons learned

Do not make a new standard if you're not adding anything to it.