As part of my purchase of <Insert product name here> I bought from Amazon, knowingly it came with a US power cord. Instead of buying a US to Aus power adaptor I thought that other cords around the house MAY work with it (Of course trying them one by one is a recipe for disaster).

The power brick says it can:

Input: 100-240V/~ 1.7A 50-60Hz
Output: 19V 3.42A

A charger brick for a Lenovo laptop (Yes, THAT Lenovo laptop) says:

Input: 100-240V/~ 1.5A 50-60Hz
Output: 20V 3.25A

Would it be safe to use the cord that goes from Wall to Powerbrick for the Lenovo laptop with the US-powercord Powerbrick?

It's not the cable between the wall and the power supply that you need to watch out for, it's the whether the device you're powering can cope with the difference in voltage. The power supply is rated from 100V-240V and 50-60Hz which means it will work in the USA and Australia just fine. Plugging a device rated only for the lower voltage used in the USA into a European or Australian socket will cause a rapid release of magic smoke.

(I'm sure the cable will cope with an extra 200mA - even the thinnest of my power cords has a 5A fuse in the plug, so 1.7A should not strain anything).

So using the wall to power supply from the Lenovo device with the Amazon product should be fine?

Yes. The cables aren't so much of a concern with these relatively low-power devices, it's whether the power supply can accommodate the significantly higher input voltage. The power supply claims it can, so I'd go for it.

(I recently acquired an Exo PC which came with a US cable for the charger - I'm using a UK cable from an old radio without any issues).

Thanks for the help, I plugged it in, it's charging atm and no smoke or house burnt down.

I was going to interject that checking tip polarity is of vital importance, but it seems that no magic smoke was emitted, so I guess the polarity was luckily (or standardized-ly) correct.

What if you reverse the polarity of the jelly baby?

The issue is with the cable between the wall and the power supply, not the power supply itself. Assuming a double insulated power supply (no earth) then live and neutral are interchangeable on the input.

Indeed, but that's what I was warning him about. I'm envisioning a laptop power supply from the numbers he quoted; wouldn't you expect about the same?

Nope:


The question is clearly about the cable between the power supply and the wall.

That happened to me once. There was no smoke, but I did need to bury my Playstation after that...

If it's just the cable between the wall and brick, it doesn't matter in the slightest. You could run copper wire from the wall to the brick(which I've done) and it'll work just fine. The box is what's doing all the work.

Ohh, Benryves, I utterly misunderstood the question. I totally glossed over the "Wall to Powerbrick" part of the question and mentally skipped to essentially "Wall to Device". Thanks for setting me straight.

Actually, even Wall to Device isn't a big deal, if the device either has it's own built-in transformer, or the kinds of power used between your two regions are similar. Many years ago, we had a Russian singer, who was going to perform at our church, stay at our place for the night. My dad made a makeshift converter out of an old plug and some copper wire that allowed her curling iron, which was designed for European outlets, to work with our American ones.