Why That Dog-Chewed Phone Charger Is a Bigger Deal Than You Realize, According to a Local Electrician

My dog ate three chargers before I did anything about it. Not at once. Over maybe a year. Each time I’d find the cord in the hallway, frayed at one end, a little damp, and I’d sigh, toss it, and order a two-pack off my phone. Nine dollars. Problem solved, I figured.

Then a friend who works as an electrician saw a photo of the latest casualty and told me I’d been getting lucky, not getting away with it. That reframing stuck with me, so I called him properly and asked him to explain what’s actually going on when a dog turns your charger into a chew toy. What he said changed how I store cords now.

The cord is not the dangerous part. Until it is.

Here’s the thing I had backwards. I assumed a phone charger was low-voltage and basically harmless, the way a pair of earbuds is harmless. And the little cable that runs from the brick to your phone is fairly low-voltage. But that’s only half the setup.

“The block plugged into the wall is pulling full household current, 120 volts,” is how Alexandr Godonoaga put it when I asked. Godonoaga is a licensed electrician who’s spent over a decade on residential jobs, and he’s seen enough chewed cords to have opinions. His point was simple: the risk isn’t the phone end you’re picturing. It’s the wall end, and it’s anything a dog reaches while the charger is plugged in and live.

When a dog bites through the outer insulation and hits the wires inside, a few things can happen, and none of them are good. The dog can complete the circuit and get a serious shock or burn to the mouth, which for a smaller animal can be fatal. The exposed wires can touch each other and arc, throwing sparks onto carpet or a dog bed. Or the damage sits there invisibly for weeks, the cord still working, until the frayed spot finally shorts while you’re at work and nobody’s home to smell it.

That last one is the scenario that bothered him most, and honestly it’s the one that bothers me now too.

Why “it still charges my phone” means nothing

I said to him, but the chewed one still worked fine. He kind of laughed.

A cord that still delivers power is not a cord that’s safe. Those are two different tests, and passing the first tells you nothing about the second. A cable can be cracked, crushed, or gnawed down to the strands and still push enough current to fill your battery, all while the compromised section quietly heats up every time it’s in use. Heat is the tell. If a cord or the plug feels warm where it shouldn’t, that’s not normal, and it’s worth pulling from the wall right then.

He mentioned that this is the same reason electricians get twitchy about cheap extension cords run under rugs and space heaters daisy-chained into power strips. The failure isn’t loud. It builds. By the time there’s a visible problem, the problem has usually been there a while.

What a chewed cord is really telling you about your home

This part surprised me. I’d been treating the chewed charger as a dog problem. He treats it as a house problem with a dog-shaped symptom.

If your pet keeps getting to cords, some of that is boredom and teething, sure. But it also means live wiring is sitting at floor level, reachable, in a house where something with teeth roams unsupervised. And a lot of homes have outlets and cords in spots that were never really planned around a curious animal. Older houses especially tend to be short on outlets, so people run cords across rooms and behind furniture to compensate, which puts more cable within reach, not less.

The fix he pushed hardest wasn’t a gadget. It was tamper-resistant outlets and, in the right rooms, GFCI protection, the kind of outlet with the test and reset buttons that cuts power in a fraction of a second when it senses a fault. Those are standard now in kitchens, bathrooms, garages, and outdoor areas, but plenty of older homes never got them, and a household with pets is exactly the case they’re built for. If you’re not sure what your place has, that’s a five-minute thing for any licensed electrician to check, and Godonoaga’s own shop, Cob Services, is the kind of local outfit that’ll look at your outlets and tell you straight whether they’re up to it. His whole pitch, when I talked to him, was less “buy the expensive thing” and more “know what you’ve actually got behind the walls.”

The stuff you can do this afternoon

None of this requires calling anyone if you just want to lower the odds today. Here’s what he suggested:

Unplug chargers when you’re not using them. A charger that isn’t in the wall can’t shock anything, and this one habit removes most of the risk for free. Keep the live ones up off the floor and behind furniture the dog can’t get behind. Run cords through a cheap cord-concealer channel or even split-loom tubing from a hardware store, which is bitter enough and tough enough that most dogs give up. And give the dog something better to chew, because a bored dog will always find the worst possible option, and the worst possible option is frequently the thing plugged into 120 volts.

Then, the ones worth doing but not urgent: swap any cord that’s already been chewed, don’t tape it. Replace outlets near water or near the dog’s usual spots with GFCI versions if they aren’t already. And if you’ve got an older home with too few outlets and a tangle of extension cords as a workaround, get someone to add real ones, because the extension cords are their own hazard even before the dog gets involved.

What I actually changed

I’ll be honest, I didn’t rewire anything. I’m not that person. But I bought a couple of cord channels, I started unplugging the bedroom charger every morning out of what’s now basically muscle memory, and I had the outlets in the mudroom checked because that’s where the dog sleeps and I’d never once thought about what she was sleeping next to.

The nine-dollar two-pack was never really the cost. That’s the part I missed for a year. Replacing a chewed charger is nothing; ignoring one is how people end up unlucky. My dog’s fine. I’d just rather that stay true because I did something about it, not because I got away with it again.

Alexandr Godonoaga is a licensed electrician (IL Lic. #26-00032356) in the western Chicago suburbs.