jwelectric said:
With all this talk about someone getting hurt or might get hurt when working on a multiwire circuit is doing nothing but highlighting their stupidity.
Working on buildings that are partially occupied, where some circuits must remain on for the business that is still operating, while another section is under demo and/or construction is just plain reality. When you work in those environments day after day and year after year and decade after decade, you can one day have one person on your crew that makes a mistake.
I'm sorry that you're too narrow minded to realize that it's not just stupidity. Humans aren't perfect. The Cleveland Ohio local that I worked in has over 2000 electricians in the local. We would hear about accidents when they happened and take the info to heart. But with 2000 guys working, there are occasional accidents. The existance of accidents doesn't highlight stupidity, it highlights that your chosen profession can be dangerous. Sometimes stupidity is involved, sometimes it's not.
jwelectric said:
In every post that I have read and every link that has been posted I see the lack of safety on the part of the person doing the work.
Each and every time there was someone poking around in a live circuit that did not have the proper safety equipment on and it seems to me that there was no meter checking being done. I could see no safety rules being observed.
And sometimes it's someone working with a circuit that they think is off because they have confirmed that the breaker feeding the whole area if off. It's not careless poking around. In my example, wiggy checking from yellow to neutral would have shown
no power. The neutral that was disconnected from its HR was energized thru the lights on the brown circuit. It was the same as a hot. The yellow was disconnected by the breaker so there would be
no reading between hot and neutral. There would have been 277v registered between neutral and ground, if I had checked.
If you think that means that I was stupid not to check, then so be it.
I don't think my example is one of plain stupidity. I think it was a genuine mistake. As I explained it before
dnem said:
We were reworking a large drop ceiling area in an office. The multi was a 4wire 277/480v. We shut off all three circuits and demoed certain connections and moved lights around. Obviously the neutral HR was lost in one of those disconnections, which I would find out the next day. When we left, we left the yellow and orange circuits off because they were feeding lights that were under construction but we turned the brown circuit back on because it feed lights that weren't being disturbed and they provided perimeter lighting for office areas that were still occupied and not part of the construction area.
The next morning we went back to work, noone thought about any danger from the brown circuit because we were not working on any brown circuit lights or even working in any 4 squares that had the brown circuit present. But the shared neutral is electrically the same at every point in the multi. Just because it's only present with the deenergized yellow phase in a jbox doesn't mean anything. The neutral that I touched wasn't anywhere near any box that contained the brown. The brown phase didn't even enter the same room that I was working in.
jwelectric said:
I have heard, ?what if some contacts a live neutral and is grounded??
I ask, ?Why someone would be grounding their self and working on any circuit live or not??
Do you honestly think someone would ground themselves
purposefully ?
I can't believe you would think that.
Do you also think that people shock themselves purposefully ?
jwelectric said:
?What if you disconnect the neutral and it burns up some ones equipment??
Who would disconnect a neutral with out first knowing which circuit(s) is/are supplying?
Why do you
assume the damage is done in the beginning, before the power is shut off. On one job, one of my employees told me that he was done with a house 3wire multi. I inspected his panel work and looked at the HR jbox in the basement ceiling. He had already folded up all of the wiring into the jbox so I didn't see that he had missed the neutral HR and it was folded up into the back of the box. We flipped on the two breakers and a fuse in the TV blew up like a balloon popping. Thankfully it was only a tiny little fuse that we replaced and everything else was fine.
The entire job was done with the power
off. But his one mistake could have cost me the price of a big screen TV.
I'm not saying that I've done everything right or that I've used every safety precaution. You do make some good points about safety proceedures. But your harsh accusations show extreme ignorance of reality.
jwelectric said:
Through seven pages and 64 post the only danger I have heard is human error.
I have heard of the so called electrician that just starts disconnecting with out knowing what they are disconnecting, The person that is working without PPE and the idiot that is grounding him/her self and poking around in an enclosure that contains a live circuit.
This is a clear picture of the uneducated and untrained persons that think they are an electrician and working unprofessionally.
Do you consider it uneducated to make wild generalizations rather than talk about the facts as they have been posted ?
David
