- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
- Occupation
- Electrical Engineer
When I was a child, we lived in a new suburban area that had been an orchard, so no city services at first. Everyone had their own well (and septic tank by the way, which I didn't understand the gravity of until much much later). At one house, the owner had increased the capacity of his well and tank. He used what I assumed much later in life, must have been a conductive level probe system, something like a BW or Warrick Relay if you've ever seen one. That relay in essence energizes the tank through a transformer and uses the flow of current to ground to the tank walls through the probes when they are in water to operate the relay and turn on the pump.
Essential to that working correctly is an extremely good connection of the tank to ground. But this guy must have done something wrong, and there must have been what I realize now was too much resistance to ground in his connection, likely corrosion or something on the connection to the galvanized tank. I only know of the effect because as kids, we got a thrill out of getting a line of kids in the neighborhood together for a "tingle line" as we called it. One kid, usually the oldest, would stand with one hand on the steel tank, then hold hands with another, then another, all the way to the end of the line. The last kid would touch a pipe, and we would all get a tingle! The fewer the kids we got in line, the more it hurt, so the party had to be at least 5 of us, otherwise we couldn't take it... Jeez, I shudder to think of how badly that COULD have gone!
Essential to that working correctly is an extremely good connection of the tank to ground. But this guy must have done something wrong, and there must have been what I realize now was too much resistance to ground in his connection, likely corrosion or something on the connection to the galvanized tank. I only know of the effect because as kids, we got a thrill out of getting a line of kids in the neighborhood together for a "tingle line" as we called it. One kid, usually the oldest, would stand with one hand on the steel tank, then hold hands with another, then another, all the way to the end of the line. The last kid would touch a pipe, and we would all get a tingle! The fewer the kids we got in line, the more it hurt, so the party had to be at least 5 of us, otherwise we couldn't take it... Jeez, I shudder to think of how badly that COULD have gone!
