"It's not the volts, it's the amps that kill you."

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donaldelectrician

Senior Member
JFletcher said:
Which explains why getting hit in July in a 150* attic (sweating, salty) is considerably more sucky than getting a light tingle when you are dry.

Forget death tho for a moment; I wonder how many injuries are caused by jerking away from electric shocks than the shocks themselves. Last time I got nailed good was working 15' up on a ladder on a MWBC that I didnt recognize as such. Grabbed the neutral, it grabbed me. To this day I dont know how I didnt come off that ladder, since I was well grounded on building steel.

the thread title reminds me of another addage: "Assumption is the mother of all foul-ups"
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I was taught that the FALL hurts most electricians .


I always work so that one hand gets hit ...

Never thriugh my body .

Old Habits .



Don
 
C

Carultch

Senior Member
Location
Massachusetts
K8MHZ said:
If you grab a hot wire in each hand so your body acts like a conductor, what flows through the body, voltage or current?
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Voltage would be present ACROSS your body.
Current would flow THROUGH your body.

If you grab two hot wires from the same phase and system, while wearing properly rated insulating shoes and not touching anything else, no significant amount of current flows through your body. You would be a "bird on the wire", because there is only one absolute voltage in contact with your body. It doesn't mater if the one absolute voltage is the same voltage as ground, or 20000 Volts above ground. It is the voltage difference that matters.

Now. If you grab a hot wire from two different phases, or from a phase and something grounded, then there will be a voltage difference present across your body that would cause the current to flow through your body.
 
roger

roger

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Fl
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K8MHZ said:
The very first president of the IBEW was killed from a ladder fall after he got shocked. The shock wasn't fatal, the fall was.
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Actually it was the sudden stop, not the fall. :cool:

Roger
 
peter d

peter d

Senior Member
Location
New England
mivey said:
It's not the shock, it's the reaction that kills you. :p
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We should start making a list of things we've involuntarily thrown in the process. I was hooking up a line voltage thermostat and didn't test....of course it was live and I managed to get 240 volts across my hand. The thermostat I was installing hit the floor pretty hard but didn't break.
 
mivey

mivey

Senior Member
peter d said:
We should start making a list of things we've involuntarily thrown in the process. I was hooking up a line voltage thermostat and didn't test....of course it was live and I managed to get 240 volts across my hand. The thermostat I was installing hit the floor pretty hard but didn't break.
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How about my head into the floor joist?
 
J

JFletcher

Senior Member
Location
Williamsburg, VA
peter d said:
We should start making a list of things we've involuntarily thrown in the process. I was hooking up a line voltage thermostat and didn't test....of course it was live and I managed to get 240 volts across my hand. The thermostat I was installing hit the floor pretty hard but didn't break.
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Ouch. Managed to throw my pinned nametag off me once after getting hit hand-hand putting in a dimmer switch live. It was a perfect storm of stupid on my part. and it hurt like hell... like stupid should.
 
K8MHZ

K8MHZ

Senior Member
Location
Michigan. It's a beautiful peninsula, I've looked
Occupation
Electrician
peter d said:
We should start making a list of things we've involuntarily thrown in the process. I was hooking up a line voltage thermostat and didn't test....of course it was live and I managed to get 240 volts across my hand. The thermostat I was installing hit the floor pretty hard but didn't break.
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I was poking around in the inside of with an old 35mm pocket camera years back. It had developed some problem which I was attempting to rectify. Somehow I managed to grab the capacitor for the flash and got nailed with about 500 VDC. Holy Moley!!! The camera went flying across the room and hit the floor, shattering it to pieces.

I picked up the biggest piece with a WTF in mind, and guess what? I got hit AGAIN by that cap and the camera took another flight across the room.

I was amazed at the fact that 2 AA batteries could put that much juice in a flash capacitor. Twice. Maybe more that. I stopped trying to fix the camera after it's second crash landing.
 
peter d

peter d

Senior Member
Location
New England
K8MHZ said:
I was poking around in the inside of with an old 35mm pocket camera years back. It had developed some problem which I was attempting to rectify. Somehow I managed to grab the capacitor for the flash and got nailed with about 500 VDC. Holy Moley!!! The camera went flying across the room and hit the floor, shattering it to pieces.

I picked up the biggest piece with a WTF in mind, and guess what? I got hit AGAIN by that cap and the camera took another flight across the room.

I was amazed at the fact that 2 AA batteries could put that much juice in a flash capacitor. Twice. Maybe more that. I stopped trying to fix the camera after it's second crash landing.
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Reminds me of when I took apart a disposable camera to mess with it and of course I discharged the capacitor - into my hand. :eek::lol:

I agree - take all those electrons from a small battery, pile them into a massive foil sheet and then quickly release them. Ouch!!
 
mivey

mivey

Senior Member
peter d said:
I agree - take all those electrons from a small battery, pile them into a massive foil sheet and then quickly release them. Ouch!!
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The battery has the same number of electrons after charging the capacitor as it did before. The capacitor has the same number of electrons after charging as it did before. What was removed from the battery and put into the capacitor was energy.

add: the battery separated charges and stored energy in electric field created by the separated charges.
 
iwire

iwire

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Staff member
Location
Massachusetts
peter d said:
I agree - take all those electrons from a small battery, pile them into a massive foil sheet and then quickly release them. Ouch!!
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On Mythbusters it was claimed a Snickers bar contains more energy than a stick of TNT.

The difference is it will take many hours to convert the Snickers bar vs milliseconds for the TNT
 
mivey

mivey

Senior Member
iwire said:
On Mythbusters it was claimed a Snickers bar contains more energy than a stick of TNT.

The difference is it will take many hours to convert the Snickers bar vs milliseconds for the TNT
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A person has enough energy in their body to throw the Earth out of orbit.
 
G

GoldDigger

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Placerville, CA, USA
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Retired PV System Designer
iwire said:
Are you pulling my leg?:huh:
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That is, of course, in the form of nuclear energy, calculated simply on the basis of the mass off all of the atoms in your body, and not in any form of energy that could be extracted by any currently feasible process.

If you met your antimatter equivalent, for example.

Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Remote from Fusion's origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.
One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.
Then, shouting gladly o'er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.
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---Harold P. Furth, 1956

http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2001/05/perils-of-modern-living-harold-p-furth.html
 
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