mechtheist
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Hello, this is my first post. I'd first like to thank Mike Holt for making his videos available on the internet. I found them just a few days ago and have binged for awhile. I'm not a professional, but a somewhat knowledgeable DIYer. These videos are really eye-opening, I see I've had some misunderstandings, and it's surprising how widespread so much misinformation is out there from even ostensibly credible sources, at least that means I'm not too much the moron. So again, Thank You Mike Holt, you are providing a real service to a lot of us non-pros who really don't want to kill ourselves and especially hurt or kill anyone or anything else either.
My main purpose for taking up your time, and thanks to anyone reading this, is to relate something that happened to me when I was a kid and that I've puzzled over, like why am I not dead? This is back probably late 1960s, I'm maybe 10 years old, we had a chain-link fence being removed, so there was a number of long aluminum poles laying on the ground, the top supports for the fence, and there were still two heavy duty poles stuck in the ground where a gate had been. So, I do what some dumb kid would do, I grabbed one of the long poles and tried to stick it down one of the gate poles, cuz it was there, you know! I'm kinda wobbling around with that long pole sticking way up in the air, trying to line it up well enough to slide into the gate pole and before I can manage to do that, I hear something right above me, loud and electric-y, just as I look up, I see this wire very gracefully falling down off to each side of me. Hmmmm? I proceed to find a hole burned into the other end of the pole I was holding, and another spot a foot or so down the pole almost burned through. There was one of the power lines that looked halfway burned across still on the poles, and of course there was the, now two, live wires with one end on the ground [well, one would have been live]. To my best recollection these were basic 3 wire lines with a transformer right around our house, but it was the main line running down the poles in our neighborhood, down the alleyway between houses.
Is there something obvious about why I felt nothing? Shouldn't that have been something like a 7-8 KV line there? This was a small town in Texas in the 1960s, I was way too young to know anything about that stuff back then. At least something above 120/240. I had tennis shoes on, standing in grass. Could it be that I had managed to have the pole I was holding touching the gate pole at the instant I hit the wires? I never got the pole into the gate pole, the timing would have been extremely fortunate if that is what happened, but as is reminded often in the videos, those pesky electrons don't take the path of least resistance, and I would have been paralleled with the gate pole, voltage divided at most maybe 10 to 1 due to length of pole vs gate pole. I don't know where to go with that, shouldn't I have felt something at least if not actually just felt ... dead? Was it the shoes?
Anyway, thanks for anyone taking the time to respond, I hope it might be of interest to some of you.
My main purpose for taking up your time, and thanks to anyone reading this, is to relate something that happened to me when I was a kid and that I've puzzled over, like why am I not dead? This is back probably late 1960s, I'm maybe 10 years old, we had a chain-link fence being removed, so there was a number of long aluminum poles laying on the ground, the top supports for the fence, and there were still two heavy duty poles stuck in the ground where a gate had been. So, I do what some dumb kid would do, I grabbed one of the long poles and tried to stick it down one of the gate poles, cuz it was there, you know! I'm kinda wobbling around with that long pole sticking way up in the air, trying to line it up well enough to slide into the gate pole and before I can manage to do that, I hear something right above me, loud and electric-y, just as I look up, I see this wire very gracefully falling down off to each side of me. Hmmmm? I proceed to find a hole burned into the other end of the pole I was holding, and another spot a foot or so down the pole almost burned through. There was one of the power lines that looked halfway burned across still on the poles, and of course there was the, now two, live wires with one end on the ground [well, one would have been live]. To my best recollection these were basic 3 wire lines with a transformer right around our house, but it was the main line running down the poles in our neighborhood, down the alleyway between houses.
Is there something obvious about why I felt nothing? Shouldn't that have been something like a 7-8 KV line there? This was a small town in Texas in the 1960s, I was way too young to know anything about that stuff back then. At least something above 120/240. I had tennis shoes on, standing in grass. Could it be that I had managed to have the pole I was holding touching the gate pole at the instant I hit the wires? I never got the pole into the gate pole, the timing would have been extremely fortunate if that is what happened, but as is reminded often in the videos, those pesky electrons don't take the path of least resistance, and I would have been paralleled with the gate pole, voltage divided at most maybe 10 to 1 due to length of pole vs gate pole. I don't know where to go with that, shouldn't I have felt something at least if not actually just felt ... dead? Was it the shoes?
Anyway, thanks for anyone taking the time to respond, I hope it might be of interest to some of you.
