50V @ 50 ohms resistance = 1Amp
25V @ 20 ohms resistance = 1.25 Amps

just an example...

Try standing on an aluminum ladder, leaning against metal girders, with one hand hanging onto the ladder as your other hand reaches to cut a 277V wire feeding a light ballast with a poorly insulated wire stripper.

You won't give a shit what the voltage is, or the current or the resistance. You also won't give a shit about some guy named Ohm.

And you can't get a girl pregnant if she is on top.

Awesome! Spring break here I come, bareback!

I'd say destroying components and releasing the "magic smoke" is a much, much higher concern/likelihood than "electrocuting" yourself, and by this I mean killing yourself via electricity, not just nasty shocks.

Also, real men strip wires with their teeth.

LOL I used to know a heating contractor who would strip thermostat wire with his teeth until he took a chunk out of one of his front teeth.

I'm still waiting to hear about the guy that got killed by a pinball machine shock, not a ladder or a toaster or an ohm, ma, electric fence, line of car batteries, video monitor etc. So...yep.

I know someone who super glued someones finger to a gas hob ovens starter.

Seriously though it's not voltage I had 30,000 volts put through me as a kid on one of these...

We had a vandergraph generator in General Science class at school and we were meant to step up on the polysterene before touching it. Someone decided to touch me when I was on it

image4s.jpg

I read these posts and realize there will be some pins coming on the market from deaths.

"Hey you with the pin I want, don't you know how good Amps taste?"

(stick to LEDs and powder coat, leave repair work to the grown ups)

"HIGHER VOLTAGE WILL ALWAYS HAVE A HIGHER CURRENT"

No offense but somebody has been watching too many Expert Village videos on YouTube.

Add to the list of questions when checking out a machine.
1. HUO or routed ?
2. Shopped or not ?
3. Any mods ?
4. Reimport ?
5. New playfield, plastics, or side art ?
6. Anybody die working on this machine ?
7. Is this machine haunted ?

LTG : )

Sweet, they never do tell you everything on Craiglist to they

Electrocution, and how to avoid it
Dont commit murder

So your saying if I put 10 "AA" batteries in series to get 15 volts it is more dangerous then at 12 Volt car battery?

I feel a bar room dare coming on

HDO (Home Death Only!)

Is that real blood you have on your Dracula?

Don't wiz on the electric fence.

\m/

Everyday static electricity is about 20,000 volts. The current is tiny. No one gets killed.

Bottom line: as any engineer will tell you, voltage and current are separate things. It so happens that current is what bodies can not handle.

Powder coat? That's 25,000 volts right there!

Idiots!

We laugh about this all the time. There isn't a week that goes by that I don't get shocked! After a while you kind of become immune to it. The worst part isn't the jolt, it's when you jerk your hand back and tear it open on something sharp. Never fails!

Someone go ahead and design for me two circuits. One that constantly delivers 12 volts through to the palms of my hands and is dangerous. Now design me one that constantly delivers 1000 volts through the palms of my hands that's safe to touch. You can't do it.

No, that's not how current works. The reason you aren't killed is because there's only 10 millijoules total delivered. While it's delivering 20,000 volts it's also delivering "lethal" current since that's how ohms law works, but it's so short in duration (on the order of 50 microseconds IIRC) that it does no damage.

Are you kidding? We're not talking about resistors in a nice circuit here. We're talking about touching a high voltage line with your hands. If you touch a 50 volt line and a 500 volts line the 500 volt line will deliver more current to your body no matter how badly you wish it wouldn't. You don't just change your bodies resistance all willy nilly like that, so in regards to what I said about higher voltage = higher current I'm regarding the case of humans interacting around high voltage lines. I know that resistance matters, but contextually we're talking about humans touching high voltage lines here so resistance is more or less constant.

Not quite. You were brought to 30kV by the van de graaff but it didn't really go through you like that. You were somewhat acting as a capacitor holding electrons on your body, but you only had some 10 or 15 millijoules of charge. If you had 30,000 volts constantly going though you you'd be dead. This is a very poor "proof" that voltage is not dangerous.

That, or you know, a senior in an electrical engineering program.

This amount of misinformation in this thread is scary, and I'm out. Too many people quoting their high school science teachers as if they were the be-all-end-all in working around high voltage lines. Please nobody get too cocky around high voltage lines because "It's the current that kills you". High voltage creates that current...

You have changed your premise by adding the words "delivers through hands". As has been shown, lots of things that measure high voltage by delivering it through a meter cannot deliver that voltage through a person. While lots of things that measure much smaller voltages, like 120, can deliver almost all of it all through a person.

Really? Last I checked a voltage differential was indiscriminate to what load is put across it. 1000 volts is the same be it to a meter, a hand, an IC, whatever. Give me an example please.

And I didn't change my premise. This entire thread has been about electrocution. Hands, feet, body, wherever.

How to avoid it? "Honey, can you come give me a hand for a sec?" Has worked well for me. Not quite as Gung Ho as she used to be though.

Overall I'm going to have to side with CodyF on this one. Others have some valid points but, Cody's assesment that people should not just believe "it's not the voltage, it's the current that's dangerous" is the point here. The top picture below is my left hand where 3 phase 480V entered through 2 fingers via 2 277V wires. The lower picture is where the voltage BLEW out my right hand and arced (about a half inch through air) to get to ground. This would not have been possible at lower voltages. Also the statement earlier in the thread that 120 is "more dangerous" could be true from the viewpoint that it kills more people annualy than any other voltage level.

wzeGbh.jpg yPg5Nh.jpg

one thing for sure.... if your "test methodolgy" is similar to what this guy uses, you should likely stay away from electricity...

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=RtlYi1yLTVQ&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DRtlYi1yLTVQ

What happened to "i'm out"?

Seriously? You are claiming to be in an electrical engineering program and you are asking these questions?

Your teachers I am sure have told you this but when you learn all your formulas and do your math they go with ideal power sources. Ideal power sources never drop voltage, they also do not exist. Real world power sources do drop voltage and depending on their make up and what you do with them they can drop almost all their voltage. Back to the guy with the 16kV neon light, do you seriously believe that touching that light will yield the same result as going down to your local substation and touching 16kV? Have some common sense.

Numerous examples have already been given in this thread of things carrying thousands of volts of differential that can be measured with a meter but can be placed hand to hand and will not kill you. A meter is not a person. In order to use Ohms law you need all the information and just saying that source X has a certain number of volts because my meter says so and human skin has Y number of ohms because my meter says so doesn't cut it.

Ouch, that is a very bad day at work. My claim is not that "it's not the voltage". You have to have the voltage to be able to push the amperage. My claim is that it's not *just* the voltage. There are other factors. You can measure huge voltage numbers that are not deadly and you can measure much smaller voltage numbers that are deadly.

Pin-it, that's hilarious!

Would someone correct me on this if I am wrong, but I thought for normal household type electrical voltages the big issue is how good of a ground you are attached to at the time of shock.

If I am ankle deep in water in my basement working on a live wire I am much more likely to be seriously harmed compared to when I am in my attic in an all wood house in rubber soled shoes with no ground with several feet of me.

I have been zapped many times in situations like the later, never the former. I am not sure how well I would hold up if I was connected to a really good ground and got even lowly 110 volts power into me.

I think the human body is a very poor ground even when the body is not connected to any ground which is how we are normally shocked even when we are nowhere near a ground.

The really bad injuries/videos that we see are when the body becomes the conductor between the power source and a good ground. Not when the body is the only ground. Which I think is how most of us are shocked when working on pins. Something like in a dry space, rubber soled shoes, not touching a ground. I would not want to be holding one of my homes copper cold water pipes when I touched something "hot" inside of a pin.

Electricity always wants to return to the source or to earth ground so yes a well grounded body will be a better path to ground. I work around 12/24/48 volt battery arrays as well as telephone work and I've gotten some good while not terribly painful shocks when kneeling on wet ground working on batteries and telephone connections even while wearing gloves that have gotten damp from the rain. I work with live 120vac daily and very rarely get bitten due to wearing good shoes, gloves and making sure the rest of my body is clear of contact with ground and load sources. One of the worse shocks I've gotten was while grounding a 1.25 mile high tension unconnected power line we were building on a dry and windy summer day, the static buildup on the line from the wind was large enough to throw a 3 inch arc while grounding and got me through my gloves when I knelt down to connect to an earth ground.

Best quote of thread. And yeah rule one do not grab anything with 2 hands path to ground is your dead if amperes high enough. =/

Apparently water and electricity can coexist.

More Crazy people.
Helicopter Transfering Lineman to Wire

+1