Author Topic: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ?  (Read 9277 times)
MVMH_99
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #15 on: November 28, 2020, 04:15:31 PM » Author: MVMH_99
Oh boy... there are too many for me to count!  Let me just start in a rough order from earliest to latest:

-I've been curious about electricity since age two (no joke) and have been tinkering with electrical devices since that age!  People thought my parents were crazy for allowing this.  Anyways, I was once curious as to what would happen if I plugged in my Lite Brite (my all-time favorite toy as a kid), and stuck my tiny little finger into the empty bulb socket!  As I was insulated by the carpet, the shock was just a bit more than a tingle (but still with a jolt, of course).  I thought this was "neat" at the time, so I purposefully did this on several other occasions!

-I decided to operate an old fire alarm strobe board out of its case.  But, my hand slipped at one point and I came into contact with the energized board, giving me a great jolt!  It practically paralyzed my arm for a split second, like a taser!

-I was in the garage of a friend's house and noticed they had an old space heater lying around.  Being my usual curious self, I couldn't help but to see if it worked.  What I didn't know, however, is that it had a wiring fault that caused the case to become energized with straight 120V (it was an older box-shaped ceramic disc heater with a metal housing).  Anyways, I plugged it in, turned it on, and it initially seemed to work well - it blew nice, hot air.  But then, I touched part of the metal grate, and it gave me a NASTY surprise shock!  As was typical for me, I was barefoot on the cement garage floor at the time, and it made me jump almost a foot in the air!   :lol: :o  The heater did NOT have a grounded plug, and the garage outlets did not have GFCI protection, being an older home.

-I was taking apart a busted digital camera, and made contact with the fully-charged flash capacitor - OUCH!!   :curse: :poof:  That did NOT feel good!  It sent a huge, painful jolt all the way up my arm!

-Most recently, I was working on a strand of Christmas lights with broken bulbs.  Part of the strand was out, and I had the "ingenious" idea to mess with the busted bulb with the strand plugged in!  This gave me a nice little tingle!
« Last Edit: November 28, 2020, 04:19:25 PM by MVMH_99 » Logged

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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #16 on: November 28, 2020, 04:29:37 PM » Author: Rommie
I've had more 'belts' than I care to remember, but the one that springs to mind is when I was volunteering at a local hospital radio station and the station engineer and I were doing some rewiring of the cricket commentary box at the Edgbaston Cricket Ground, where the studios were located (the station was originally set up to broadcast commentaries).

I was about to pull through some new power wiring in already installed steel conduit, and asked the boss if the power was switched off. Yes, replies he, upon which I got an almighty 'belt' on touching one of the other exposed wires  :poof:

Needless to say, some rather unladylike words issued forth  :mrg:
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #17 on: November 28, 2020, 09:42:00 PM » Author: HPS_250
I've had more 'belts' than I care to remember, but the one that springs to mind is when I was volunteering at a local hospital radio station and the station engineer and I were doing some rewiring of the cricket commentary box at the Edgbaston Cricket Ground, where the studios were located (the station was originally set up to broadcast commentaries).

I was about to pull through some new power wiring in already installed steel conduit, and asked the boss if the power was switched off. Yes, replies he, upon which I got an almighty 'belt' on touching one of the other exposed wires  :poof:

Needless to say, some rather unladylike words issued forth  :mrg:

If I remember correctly, was it you who had this experience? I remember hearing about someone who was home alone and repairing some wiring inside a partition wall, and someone came home into the building and noticed that a breaker was off, so they turned it on. Then, (insert name here) who was doing this was shocked badly and went through the partition wall. If it was you are someone else, it must have hurt!
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #18 on: November 28, 2020, 10:26:01 PM » Author: High Intensity
I recently remembered an electric shock I had a few years ago that could have ended really badly.

It's a long story, so I'll just say I grabbed a live, cut up extension cord and got a big dosage of 120v across my body. I managed to drop the cord so it only lasted 1/2 a second but it still hurt like heck and I'm still surprised it did not injure me in any way.
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #19 on: November 29, 2020, 06:59:49 AM » Author: Rommie
If I remember correctly, was it you who had this experience? I remember hearing about someone who was home alone and repairing some wiring inside a partition wall, and someone came home into the building and noticed that a breaker was off, so they turned it on. Then, (insert name here) who was doing this was shocked badly and went through the partition wall. If it was you are someone else, it must have hurt!
That was Sammi, she'll probably reply later  :mrg:
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #20 on: November 29, 2020, 01:36:24 PM » Author: Mandolin Girl
If I remember correctly, was it you who had this experience? I remember hearing about someone who was home alone and repairing some wiring inside a partition wall, and someone came home into the building and noticed that a breaker was off, so they turned it on. Then, (insert name here) who was doing this was shocked badly and went through the partition wall. If it was you are someone else, it must have hurt!
Yes, that was me...  :poof: :short:  :curse:
And it did hurt quite a bit, I was very lucky that I was blown off the wiring and not sucked onto it.!! :poof:
Otherwise I would have been singing with the  :angel: or knowing my luck...  >:D
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #21 on: December 01, 2020, 08:50:03 PM » Author: icefoglights
Too many to count.  Here are some memorable ones.

While building our house, we used an old Coleman Powermate generator to run power tools and work lighting.  Very simple generator.  The kill switch was a metal tab that hung over the spark plug.  When pushed in, a prong poked through the rubber plug cap and shorted out the spark plug.  Eventually, the rubber cap fell off, and the metal tab broke off.  After that, we shut it down by shorting the spark plug with whatever was handy.  Usually the head of a hammer.  One day, I didn't have a hammer handy and wanted to shut it down to refuel.  I did have a small metal pry bar.  I leaned over and braced myself to the generator frame, touched the pry bar to the spark plug (before it touched the engine) and  :o :curse:

More recently, I was helping a friend remodel a garage.  Along one wall were some surface mounted outlets connected with conduit.  At the far end of the line, in the box with an outlet was a (circle F) light switch.  The conduit than went up to the ceiling to a chain of fluorescent strip lights, missing tubes at this point.  Shut off the power to the outlets and started disassembling them.  Got all of the outlet boxes except the last one with the switch removed.  Went up to the light and started disconnecting wires.  Here is the funny thing.  Sometimes, when you get poked, it can feel like an electric shock.  The point of a copper wire cut with dikes can leave that feeling.  One of the wires was poking me real good.  After about the 5th "jab" I realized that it wasn't jabbing me, it was shocking me :curse: :lol:   Turns out there was a ceiling box above the fluorescent strip that was feeding power to the lights on a separate circuit from the outlets.
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #22 on: January 26, 2021, 06:11:18 PM » Author: CEB1993
The worst and most recent time I got shocked was last December when I was helping my brother fix the vanity light in his bathroom. When I installed the new incandescent bulbs, one of them exploded after about 2 minutes of operation :o It was a pain to clean up all the glass and remove the remaining filament and socket from the fixture. I foolishly reached up to grab the stem of the bulb to try and loosen it and ZAP  :poof: It hurt and it made my whole arm jolt. I went turned off the breaker and was able to remove the broken bulb. 120 volts to your hand and arm certainly does not feel good and it was a shocking (pun intended) reminder to ALWAYS turn off the breaker before performing any electrical repairs and maintenance.
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #23 on: January 26, 2021, 06:22:59 PM » Author: Rommie
You're lucky it wasn't 240V..! Getting zapped with that whilst standing on a chair reaching up to pull wires through conduit is something you definitely don't want to do again :short:  :poof:
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #24 on: January 27, 2021, 09:00:25 AM » Author: Metal Halide Boy
Probably around 300V on a A/C compressor`s capasitor. My hand hurt for like an hour after. And countless 120V shocks.
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #25 on: January 27, 2021, 09:42:10 AM » Author: Medved
Shocked myself? Probably a capacitor.
A 10 mm diameter, 15cm long screwdriver I was holding in my hand: Short circuit of about 7000uF capacitor bank charged on about 900V (smoothing capacitor of the thyristor traction regulator on Tr15 trolleybus; traction voltage was 750V nominal, but the conversion stations use to be set to 900V, as high as possible to reduce resistance losses, yet not exceed the 1kV upper tolerance limit for the system; the feed rectifier stations had active regulation, so the mains variation did not translate to the output, so there was way less margin needed). A centimeter in diameter screwdriver literally disappeared into firework sparks. Knew the bleeder resistors were bad (that was the reason why the bank was taken out of the vehicle for servicing in the first place), but somehow was convinced there was just some 10 V. Dunno what made me believe that, the fireworks proved me wrong in so spectacular way...
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #26 on: January 27, 2021, 10:39:21 AM » Author: Mandolin Girl
Oh crap.!!  :poof:    Hopefully not literally though...  :mrg:
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #27 on: January 28, 2021, 12:12:49 AM » Author: wide-lite 1000
Holy Crap !! :o  Medved , YOU WIN !!
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #28 on: January 28, 2021, 05:00:31 AM » Author: Medved
But I'm not sure if it qualifies for the title: It was the screwdriver what got the charge, not me...
Except the screwdriver and small damage on the connection bolts (a thread cutter was able to fix that), no one was harmed in any way. I was expecting some sparks there, but not that big.
But definitely a lesson learned: Always treat anything able to store any energy in any form as "charged" and so able to release the energy if the conditions for that are there, unless you can prove otherwise, when handling such device.
And when disposing of the stored energy, make sure you do it so the rate is all the time under control.
Applies not only for capacitors, but for batteries, pressure vessels, vacuum vessels (implosion...), but also things like devices containing explosives, chemical propelants and so on.
But as I said, it was really a damn stupid move from me, dunno what I was thinking:
- The vehicle just arrived on its normal power, barely a minute ago, so obviously was connected to power.
- The work order was explicitely to fix the faulty bleeder resistors, because about 600V was measured there after overnight parking (so shut down, with collectors down), so clearly not discharging.
- I was well aware about the energy of fully charged capacitor and what it could do.
- But even then I was "100% sure" the capacitor is discharged, so no more than some polarization voltage may build up (if a capacitor is charged, then discharged for a short time and then left alone, some voltage may build up on it, with the electrolytics it is few percent).

To me it really is no different from the "famous" last words: "I'm sure this gun is unloaded"...
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Re: What's the worst you've ever been shocked ? « Reply #29 on: January 28, 2021, 08:18:29 AM » Author: Mandolin Girl
You might not have got an electrical shock yourself, but I bet you were mentally shocked at seeing it happen,! :o :poof: @-@
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