Discuss Whats the strangest way you have received a electric shock , and the worst ? in the Electrical Forum area at ElectriciansForums.net

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JD6400

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No matter how careful you are and even if you follow all the protocols , if you have been in this game long enough you will have taken at least one lick or some , substantially more than one ?
So in the interests of highlighting some possible hidden dangers that you just would not think of , lets have them !
I of course have never had one , because i am so good !!!!!!!!:Angel_anim:
But hypothetically if i had , one of the many i am afraid:frown2: would be when tracing a fault on a neighbouring farm in his dairy i put my hands on top of a wall to pull myself up and found about 3 foot of 10mm T+E feeding a water heater that had been totally stripped bare on top by rats , so that would count as one i think ?
Always check first , before touching anything when rats are about !
 
Well I can tell you about a near miss as i work on intruder alarms and have done so in the past I was asked to strip out a panel so checked it out and as the cupboard with the consumer unit in it was packed full of stuff I reached in and threw the main switch thinking as it was a bungalow the supply cable of 1.omm T&E was spurred off the lighting circuit so I thought isolate it as the builder wanted to get moving and then jump up the attic to remove the cable but as I opened the panel I thought hold on if this was fitted by a alarm engineer better to test it even although the builder and his mate said E E you have the mains off and the panel is dead I said yep but best to check anyway sure enough the cable was live and the reason the panel was not was that the customer had removed the inline fuse. So further checks after the cupboard was stripped out to get access to the consumer unit was not another consumer unit fitted but the 1.0mm was connected into the live side of the consumer and as I have highlighted before it seemed to be the done thing years ago with alarm engineers who were not electrically trained.

Forgot to add that the cable was being protected by a 80 DNO fuse and last but not least this for me has not been an isolated incident and over the years I have had to move the cable to a 5 or 6 amp fuse so that I can sleep at night
 
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not seen that before, but once i had to do a call out on an alarm in a new build (2 years old) only to find that the mains feed to the alarm panel was done in 6 core alarm cable, 2 cores twisted together for each ( L,N,E)! this had been done on all 20 houses of the development.
 
Well, the most shocking things I've seen/been unfortunate with have all been back in my days as a theatrical sparks. The one which really sticks out was discovering an entire flock of pre-wired decorative brass BC's that had been hung in the roof of a massive marquee....wouldn't work after being turned on from the ground....up a ladder....grab first fixture in the chain to check bulb etc (on 16A commando's) ....ouch ouch ouch whilst waiting for the 3secs RCD to go...later investigation revealed the entire stock (from a rental company) had been wired Live / Earth reversed (remember this is a brass, class 1 BC) - so nothing seen at the RCD until my visit. Another one, much like Teletrix above, was the discovery in a well-known holiday camp (hi-de-ho, Sparkies!) of the mains power for the sound and lighting control booth in the club room being run down three cores of the sound multicore (about as thin a cable as I think can be made!!)

But by far the worst thing I've ever seen was whilst on a job in India....local generator company produced this 'thing on a trailer' that they claimed was a 125kVA genset. Left if on the street outside the venue and ran 3ph cables off it via a set of 16mm lugs....left as 5 completely bare bolts on the street side of the set. When I refused to use it in that condition, they assured me they'd send for the insulating cover. Ten minutes later a shop carrier bag appeared and was draped over it. No RCD's, don't think there was even a set-side overload breaker anywhere. Just a few microns of plastic bag. In fairness, I didn't hear any screams from the street, but I HAD turned the music up loud.
 
A total cock up on labelling of the control DB's for a gas burner. There were 3 separate DB's so I locked off the one that provided the supply and control to an ignition transformer. Unbeknown to me someone had taken the covers off all the DB's and mixed them when putting them back. I'd isolated the wrong board!
Anyway I’d been quite happily working on the ignition probe for about ½ an hour when someone pressed the burner start button!
I don’t know what hurt most the shock or hitting my head on the wall when I shot across the room! There can’t be many that have walked (limped) away from a 10,000V shock.
The guy that had pressed the button was the one the found me wandering around in a total daze. Trip to the works medical centre, lots of hot sweet tea, managers buzzing round everywhere, I refused to go to hospital as I was feeling OK by then.
I didn’t even get a burn from it as I was holding the cable at the time. The only lasting after effect is restricted movement in my neck from head butting the wall.
And before someone says it, the wall didn’t require rebuilding!
 
Does a shock from a cars HT lead count? That bloody hurt

As for 230/400v ive always been careful enough to check something before working on it, im still yet to blow a hole in some snips too
 
I bought an insulation resistance tester a while ago and just out of curiosity I tested an SWA cable supplying a garden shed at 250V / 500V and then 1000V.

When I had finished I went back to the house to re-terminate the cable at the DB and got a nasty shock off the end of the cable.

I've been told it was capacitance, the cable has stored a load of charge from the IR test.
 
Not me but the contracts manager I was with….lol

Got called out to a huge welding machine. One of the contactors inside the control panel had burned out. We took out the contactor with a view to replacing it, only there was a problem. The thing was ancient and part of a circuit board with loads of electronics on it.
So you have to picture this. The contracts manager is in the general office on the phone to Siemens describing this thing when all of a sudden he shots across the length of the office still sitting in the swivel chair holding what’s left of the phone. There was not a single sound out of him! One of the capacitors on the board still had a bit of a charge in it. :biggrin:
After he leaved we all had a go on the swivel chair to see how far we could go and his record has never been broken. :biggrin:
 
two come to mind a door bell with 240 volts switch wire to turn on the transformer which then rang the bell and one where an earth rod had grazed the live incommer
was the route cause for getting a shock from the 1980s earth fault detector case screws.
 
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Thats strange as i thought most IR testers "drained" the cable after test.

A regular failing is to disconnect the insulated crocodile clips before the tester has discharged.

It’s even funnier with a 5000V Megger and a fully charged 2Km cable! It can take the Megger several minutes to discharge the cable! It’s like "Waiting for Godot" for the cable to charge so you can get a stable reading.
 
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I bought an insulation resistance tester a while ago and just out of curiosity I tested an SWA cable supplying a garden shed at 250V / 500V and then 1000V.

When I had finished I went back to the house to re-terminate the cable at the DB and got a nasty shock off the end of the cable.

I've been told it was capacitance, the cable has stored a load of charge from the IR test.

MICC or Pyro is bad for this
 
was working on a 3p 440v Bilge Pump while on submarine. any way section spark had removed fuses and carried out dead tests.

during the day we had reconnected the Port Bilge Pump and Bowl along with the Starter Panel and associated cables..

we informed the muppet about this and he said he would energise the power to that pump to carry out running checks etc.

as i was working on the Stbd pump bowl surrounded by wet metal work and actually stood in the bilge i moved to the left (tight squeeze) i made contact with the incomers for the starter and actually direct shorted them with each other and my shoulder!! Bang Flash and a Loud Groan from me....! i managed to take 440 and blow the 30A HRC fuse in both phases!!

i was not a happy bunny and when i got out of the rabbit hole i was working in i sat down for ten minutes in total silence with the chief of the watch asking me what the hell happened repeatedly!

the muppet only energised the wrong fecking pump...!!!
 
From Derry0178,
One of my mates was skimming an internal wall for a customer in his kitchen. My mate said that he kept receiving shocks when applying the skim to the wall. Very weird he thought, then he told the customer about it she also said that she has received shocks also when touching the wall. My friend decided to report this incident to the relevant people. What had happened was that there was bare live wires in the wall, with no basic protection at all. Just think how many dodgy so called trades people are out there doing just this in customers homes, putting people's lives at risk!
 
Fromm derry0178,
Also Did you here the time when chris Tarrant From who wants to be a millionare went fly fishing. He went for a wee near the river where he was fishing and wee'd up against an electric fence, blacking both balls, Classic!
 
My only one was a little tickle in a kitchen about four months ago, 3 double sockets to replace, isolated the kitchen ring, tested and disconnected the first socket, dead, same with the second. As i disconnected the third I brushed my the back of my hand against the live and got a small tingle (Wooden floor helped). Tested it, 240v. After a bit of digging around i discovered that it was spurred from an upstairs socket!! Just goes to show that you can never assume that a row of sockets on the same room, on the same wall are all in the same ring. Obviously I check every one now!!!
 

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