[quote=“Keeve, post:18, topic:548545”]
There was a Handy Manny episode about exactly that. They ended up using a bunch of mirrors to reflect light from the kitchen on to the work area.
Uh, no. A ‘good flashlight’ is a standard piece of equipment in an electrician’s kit. The Mr. only does commercial and industrial jobs at work, but when he’s putzing around the house he still turns off the breakers.
Honestly, it’s pretty lazy not to, as well as being rather dumb.
Do it all the time. This is the SDMB, and still I like to see that not everyone is a “know it all”.-DO NOT PLAY WITH ELECTRICITY- And yes I have been zapped by 110 and 220. I used to work with 440 at the water plant but thank og we had to work in pairs to keep it (me) safe.
Pretty much the only time I find myself replacing a wall outlet is in a 40+ year old house and I’m coming behind 3 or 4 other DIY geniuses. Many times I’ve come across what appears to be a simple 4-plug outlet the is actually a confluence of two separate circuits, sometimes sharing a common ground or negative. Other times I’v seen the white wire hot and the black negative. Out of habit I simply distrust anyone else’s work and check every wire in a box and proceed accordingly, and it’s just easier to leave the power on and be careful than to run out to the box, flip breakers until your lamp or radio in the subject outlet turns off, and then tear into the project only to discover there’s another HOT circuit in the there waiting like a viper.
Balls. Leave it hot, know it’s all hot, use one hand whenever possible and pay attention to what you’re doing.
when electricians have to work on live circuits in industrial and commercial settings they work in pairs for safety as mentioned. a good safety procedure is that they frequently look to each other (in a safe manner with themself not near any wires) to see the other guy is still breathing and yell a reminder that the circuit is still live to each other in order to help prevent that half a second lapse in thought that could kill you.
Its doable sure.
As for working on a live line to keep you safe because you’ll be more carefull…well, I think thats macho BS IMO.
I turn off the power and STILL assume its live when working on it. Thats the safest way to do it.
IANAE but I have never run across a shared neutral. Does that conform to code?
This is why you should never flip breaker switches till the unit you are gonna work on is “off”. If you are not sure of what you are doing, please shut off the entire home at the main.
Every two outlet circuit in my kitchen (there are three of them) is wired to two separate circuits (the same two). The electrician who did this said the code required it. The reason he gave was that in a kitchen you might be tempted to plug in a toaster in the top and a coffee maker in the bottom and that would exceed the 15 amps of one circuit. Of course, there is no reason I couldn’t plug the toaster into the top of one of the outlets and the coffee maker into the top of a different one, with the same effect. Nonetheless the point above is well taken. Unless you have tested every outlet, don’t assume that if one is off, so is the other.
I suppose I could replace a live outlet, but I’ll be damned if I would try.
Back when I worked for an electrician, the rule was to always have three layers of safety, such that if any two of them failed, you’d still be OK. Turning off the power at the breaker is one of the easier things you can do in this regard. Yes, it can turn out, for various reasons, that that doesn’t work: That’s why you have the other two layers of safety.
I personally shut off the breaker and then treat the wires as if they were hot anyway.
At work I occasionally deal with hot circuits. It’s not that bad if you just keep safe and think about what you are doing. 110 and 220 don’t bother me, but when I’m near 440 and above I really start consciously thinking more about safety.
I agree with that. If you can feel the shock, it’s already got more than enough current flowing to potentially stop your heart. It’s not that hard to avoid getting shocked. Anyone who just thinks getting shocked is no big deal and doesn’t take the proper precautions is just stupid.
I personally have only been shocked twice in my life. Once when I was about six years old I plugged in a record player with my fingers on each prong of the plug. The second time was at work. I was working on a prototype of an industrial controller and the machine was off but was still plugged in. I reached inside to fiddle with something and happened to contact some power filtering circuitry that I thought was switched off when the power switch was off. It wasn’t.
For the benefit of anyone coming into this thread, you never, ever, want to use your water pipe as a ground. It used to be that you were required to ground the house through the cold water pipe. That was changed many years ago and now a separate ground is required. A lot of folks back then used to use water pipes as their ground, but what you really want to do is keep your protective grounds from your circuits completely separate from your water pipes. However, you also want to ground all of your metal water pipes for safety.
You want your water pipes grounded, but you don’t want to use the water pipes as grounds for anything else.
If there is substantial length to the wire and the outlet has spade connectors then it’s doable to replace it safely. I always screw the wires in the side terminals so that would greatly increase the danger.
The one time I did an installation with live wires involved a color coding issue so I needed the power on to establish what was actually live. Since all the wires were away from a grounded box I was able to spread them out and cover each wire while working on the others. I would certainly never recommend doing it and in retrospect should have turned the power off when I was able to identify the wires but it was hot in the attic and I got lazy.
I was an electronics engineer in the Air Force, so I know how it feels to get bit by 110 (5000v, 15,000v). It’s the amperage. 1/4 of a volt will kill you if it’s > .01 amp.
“Bites” were taken very seriously, and weren’t as trivial as you put it above. Anyone who gets bitten proceeds immediately to the infirmary where they were hooked up to heart monitors for an hour.
Any one with a congenital heart defect can find themselves very dead where others would simply go “ouch” and move along (granted a little wobbly).
That being said, why take a chance. Turn off the freakin’ breaker.
The industiral electrician who used to do the work at a plant I worked for had a little device about the size of a pen that could tell if current was flowing through a wire.
I said, “That’s neat! What do you call it”
He said, we call them liars.
It’s a lot like jumping a car battery: start with wire A and terminal 1, then wire A and terminal 2, then wire B, etc. People jump start cars all the time with no problem. Of course, people also create sparks while jumping cars, brush one of the cables across a grounded section of the frame, accidentally connect the red thingy to the black thingy, etc. As the manual says “unpredictable results may occur.”
Every outlet box I’ve ever had the unpleasure to work on has had a bunch of stiff wires stuffed into a small space. Sometimes the screw terminals on the old outlet don’t want to be unscrewed. Sometimes the wires slip off the terminals while you’re trying to screw them down. Sometimes you touch two things together that should be kept apart.
Unpredictable results may occur. Sure, maybe you can do it, but why the hell would you want to do it? Just go downstairs and throw the breaker.
there can be confusion with terms and regulations and this also depends on where and when.
in the USA, at one time, if a person was on city water (with a metal water main) the water pipe going out of the house was the house grounding electrode and the electrical grounded conductor from the fuse/breaker box was connected to this. if the water pipe going out of your house wasn’t metal (for 8 feet or more) then you used a grounding rod as your grounding electrode. if you have the water pipe as your house grounding electrode it is still OK as long as it is maintained and remains 8 feet of metal outside the house.
all the metallic water pipes in your house should be grounded for safety. the metal water piping should not be used as a grounding path for your house electrical system (except as the grounding electrode as mentioned above).
Dude, ground yer pipe to yer lips and fire away!
All of the above. I’m old and made all the mistakes, just ain’t figured out I’m already dead.
If us humans always did it the right way, there would never be an accident. How’s that been working?
I enjoying wiring up my shop I built. I did it all and it is better than code but I had never thought of 2 separate circuits to the same outlet, either 2 or 4 plex. This I will think about.
I hate working on my old house wiring that is goofy as can be. I don’t even trust pulling the mains it is so bad. they mush have thought the copper was gold and saved every penny, wires guitar string tight, no excess in outlets, shared neutrals and I still have switches that only work when some other switch is in only one position. some switches are hot but control nothing I can find… Need to win the lottery so I can have the place stripped and totally rewired.
I gave up and added the circuits from the mains box, put the wired under the house and back up through the floor so I could have good juice in our computer room.
It is a rock house and I’m not sure it can be rewired to all the things in it now without some major remodeling… ::; sigh :::
My husband got a 277 volt shock at work a couple of weeks ago and he was REALLY lucky as his arm happened to be touching a copper pipe next to the box so the current went in his finger tips and out his forearm, not crossing anything particularly critical to living.
He was VERY shaky for the rest of the evening, and has assured me that you certainly wouldn’t ‘get used to it’.
(In case anyone was wondering, he was shocked because his coworker screwed up and turned on the breaker that was turned off without checking that anyone was working. This wasn’t a residential job - it was commercial and I’m not sure of the actual details of the device hubby was working on).
if his place of work hasn’t implemented a lockout procedure, or at least a tagout procedure, then they should.