Electricity kills you in basically two ways. First of all, it can interrupt your heart’s normal way of doing things. Once you get your heartbeat screwed up, it doesn’t tend to fix itself, and eventually you die from lack of blood flow. However, this isn’t how an electric chair kills you. An electric chair uses the second method, where basically it cooks you to death. The theory is that there’s enough damage done to your brain in the first jolt that you don’t feel the rest, otherwise it would be a fairly gruesome way to die (which is the stuff for a different forum, or at least a different thread).
Directly relevant to this thread, what you need to do is basically increase the cooking power of your chair. The first thing you would want to do is make sure that your chair has good connections everywhere. A bad connection won’t allow as much current to pass through it. A bad connection will result from things like corroded copper in one of the wires or connections, or a dried out or synthetic sponge where the connection to the body is made. A wire that is too thin would also count as a bad connection, since it will lose all of the power in heating up the wire and not enough current will get transferred to the victim. All of this is number 2 on your list, increasing the current, but we’re not changing the voltage yet.
The next thing to do would be to change the voltage (number 1 on your list). If we increase the voltage, all other things being equal, the current will also increase.
Note here that we’re kinda focusing on the current delivered into the load, so that’s why electricians have the saying “its the volts that jolts but the mills that kills” (meaning milliamps, or current). But really it’s the power transferred to the load that matters (power is voltage multiplied by current, for those of you that slept through your circuits classes ). By focusing on the current delivered to the load, you focus on the actual power being delivered, not the power lost through bad connections, thin wire, etc.
We’re kinda focusing on an electric chair here, but the principle is the same for other things as well. There are many things besides the source voltage that determine how much current actually flows. It’s not the source voltage that gets you. It’s how much actual current you get to flow, which translates into how much power is actually delivered to the load, that causes the real damage.
The proper combination of your resistance and an applied voltage and you’ve had it.
That’s why,sometimes, the results are horrific-----the body resistance is an unknown------------------the voltage applied is an over voltage–result is a smoky mess.
Something that is being overlooked here, is where the voltage is being applied, and where the ground point is. For example on one model car I used to work on when I would lean in to adjust the fuel injection, my elbow would be gounded, and my forearm would somtimes brush the low tension terminal of the ignition coil. (about 100-300V A/C) This would make me jump, but put me in no danger as the current path went from forearm to elbow.
If I am dinking with the park plug wires I might get a 35,000 Volt shock, but again since my arm was grounded, the only damage was from my elbow hitting something sharp at Mach 4 as I flinched.
The worst shock I ever got, should have killed me. I was very very lucky. I was changing a 110V socket behind my stove. I had the stove pulled out and was standing behind it, leaning back against it. (ground). Now usually when I do this work, I work hot (power on), but this time, my wife ragged on me, so I turned off the breaker. Since I knew the power was off (BAD assumption) I did not hesitate to grab the wire. Hot was dead, no problem. The neutral was shared with another circuit that was still hot. When I grabed the one neutral wire, the current went up along my arm, across my back and out through the stove. :eek: I danced the funky chicken for a few seconds, before I broke the connection. I think what saved me was the fact that it was a very hot day, and I was sweating buckets. I believe that the current traveled along my moist skin, and to ground. some current still traveled through me, since I could feel the shock, but I think my sweat acted as a voltage divider, and saved my ass.
yes I was a :wally for not knowing about shared neutrals.
** Flippyfly**: If the power source can be approximated as an ideal voltage source (which is likely), then increasing the voltage will make the chair more effective.
Goosemaster: Sorry, but your entire post is incorrect. EE student? Better hit the books! (I’m just jabbing ya. I was once an EE student…)
Ezstrete: Power is not “resistance times applied voltage.” It is V[sup]2[/sup]/R.
Rick: The neutral must have been broken, since you cannot get a jolt from a neutral that is tied to ground at the breaker box.
I don’t mean to toot my horn here, but everything you need to know can be found in my first post.
You apparently didn’t read the last two paragraphs of what you quoted.
Erm, current times voltage, not resistance times voltage. Or, current squared times resistance, or voltage squared divided by resistance. Take your pick.
2 neutral wires one back to the box, one that ran up to the light fixture. The light was on when I started and boy did I light up when I touched that wire. :eek:
Although we tend to look at current, and sometimes power, when the heart is affected it can be useful to look at the amount of energy delivered at a certain rate. This can allow for more accurate dispensing of energy.
When you watch almost any hospital show on tv, such as ER, one very common scenario is that of a patient having a cardiac arrest and perhaps needing defibrillation.
The device used to carry out this task is moreorless a large charge storage device, and a means of delivery which can be controlled.
You often hear mention of the amount of energy to be delivered, in Joules.
The number of Joules per second is Watts, however the energy on defib machines is delivered in periods much shorter than one second and the machine is fully discharged.
Averaged out over a period of time, the number of Watts may appear to be less.
In such a case the amount of current delivered is misleading, a large current delivered over a very short timespan can stop the heart, but delivered over a longer period will cook internal organs.
Similarly, a large amount of energy delivered over a very long period of time may well not even be noticeable.
[QUOTE=Crafter_Man] Tim314: 1st paragraph is correct.
Chronos: 100% correct.
** Flippyfly**: If the power source can be approximated as an ideal voltage source (which is likely), then increasing the voltage will make the chair more effective.
Goosemaster: Sorry, but your entire post is incorrect. EE student? Better hit the books! (I’m just jabbing ya. I was once an EE student…)
Ezstrete: Power is not “resistance times applied voltage.” It is V[sup]2[/sup]/R.
Rick: The neutral must have been broken, since you cannot get a jolt from a neutral that is tied to ground at the breaker box.
Nitpicking is another form of avoidance.
"Them what can’t "is fated to become editors-or horn blowers.
Amps-volts----without them in combinatiion that chair would just be another park bench.
That’s WATT I said.
More power to all!
EZ
I don’t mean to toot my horn here, but everything you need to know can be found in my first post.[/QUO
I once took a shock using worm prods - long electrodes with a wooden handle on top you plug in to a 110v AC source and stick into the ground because it irritates the worms and they come up to the top of the earth for harvesting. We used to sell worms.
I was a kid and these things are inherently dangerous. I was moving one around in the ground and my hand slipped off the handle on to the electrode. I attempted to pull it off with my other hand, but then my other hand became paralyzed from the current as well. There I sat, concious but paralyzed, for about 10 seconds, when my grandpa noticed me from the window inside the house. He ran outside and knocked me off the worm prod and unplugged them.
So I took the brunt of a 110 V/ 20 A circuit for about 15 seconds, all the way through my body (except my head), as the current went in through my arms and out through my feet into the ground. And I took no real damage, just a bit shaken up after it all. The current must have traveled lose to my skin and avoided my heart.
If we’re gonna hijack this thread with my shocking electric shock experience stories. Here’s mine.
I was 16 or so playing guitar in my room, electric guitar. Guitar in right hand (earthed strings good solid contact there). Go to pick up switched on amplifier with left hand. No back on amplifier - index finger contacts with live terminal in the power switch.
240 Volts across the chest.
I was thrown across the room by the shock but was unfortunately still connected to the National Grid. I couldn’t shout for help as my voice didn’t work, paralysed I supposed. I remember thinking “I-am-going-to-die” My legs did work and I managed to kick the amp away. I don’t really know how long I was wired up for, probably a few seconds.
I should have died. I was in shock (natch) for the rest of the day and had chest pains for weeks, it felt like my lungs had come loose. I still have a scar on my index finger where the switch terminals burned into it.
I stuck to the accoustic for a while after that.
Needless to say I am now always extremely flipping careful when dealing with mains voltages.
Beltbuckle: Were the electrodes connected to an isolation transformer? If not, they should have been. It is still possible to get zapped with isolation transformer, but it does offer more protection.
Beltbuckle: Were the electrodes connected to an isolation transformer? If not, they should have been. It is still possible to get zapped with isolation transformer, but it does offer more protection.
[/QUOTE]
No, of course not. These worm prods were built by my grandpa and just hardwired to the outlet, no switch or transformer. We wouldn’t want to make them safer, now would we?
Its pretty common for musos to unhook the mains earth from their amplifiers and other mains driven stuff as it usuallly kills hum loops. Some of this stuff is classed as double insulated and allegedly does not need and earth wire, however, the secondary insulation on electrical musical merchandise is often little more than a compressed cardboard cover over the mains transformer and of course it all helps keep costs down.
The risks are obvious but your amp should have blown the fuse when the insulation broke down. I wonder if your amp had been prviously owned or it it had been modified ?
Its also why power breakers(Residual current devices) are ‘A Very Good Thing’
modified in that the back cover had been removed. There was no insulation over the mains switch terminals where my hand went.
Yup. I later life I ran a PA company that started out doing rock band gigs. All our gear was on RCDs and we supplied RCD equipped muti-socket boards for the bands’ backline. I wasn’t gonna see anyone fried on my watch.
). By focusing on the current delivered to the load, you focus on the actual power being delivered, not the power lost through bad connections, thin wire, etc.