has anyone ever gotten electrocuted by peeing on an electric fence or even by peeing on the third rail of a subway?
I’ve heard this warning a million times when I was a kid but I’ve never been given the opportunity to even attempt it.
It makes perfect sense since the electrolytes in urine would make for a good conductor.
But has this ever been documented?
“Mythbusters” did an episode on this topic.
The Master addressed the 3rd rail in 1977
My golf partner once peed on an electric fence, and he most certainly was shocked.
An electric fence won’t kill you, it is designed to shoo away cows and horses. You can walk up and touch it. You probably won’t do that more then once, though… It gives a quick pulse that allows the muscles to relax so you don’t get ‘stuck’.
Dennis
AIUI, the stream of urine breaks up mid-flow in mid-air, so that the electrical current cannot conduct from the wire/rail back up to your body.
Not if you’re standing a foot from the fence.
When I was a child we had three wheeler ATCs. One day while riding I stopped to relieve myself and while doing so I noticed a sheriff driving past me higher up the hill. As I was wearing a helmet with restricted visibility I turned my entire body to see if he was going to come and talk to me and my arc unfortunately intercepted the sparkplug. The resulting experience was less than a pleasant, but was at a distance significantly greater than a foot and apparently was extremely amusing to the officer, if not for myself at that time.
While I cannot directly correlate this experience with that of an electric fence, my direct experience contradicts some of the more common experimental claims.
As I am completely unwilling to participate in any effort to replicate this experiment feel free to disregard it as anecdote but I will personally treat it as well established fact.
My dad used to tell the story of the co worker who hooked a live wire to the metal toilet seat. This would have been a very long time ago. Nobody died but they weren’t too happy!
This is a story from a long time ago, but I believe I have the broad strokes right. A student at the high school I attended, while on a field trip (an extended one) went into a construction site at night to take a private whiz. He wound up pissing on some kind of live electric cable and died.
Evidence against: I have no name, date, actual circumstances. Occurred before I was at the school.
Evidence for: My school was TINY–20 students per grade. No chance this was a “one time some kid…” story. Related to me by people (teachers and students) who knew the boy.
Reason this is off topic: Not an electric fence, if true probably a downed power line of some kind.
Like hell it can’t!
I can speak from personal experience on that. More than 50 years ago, and I still remember it.
It won’t electrocute (kill) you. It’s just a pretty significant shock. (It’s designed for animals, much larger than a human, and with tougher, hair-covered skin.) And it’s pulsed, so it stops and you can pull away.
I suppose there could be a freak case where some elderly person with a weak heart or a pacemaker gets shock that stops his heart & kills them. But it’s usually teens or 20’s macho boys who do this, not elderly men. And the current would travel from the crotch down your legs to the ground, not going through the heart anyway. Very unlikely to be fatal; it’s designed that way – after all, the farmer doesn’t want to kill his animals, just keep them off the fence.
Rat Avatar, my brother had a similar experience. Not with an ATC’s spark plug but with a “weed burning” electric fence. He swore at the Myth-busters for their conclusion that you can not get shocked pissing on an electric fence. I was there, & while I did not get shocked, I can assure you that pissing on an electric fence is a very bad idea. No one could fake the pain that he experienced.
Like you, neither my brother, nor I, will participate in these kind of experiments. We do not have to, we know the facts.
Your understanding is incomplete. All it takes is a brief portion of a second where the stream is intact, and it will conduct electricity.
Of course, the greater the distance from electrical source to the body, the fewer moments of intact stream. But for most feats of human urination, the distance is plenty short enough to almost guarantee a jolt.
While I admit that I haven’t studied the hydrodynamics of peeing closely, this strobe demonstration illustrates how rapidly the liquid stream breaks up:
I also know about this from work with flowing dye lasers -- you have to use the shaped stream awfully close to the outlet if you want to get the shaped flow, and not droplets.I suppose it’s possible to have a connected stream long enough to give an unbroken conduit all the way to an electrified surface (the examples quoted in various sources cited here suggest it), but it seems unlikely.
In any event, if you’re determined to pee on the third rail, prudence would suggest moving your instrument rapidly from side to side to break up the flow.
electrocute - injure or kill someone by electric shock
electric shock - a sudden discharge of electricity through a part of the body
I doubt anybody has ever been seriously injured or killed by peeing on an electric fence, shocked, yes.
Even with a broken stream, sufficient voltage will cause dielectric breakdown of air. Ever gotten a static shock? That discharge is not from contact, but from near-contact. ~3 kV/mm.
But I doubt anyone would be electrocuted.
This.
My childhood buddy Benny did the ‘Whiz on the Electric Fence’ thing, and yeah, he got bit a good one. I’ve been hit a couple times ducking under an electric fence, and while yeah, it was harmless, you DO NOT want to get hit again.
While I would seriously not recommend reliving oneself against an electric fence, it is an entirely survivable (if highly memorable) event.
NB: Electric fences (in the USA) generally come in two voltages 12VDC, and 24VDC. 12 volts hurts. 24 volts burns.
That would make the breakdown I mentioned much less likely.
So was the woman on the other side of it.
Those are the voltages feeding the charger. The output would be in the kV range.