I was staying with friends after my apartment had burned down, and went down their basement to do laundry. Standing puddle of water, and 220 bare wire hanging down at head level…YIKES! Knocked me on my ass, and my whole body felt like it was shaking for the rest of the day. Why, oh why, was that there??? The family had small children,also!!!
Adding to the “when I was a little kid…” pile:
when I was a little kid on at least one occasion I pulled the plug for something, a lamp maybe, out of the outlet about halfway and touched one of the prongs. It was a mild shock but I don’t remember it being particularly traumatic. It was definitely not the smartest thing I ever did.
I always thought mains electricity was fatal to touch.
In shop class we had a student grab the aligator clamp on his arc welder while holding the metal frame that he’d clipped to. Both hands no gloves. He did drop the welder, but the look on his face as he pissed himself was pretty funny.
I don’t recall the numbers but somebody else can tell us, the volt and amps on a rod welder.
It’s probably only fatal if you keep on touching it. Most people will stop touching it very quickly.
As several people here testify, and as I know from my own experience, a good jolt of electricity will throw you across a room. Not with explosive force, but by causing every muscle in your body to spasm at once. That’s actually pretty handy since it means the connection is broken in a fraction of a second. If the connection, for some reason, isn’t broken right away… then you’re in real trouble.
Just an FYI, but if you’re in the U.S., and you got zapped on a “240 circuit” (dryer outlet, range outlet, air conditioner circuit, etc.), then in all likelihood you were ***not ***subjected to 240 VAC.
When a person gets zapped, it is almost always between a hot leg and earth ground. And on residential 240 VAC circuits in the U.S., each hot leg is 120 VAC relative to earth ground.
The only way to get zapped by 240 VAC is to do the following:
- Isolate yourself from ground.
- Touch one hot leg of the 240 VAC circuit. (Note that you will not feel a thing after you do this, since you’re isolated from ground.)
- Touch the *other *hot leg of the 240 VAC circuit.
Again, the above scenario is not common, since a person is often *not *isolated from ground, and hence will feel the 120 VAC shock when the touch just one of the legs.
It’s my understanding that it’s amps that kill you, and any electricians please correct me if I am wrong here: the amperage coming through the one outlet is divided among all of the outlets connected to the circuit which are drawing power.
The outlet I touched obviously was on a circuit with many other outlets, and I was probably shocking myself with pretty low amps. Had I pulled out the plug on the dryer and touched that, I’d have gotten all 30 amps would surely be dead.
Like I said, not the smartest thing I ever did; more accurately it was certainly one of the stupidest thing I ever did.
As a former (and very careful) electrician, I got zapped a few times with 120v, and always because I didn’t double check to make sure the circuit was dead. I don’t have much resistance to it, so it’s always painful. I had an electrical foreman who mocked me for wanting to turn off a circuit prior to working on it. I refused to work with him from that point on.
Back in the days when I worked on TVs, I would discharge the CRT by connecting a ground wire to a long screwdriver, and then stick then screwdriver under the CRTs anode cap. As described here.
One time I forgot to connect the ground wire to the screwdriver. And then I accidently touched the screwdriver with my finger after I stuck it under the CRT’s anode cap. :smack: I did a backwards summersault and landed 5 feet away.
the immediately fatal range is if about 100 to 200 milliamps of current pass through the heart. That range is fatal because it can cause your heart to go into fibrillation and it won’t correct itself w/o medical intervention. So yes, the “amps” are what counts, but as Ohm’s law states you need the correct voltage across the two contact points to deliver that current through the heart. and what voltage level will be dangerous that way depends on where the contact points are touching your body, is your skin dry/wet/broken, etc.
the most common shock paths that can pass current through the heart are arm-to-arm and arm-to-leg.
I was nailed by a flyback transformer while working on a TV in high school. 110 Volts is nothing.
Not quite.
First of all, the voltage at your receptacle is 120 VAC[sub]RMS[/sub], with a positive peak voltage of around 170 V and a negative peak voltage of around -170 V. This is true regardless of whatever else is connected to the circuit.
On a 15 A circuit, the current that can be delivered by a particular receptacle can be anywhere from 0 to 15 A[sub]RMS[/sub]; the actual current depends upon the resistance (or more precisely, the impedance) of whatever is connected to that receptacle. A clock radio has relatively high resistance, so there won’t be much current through the radio when it is plugged into a 120 VAC receptacle. A toaster has relative low resistance, so there will be quite a bit of current through the toaster when it is plugged into a 120 VAC receptacle.
Current through your body (coulombs of charge per second) is what’s dangerous, regardless of how or why the current was imposed. Anything over 0.01 amps (instantaneous) is pretty dangerous. Frequency is also an important variable, but I won’t get into that here.
When you get zapped by electricity, the current through your body – which is all that matters – is determined by the source voltage (170 V peak if you’re zapped by an electrical receptacle in the U.S.) and your body resistance. The latter is not a fixed value; it depends on many factors. If the conductors make contact with your dry skin, your body resistance will be fairly high, and hence the current through your body will be fairly low. If it’s through your blood vessels, your body resistance will be fairly low and thus the current through your body will be relatively high. Furthermore, your body resistance is a very nonlinear resistance, since the mobile charge carriers in your body are comprised of ions, not electrons. It’s not a simple calculation.
Which is why the crazy shop teacher would stick two fingers into a socket and say 'that tingles." It had no chance to go down his leg or arm to arm.
AC (alternating current) will often cause your muscles to jerk which often has the fortunate effect of throwing you away from the electricity you came in contact with.
prolonged contact or having the electricity follow a path to impact critical parts of your body can be fatal. people who might have good health and contact with dry skin on limbs can have bad but not fatal experiences.
110 volts household: several times 'cause I’m stupid.
Electric fences: several times as a kid… the worst being when my dad and I stopped to see one of his friends (I had never been to their house before so was unfamiliar with the area). I was playing outside in the snow while they talked inside, soaked my sneakers, then went over to look into the field next door. I leaned over the fence while grabbing hold with both hands; of course it was an electric fence… I couldn’t open my hands! So I was stuck on that fence being shocked over and over for about 10 minutes until my dad came looking for me. He managed to pull me off by the hood of my coat. Not fun.
I wish I could say I did it when I was a kid - but I did it my senior year at college!
I got a huge glass cover from a street lamp, round and white, about the size of a basketball. I decided it would make a great lamp for my dorm room. So I got a plastic cup, put on a socket, ran the wire to the outlet and got the lamp lit. Put the huge white globe over it and yes, it was a nice ambient light!
Then noticed the bulb was slightly crooked.
So I took off the white globe, and while the lamp was still lit, put both thumbs on the shiny copper contact connections to straighten out the bulb.
I remember nothing except suddenly sitting on the floor on the other side of the room in a daze.
I’ve been hit by 48 VDC (didn’t feel a thing), 140 VDC (slight ticklish feeling) and one leg of a 240 VAC feed (blacked out for a few seconds). I believe the only reason I didn’t get fried by that 240 leg is that the back of my hand was touching a grounded cabinet (now that I think about it my hand was touching the screw that held the ground to the cabinet) while the back of my other hand brushed against the feed. When my muscles contracted there was nothing for my hands to grasp onto, and when I blacked out I fell away and broke the connection. Except for the feeling that my heart was going to burst out of my chest I felt fine afterwards.
My most entertaining encounter with electricity was with an old lawnmower that wouldn’t shut off unless you pulled the spark plug wire loose. I usually grabbed it with an old rag, but once tried to flip it loose with my finger. I felt a jolt with each turn of the crankshaft.
Using a Van De Graaff generator I could generate over 100,000 Volts easily, and on certain days up to close to a million. Shocked myself a lot with it, and with students.
The most fun was getting them all to hold hands and stand on their desks, and then the last person would be grounded. The shock would travel through all of them instantaneously, and everyone would yell “oowowwwwwww” 
As pointed out already, a high voltage doesn’t mean much. It’s high currents you need to watch out for. The amount of current flowing through all my students was practically insignificant, though the voltage was quite high.
So do I win with having been zapped with 100K+ volts?
If you are talking about an older car most likely about 20,000V is the most you would see. I’ve been shocked by spark plug wires more often than I can count.
No electric fence or 220V
One time I had the stove pulled out and was changing the 110 receptacle behind it. Hot day I was very sweaty. My back was leaning against the stove. I had the power to that circuit off but the house was wired with a shared neutral. I didn’t know it but the other circuit was live an consuming power. I touched the neutral the jolt ran up my arm along my rib cage and out my back where it was against the stove. Not fun. scared the shit out of me.
I was wiring my garage. I was putting all the wires in flex to protect them from vermin. Anyway I would cut a piece of flex string the wires through it attach on end then attach the other end. So I was up on the ladder added a piece of flex, I wire nutted everything and I climbed down the ladder to get the cover for the box. I flipped on the breaker to see if the other lights in the circuit were working. They were so I grabbed the cover and climbed the ladder to put on the cover. While I am up there I feel this strange tingle on my leg. WTF? I look down and see the ends of the now live wires that are sticking out of the end of the flex are touching my calf about 1/2 inch apart. Oopsie. I reached out and moved the flex away from my leg.
Lots of other 110 shocks most just a tingle.