Without reading the thread let me just say that the experience of pissing on an electric fence is fantastic for the sado-masochistically inclined.
My experience with electric fences is that they pulse for just that reason. They aren’t constantly electrified.
I have had the same experience when swapping an electric guitar for an electric bass plugged into a different circuit. I wasn’t harmed, but I couldn’t let go until someone swatted one of them from my hand.
i think modern fences will stop pulsing if it senses constant current draw.
One day I was cleaning horse water troughs in the paddocks at the dressage school I worked at. I was under the impression that the hotwire had been turned off. So there I am both arms in a big trough of water when I stand up and hit the nape of my neck against the very much still on horse wire. I remember nothing except picking myself up off my butt on the other side of the paddock.
Electricity generally kills you in one of two ways.
The first way is that it literally cooks you to death. Electricity through anything other than a superconductor generates heat. An old experiment to demonstrate this is to take two nails and stick them in either end of a hot dog. Then take a lamp cord with the ends cut and stripped and attach one wire to each nail (then mount this in some manner so that you can’t touch the exposed bits of metal). When you plug it in, you’ll cook the hot dog very quickly.
It takes a fair amount of electricity to cook you to death. Lightning and the electric chair both kill you using this method. A typical shock from a 110 volt outlet usually won’t cook you to death, but it can if you are incapacitated and can’t separate yourself and the source of the electric shock. If you do have enough voltage and current though, this method is almost guaranteed to be fatal. No one ever survives a properly functioning electric chair.
The second way that electricity kills you is that it gets your heartbeat out of whack. If you hit your heart with an electric current at the right moment you can throw the heart into fibrillation. Instead of beating, your heart just kinda sits there and shakes, and since it isn’t effectively pumping blood, you pass out and die. Our heart has a funny design in that if you can get it into fibrillation it will happily stay that way, so unless someone happens to be standing close by with a portable defibrillator you could be in a very big world of hurt.
Unlike the cooking to death method, the screwing with your heartbeat method takes a very surprisingly small amount of current. Currents below 5 mA are generally regarded to be “safe” (at least by most safety standards). As the current levels rise, the chances of throwing the heart into fibrillation increase, and once you get around 100 to 200 mA or so you’ve got quite a good chance of throwing the heart’s rhythm out of whack. This method is nowhere near guaranteed to kill you though. Your heart is significantly more sensitive to getting thrown out of rhythm at certain points in its cycle than others, so even if you do get a shock where the current goes through your chest, it’s not likely to throw your heart into fibrillation. The current level required to kill you though is very small. To put it into perspective, you don’t start feeling a shock until about 1 mA, and it doesn’t start to get painful until about 10 mA. Involuntary muscle contractions start at about 20 mA. If you ever got enough of a shock to make your muscles twitch, you were well up into the potentially fatal range.
The funny thing is once you get above about 5 amps or so, the chances of throwing the heart into fibrillation actually decrease significantly. What happens instead is that all of the muscles of the heart just clamp and hold. Your heart isn’t pumping blood at that point, so you will definitely still die if no one removes the source of current, but once the electricity is removed the heart will usually start beating normally again. Current levels below 5 amps are more likely to be fatal, and current levels above 5 amps are also more likely to be fatal, since at that level you start to suffer more severe burn damage.
The path of the current matters. Grabbing both prongs of a plug and plugging it in isn’t going to be pleasant, but it’s not going to kill you. All of the current will be going from your finger to your thumb in the same hand (unless another part of your body happens to be touching something grounded, in which case all bets are off). If you work with electricity a lot, it’s a good idea to get into the habit of only reaching into things with one hand. That way you are significantly less likely to suffer a shock where the current path goes through the chest.
The Hollywood idea that touching water with a wire in it will instantly kill everyone is false. You could wade out into a swimming pool that had an exposed 110 volt line on the other end of it and you wouldn’t feel anything. As you got closer to the wire you’d start to feel tingling (which puts you in the potential death from fibrillation range) and eventually the tingling would be rather unpleasant and you’d be very motivated to turn around and go away from it. The idea that all water instantly becomes “electrified” and kills anyone who touches it is not at all accurate. On the other hand, water allows electricity to find interesting paths to ground, and you can accidentally complete the circuit in ways that aren’t always obvious. For example, if you have a light switch near your sink (for an overhead light, for example) and that switch happens to be wired backwards, the screws on the switch cover will be electrically hot. If you are doing dishes and have one hand in the water, and you reach over with the other hand to turn on the switch, you create a current path from the hot screws, through you, through the water, and down through the water pipes to ground.
Yes, I have…
stuck my finger in a live, empty household lamp socket (I was feeling for the switch).
touched (and held onto) an electric fence.
tested a 9v battery with my tongue.
and last but not least, got zapped by a 220 line (woke up twitching on the other side of the room).
I do not recommend any of the above to those who - to date - have never attempted them.
I was unplugging a TV behind an entertainment center, and managed to get my finger in between the prongs while the plug was still halfway in. Never felt 240 volts, thanks to the much better thought out British Standard plug.
I really don’t get why the US uses two prong plugs without wall switches. The only other places I can think of using a similar setup are third world countries.
It’s too bad the US mains receptacle can’t be replaced by something safer, but the price of doing something early is often locking yourself into something suboptimal.
This is a very odd statement. The British system, and countries that use outlets based on it, may be the only ones that require a third prong. North America, most of Europe, China, Japan, and probably numerous others allow two prongs. Large appliances require three, and most states now require other safety devices such as shutters.
To an American, British outlets appear hilariously overbuilt. I have complete power adapters of about half the volume of a British socket. I’m sure they are safer, but that’s less important at 120v than 240v.
some receptacles for floor and table lamps are wall switched.
most plug designs are such that you have a fairly good grip without getting your fingers near the prongs.
I said two prong plugs without wall switches, not just two prong plugs. I think a two prong + switch system makes perfect sense.
Damned English with its ambiguity between logical and vs. colloquial and.
Still, I’m not sure what the connection is. Most rooms have a sprinkling of wall-switched outlets–often, one outlet in a two-outlet plate will be switched while the other not. Are all outlets in British homes required to have a switch? This seems like it would be very inconvenient–I don’t want to accidentally shut down my computer when hitting the wrong switch.
At any rate, a switch shouldn’t be thought of as a safety mechanism. The sleeved pins are more useful for the problem you describe.
Still, no one can deny that British plug design is safe. The same can’t be said for ring circuits, which is what pops in my mind when I think of things that you’d see in third-world countries. In fact, part of the reason for the overdesigned plug (in particular, the fuses) is due to the deficiencies of ring circuits.
Keep in mind that this happened 35 years ago or so, but if my memory is good it was pulsing but too fast for me to be able to get my hands unclenched.
Never touch a prong whilst plugging something in. Most of you probably didn’t have to learn that via painful experience. I was a stupid child.
While playing werewolf in the dark I ran headlong into an electric fence. I’m a midget so the top strand caught me across the forehead just above the eyes. I think it was more the clothesline action than the electric shock that hurt but either way it was an experience I cannot recommend.
1975…Arc Welder…in metal shop class…yikes.
Most newer American two pin plugs have a bit of a “ring” around the front so your fingers don’t slip forward and contact the prongs while you’re fumbling around plugging your lamp into an outlet waaay behind furniture. Older plugs didn’t (as well as being non-polarized).
British outlets have a switch immediately adjacent to the outlet, it’s not next to a light switch so you won’t accidently turn off your computer instead of your room lights. but switches are only as good as people remembering to turn them off before attempting to plug or unplug something. “Passive” safety devices like shutters, recessed outlets, and sleeved pins are better.
Household 110; just a slight tingle
Electric Fence 110; Burning pain (“Weedburner” fence charger, not pleasant)
Power supply from a Flat Panel iMac (AC 110 style tingle)
Yes, they all have switches, but you’d have to be pretty dim to turn off the wrong one by mistake because they’re right next to the corresponding sockets. Like this.
Been there, done that. I was working on a car engine and had my hand inside a distributor cap. My co-mechanic hit the starter of the engine and I got the shock of my life. More volts than anyone should have to sustain.
Again, it’s the amps not the volts, or some combination that will kill you.
There were carnival sideshows where a guy would stand on top of something that was sending tremendous voltage through his body and he would ignite flammable objects. Pretty amazing, pretty weird and I don’t think I would want that job.
I remember getting thrown about 6 feet, when I touched the top electrified screen of a Bumper car ride, back when I was a Carnival ride operator. I believe it was 440 volts running off a generator ( large trailer sized.) man, oh man. I tasted purple, let me repeat that " I tasted purple" and felt like a stuffed plush animal for a week.:smack: