This guy had probably been an electrician for 20 years or more. He will have been shocked accidentally many times and would have little fear of them. He was also lazy.
So, standing on a chair (too lazy to fetch a ladder?) he doesn’t want to short a live circuit (more work - replacing a fuse wire) and he doesn’t have a circuit tester in his pocket. As far as he was concerned, the simplest and easiest thing to do was to use a finger.
The gun analogy would work better if you just (say) pointed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. You could do that hundreds of times before a, it was actually loaded and b, the bullet went through and killed the baby in the cot upstairs.
That doesn’t work better. The clown was testing whether a circuit had enough juice to kill him if he touched a bare wire with his hand, by touching bare metal in the circuit with his hand.
Whatever the worst possible outcome was if the circuit was live, it was going to happen as a result of the “test”. It was nothing at all like pointing a gun at the ceiling. In that case it’s unlikely that a “live” instrument would cause more than property damage. The worst case scenario, shooting yourself, is almost impossible using that test.
In contrast, striking your finger into a light socket will always produce the worst possible effect that could possibly occur. You would actually be better off not doing the test since there is at least a chance that you won’t contact bare metal with your skin if you don’t perform the test, whereas the test requires you do do so deliberately.
It’s exactly analogous to testing a gun by putting the barrel in your mouth and pulling the trigger. You are engineering the worst possible outcome. If you didn’t perform the test then the gun might not go off at all even if it was loaded. And if yo didn’t perform the “test” of sticking your finger onto exposed metal then you might be able to complete the jib without ever contacting the live wire.
Re-reading this thread, it suddenly occurred to me that there’s an obvious and trivially straightforward reason why the OP, after grabbing a handful of voltage, is okay.
It’s just a case of the Anthropic Principle, everybody! Duh! :smack:
If the OP wasn’t okay after that, he wouldn’t have started this thread and we woudn’t be reading it.
I do not know all the medical ins and outs of lightning striking people but it lasts a very short time and a shock from house current is continuous.
ETA: Also, alternating current is more injurious than direct current. Lightning current tends to traverse along the surface of the body rather than straight through the interior.
Multimeters and light sensors are very cheap and easy to use. I constantly check if a connection is being supplied with power even after I turn off fuses or the main to the house. I see no reason to be in such a hurry or have confidence that it isn’t necessary to check first.
Having said that, I have seen professional electricians not use this equipment and rely on knowing what is hot and what isn’t, but I am simply not willing to take that chance and any electrical instruction book I have seen tells you to be careful and use the tools I mentioned above to check to make sure no power is going through what you are going to be in contact with.
I had an electrician doing some work at my business. I asked him if he ever got shocked. He looked at me like I was daft and said, “sure, all the time!”
I later asked my gf’s dad (a retired electrician) the same question. He looked at me like I was daft and said, “no!”
No, wrong analogy. You’d have to check your car for bombs by sitting in the driver’s seat and chucking a lit stick of dynamite under the car. If the exploding dynamite sets off a bomb, there was a bomb.
When I do electrical work, I turn off the circuits and check with one of those electrical field detectors. Actually, I check the circuit first, to make sure the voltage tester is working, then test again after turning off the circuit breaker. Once I’m convinced the current is off, I’ll give the conductor a very quick swipe with the back of my hand, the idea being that if something has gone very wrong and there’s still current in the wire, the contraction of the muscles will instantly break the contact.
I’ve gotten more cautious about this since the time I tried to replace a lightbulb in a chandelier and nearly got flung down a staircase because the idiot who wired the light had switched the ground rather than the hot wire.
I’m not a fully qualified electrician but I’m smart enough to have spent $15 on a voltmeter. I recommend it. Don’t be a fool and “test” a circuit with a body part. Darwin may send you an award.
I replaced a porch light fixture yesterday. I thought I was smart; I plugged a radio into the outlet right below the light so I could hear the sound stop when I threw the correct breaker.
But it turns out the light and outlet were on two seperate circuits. Luckily I checked with a current detector.
The silly idea behind the finger test is that the shortest pathway between the hot and ground is a bit of finger. You will supposedly feel the current and no real harm done. Well, electricity doesn’t just take the path of least resistance. It takes all paths proportional to the degree of conductivity. And some of that current went through the heart and killed the man.
But, in general the finger won’t be as bad as hand to hand contact or hand to foot because most of the current is going through the finger. But in specific instances it can be as bad. It’s a stupid and lazy gamble.
Umm… I know I’m the idiot OP and shouldn’t be lecturing on electrics, but why would you assume that a light was on the same circuit as a socket? AFAIK lighting and household socket circuits are generally totally separate.
IANAE. I just thought they were very close to each other. Live & learn. I’ve seen breakers labeled “living room” for instance and just figured that would mean lights, outlets, etc located in that room.
Obviously the REAL test is to touch the wire and see if you can post about it the next day. I use my ability to post to the SDMB as a constant check of my driving skills.
That is often exactly the case. There are some arguments for keeping lighting and outlet circuits separate, but no requirement to do do, excepting special cases. Running one circuit around everything in a given room is usually the cheapest installation.
But obviously one should not make assumptions either way.
It might or might not. If outlets or lighting was added at some time after the original structure was built, they may be on a separate circuit breaker. In our house, there is a “basement” circuit breaker that kills the lights and outlets that were there when we moved in. I added several other lights and outlets that are on another breaker.
Given the vague labels that were scribbled in the breaker box when we moved in, years ago I checked every outlet and light switch in the house and created a map of the house that puts the corresponding breaker number near every one of those things. Easy: want to de-energize this outlet, in this corner of the living room? turn off breaker #7. (but I still always check the wires for voltage before touching them.)
I was a teenager and we used an electric lawnmower with a cord. After finishing mowing the lawn which was slightly damp from dew, I was in the garage wrapping up the extensive power cord on my arm. It was still plugged into the wall. Something I never do and advise others not to do since. Because while I was wrapping this worn cord around my arm the muscles quickly started to contract and the only way I could stop it was to pull the cord out of the wall with my other hand. It was a very scary event. After that, I have been super careful working with any electric. And here I wasn’t even working with repairing or installing something electrical.
