Oh, you touched a condenser. So the electric flow was limited to only your hand. I assumed you mean from hand to ground.
If the current doesn’t flow through your body (so you heart is unaffected) than there ist most likely no problem. But I wouldn’t recommend testing it because it’s pretty dangerous
Yes, I think it was. My legs were are isolated - 1-2 sm of the plastic (slippers) and then the linoleum, then - the old wooden logs, so it must be only through my hands (the one on a condenser, the second one on the ground of the shell… however, we didn’t have a normal grounding that days, so I believe it was the same as between the phase and the zero). What’s I remember is a bright light in my eyes and then I somehow near the sofa 4 meters far from the box.
Then I pulled out the box from the power cell and was able to finish the repair.
However, I did the same mistake after a year later…
As a consequence, I can’t stand static electricity. Every time I swear when it overtakes me.
Story time:
In one of my H&S classes, our instructor was a former H&S inspector (government). We had a case study about an incident where a truck operator died, using a boom to unload livestock feed in a silo. The boom touched the transmission line (22kV). The SCADA system registered a 3kA fault.
All of that 3kA fault flowed through the boom operator’s legs. His knees were touching the (metal) bumper of the truck as he was using the truck mounted controls to operate it. Warning: don’t read the spoiler if you can’t handle it: Needless to say that the only thing left of his legs were bloodstains and chunks of meat stuck to the bumper.
So yes, there is not a single person alive that can survive 20kV across a sizeable part of his body. If you (general you, not MarviBiene in particular) only manage to get a finger literally evaporated off your body by shorting 20kV to neutral/ground, consider yourself blessed. If you walked away with no visible parts missing, you didn’t short 20kV across your body. Your body’s impedance coupled with any insulation materials around you (ie boots, insulating mats) limited that voltage to a few hundred volts. In case of Alexey, I doubt the voltage was anything more than a couple hundred volts (causing his muscles to contract and him jumping across the room).
Again people, and this goes to anyone with all due respect: at 45mA through your heart, death starts. It is an inverse relationship of mA vs time alive: The higher the mA, the less seconds you have left.
Yeah, time and current choose how dangerous something is. There are charts for this:
But (correct me if a am wrong) high voltage doesn’t mean it will kill you. If you have high voltage low current than you won’t die. Your description was high voltage high currently scenario.
There are enough Tesla (not the car) videos on YouTube where the voltage is super high but the current Is so low, that you can’t feel anything
A capacitor for an example can have high voltage (and high current for a short time) but the time is most often not sufficient to cause immediate death
I don’t make the rules, electricity does. If voltage can be sustained (ie is not an open circuit transformer showing 500V across its terminals and instantly drops to zero when loaded), it will push current through any resistance.
Tesla coils are exactly that: transformers. They get up to high voltage (low or zero current), a spark is generated (breakdown voltage of air → current flows, voltage goes low), spark stops, cycle repeats.
It’s the old saying: “It’s not voltage that kills you, it’s amperage”. Technically true, but in order to have amperage, you need voltage. A 12V 60A car battery can’t kill you because (in simple terms) voltage is not high enough to overpower your body’s resistance, hence a few μA flow through you. A 230V 13A wall socket (yes I know it’s higher A than that) will kill you because electricity says I will apply 230V across you and your body’s resistance is 1kΩ, hence 0.23A will flow through you. (230mA > 45mA => R.I.P.)
@Alexey so after 2 atempts to not get hired by Storj Team and meet your Maker, what changed in your daily routine when repairing electrical stuff? Did you buy gloves at least?
I had my close encounters also, and now I’m pretty carefull, checking 3 times before I touch anything, with testers. And I don’t repair high voltages.
People survived Lightning Strikes somehow.
How would you even measure the body resistance? (or nearly predict it at unknown in and outs?)
If Alexey would have Tree-skin everywhere, why not?
I remember a video from a guy who can use his body to do impossible things with current/voltage, to bad i can’t find it. Edit Found it!
Found interesting things here Conduction of Electrical Current to and Through the Human Body: A Review - PMC
They didn’t survive lightning. They survived a lightning that touched down close enough and they managed to not get affected by step voltage (the wider your feet are apart when lightning strikes, the higher the voltage across your body). I’ve seen persons being temporarily paralyzed by a 22kV line that touched ground close to them (high step voltage). I even saw pictures in the previously mentioned H&S class (no, they were not “internet meme pictures”) of entire herds of sheeps/cows after they got electrocuted by lightning. That is the reason why large farms have copper mesh in the ground, to limit step voltage.
Nobody has tree-skin, trust me on this one. Not even the man in the video. All those kinds of videos are smoke-and-mirrors, nothing more.
You measure the body resistance the same way you measure everything else: you apply voltage across it and see what kind of current flows. There are resistance charts for head-to-toe, arm-to-toe,arm-to-arm, etc. If you’ve been involved in electrical H&S, those charts are mandatory.
Doing things with a Tesla coil is something else as doing it with power lines.
Electroboom is good to understand when current will kill you and when not.
Here is a Tesla coil playlist from him:
Did you see the egg boil while the irons rusting in the water ?? at the end.
At the tesla, i was sceptical too…
There are 100% used tricks. Why do they never show the reading?
If he would put so much energy into the water then his nerves would be destroyed (including his heart nerves) and his blood would boil too.
How do they explain his capabilities, that he can do this?
Edit:
“When electrical current passes through a conductive fluid such as blood for an extended period, it can lead to electrolysis. This process involves chemical reactions within the fluid, potentially causing tissue damage, the release of gases that can harm blood vessels, and the release of toxic metal ions from electrodes. Electrolysis of blood can be extremely dangerous and may result in severe injuries or even death.”
Edit 2:
This is your magic man:
It was a long time ago (35 years ago), I have many interests, repair electronics is just one of them, also photography, software development, building different devices… On that time I have had what is now called a “Smart Home”, but without a computer (my first one I built myself too - but ordered the electronic board, because it was very hard to make it myself with a using varnish and copper sulfate, the paths needed were much narrower than I could draw with varnish): several detectors (we had a gas stove back then), electronic locks with a binary code (just for fun, but my future wife didn’t get the joke… so finally replaced the logic block to accept usual input), the volume detector (when someone enters the bathroom, the light turns on), but it also worked on the cat…this bug I never fixed, because why not?, etc. all DIY. There is was no possibility to get a normal detectors (it was USSR), so, half of them were made from transistors without a cap to make them either light sensitive or as a volume detector, the gas detector was a more complicated, but still DIY.
And by the way, it’s not convenient to work with electronic in gloves, especially when I switched to chips: too small and requires precise.
You are absolutely right. And I do not think that I’m special. Just the fact, that I survived. I didn’t have a needed tools to measure it, because they have had a limit of 220v only on that time… However, I become very careful and always checked twice, did I switched it from the outlet before starting the work.
This is hilarious!
How many digits?
8 as usual. It’s a byte. And only one button (hidden under the dermantine (artificial leather)). So you need to know to where to press also
You need to press it with a timeout. 0 Is a short press, 1 is a longer press.
It was a fun to implement this with only a one chip and no CPU. Only this chip and a powerful thyristor to power on the electromagnetic coil to unlock the door. Also some condensers and resistors, but well…
There was also a power inverter from 9v Krona battery if there is no power… It was a precaution, however, never used.
And also you might unlock it in an old way - just use the boring metal key (never used since)…
Ah, yes. The power supply, it was built using the condenser approach (no transformers, just condensers, resistors and diodes), and the inverter from the battery as you remember as a fallback.
However, there was a problem, the condenser power supply was not able to power on the coil to allow to unlock the door, so there was several workarounds. If the power cell is available - use it, otherwise the invertor fallback… When I tested, you would also need to pull the door to help the coil if it’s powered by the invertor…
However, never used.
oh this brings back memories, filing off caps from transistors salvaged from obsolete industrial electronics And no internet to google the problem: if something does not work – you just sit and debug. With multimeter and maybe giant CRT oscilloscope (that was also salvaged and repaired using parts salvaged from elsewhere). It was glorious, and very educational.
Agree. Gloves are a no go. I just wear an ESD strap on the leg that is also connected to the ESD desk surface when dealing with FETs and other high impedance stuff.
On the leg? Aren’t they supposed to be worn on the wrist? Or doesn’t it matter?
Yes, they are supposed to be worn on the wrists. But the cable annoyed me and was getting in the way all the time.
It does not matter ultimately; the purpose is to dissipate any accumulated charge. As long as you reasonably ground any body part it’s good.
The reason they are supposed to be worn on the wrist is that in case the resistor in them fails (if yours doesn’t have a resistor, throw it away), and you touch live by accident, current will flow from your finger to your wrist and out the strap’s ground. Painful? Yes. Chance of evaporating a finger or two? Yes. Life threatening? No.