Electric shock experiences - for those still alive

[Howardlong]

So I am not proud but I've had a handful of shocks over the years, the most recent one a few weeks ago, but that's the first I've had for about 20 years.

I had one life-threatening one when stood 20' up on an A-frame ladder putting up theatre lighting 30 odd years ago, the cross bar was earthed, we were taught to hold the cross bar while doing anything up there to keep physical stability on top of the ladder. My left hand was holding the earthed cross bar with some force to stabilise my body, while my right hand plugged in the 15A round pin plug. My right middle finger happened to touch the live pin while I plugged it in. It was live. I don't remember much, other than being unable to pull either hand away for some time, but realising either I had to release my right or left hand. I tried both, one after the other. Luckily, after several attempts it was the right hand that budged.

Apparently the whole ladder was shaking for about twenty seconds. I was shaking for a lot longer once I'd climbed back down.

Luckily I've been on terra firma for the two or three shocks since then, and they haven't been across my body like that first time.

[KJDS]

I've had a few. Recently worked on a project that had a lot of 300V DC on the boards but it was always current limited to less than 10mA. It gave a sharp nudge but no more than that.

When I was about 16 I managed to get a proper blast of mains which threw me across the room. That really was a shock.

A mate of mine was an industrial electrician and would test 415V bus bars with the back of his hand. If you hold your hand and wrist the right way then it will always contract your muscles away from the bar. Personally I was never brave stupid enough to try that.

[ReaDave]

I've had a few but there are two I remember most clearly.
The first was when I was little and climbed up on the table and stuck my finger in the light socket of my mother's sewing machine!
The other one I can recall clearly was when I was building my first serious power supply when I was in my teens. I forgot that I still had the mains cord plugged in and was rearranging the mains wiring on the main power switch. My thumb came into contact with the active wire and I felt a massive hum and serious pain shoot right down the right side of my body. Fortunately the path was from my thumb to ground and not across my chest. That really shook me up for a while! I went from this:  to this:  instantly!!
Fortunately, in all my years of working with CRTs, live chassis TVs (always with an isolation transformer), neon sign transformers, gas lasers and microwave ovens, I never got a belt from one of those. I am ALWAYS extra cautious when working with lethal stuff like that.

I used to work with another tech who used to tap his finger on the active mains of live circuits to check the presence of the mains! Dude must've had some seriously dry skin is all I can say! 

[Codemonkey]

Had a few in the past at a previous job but only one really almost resulted in a change of underwear!

Was building a SMPS. Had the earth disconnected on the scope and the PSU running from a large variac (looked like something straight from a Frankenstein film set). All was going well until I had one hand on the earthed metal handle of the variac and reached over with the other hand to change something on the scope. I brushed the unshielded bit of the BNC connector with my fingers making the connection to earth across my body. I remember a loud buzzing sensation, thinking oops, somethin bad is happening, then the trip went and I found myself sat on the floor on the other side of the office! I got on the phone immediately afterwards to our transformer supplier and had them wind me an isolation transformer.

[matseng]

35 years later I still have scars on my fingertips from this incident.  I was in school 14 or 15 years old and during a students-helping-the-staffs-week I was assigned to replace the lightbulbs of the lamp posts in the school yard.

I was got a box of new bulbs, an aluminum ladder and a screwdriver and let loose on my task.  The first few bulbs got replaced without any problem, but the last one I did was broken on the backside and by some reason the power was on.  Having one hand in a steady grip of the metallic lamppost and the fingers on the other hand touching the live filament ended up rather badly.

This was in Sweden with 220 volts, not the wimpy it-only-tickles-a-bit 110 you got in the states, so I got stuck for quite some time with the current going in on one hand and out the other.

The bulb got reduced to tiny shards, and I'm still amazed that my other hand didn't make an impression in the lamp post.

After a while I fell down to the ground, I remember a lot of people running around shouting and I was taken the the hospital to check that my heart still was doing what it is supposed to do.

Except for some burns on one hand and some not too bad cuts on the other I didn't suffer any ill effects after the ordeal.  Unfortunately I didn't gain any superpowers either. ;-)

Then of course I have had the usual small mishaps mostly involving putting my hand on a transformer with exposed primary connector while being in contact with chassis ground at the same time.  But since I always have GFI's where I work and play it's merely a minor inconvenience to get zapped rather than something nasty.

[codeboy2k]

I've posted about my brush with 10 KV before

I'm here today because it was current limited to about 10mA.

[Kaptein QK]

I pulled the cap off the spark plug on my scooter while it was running. I got 10-20 shocks, one for each rotation of the engine before it stopped.
Nothing to write home about

[3roomlab]

I've had a few. Recently worked on a project that had a lot of 300V DC on the boards but it was always current limited to less than 10mA. It gave a sharp nudge but no more than that.

When I was about 16 I managed to get a proper blast of mains which threw me across the room. That really was a shock.

A mate of mine was an industrial electrician and would test 415V bus bars with the back of his hand. If you hold your hand and wrist the right way then it will always contract your muscles away from the bar. Personally I was never brave stupid enough to try that.

human volt meter? i had the chance to stumble upon a mildly leaky instrument once. and so i tried the "backhand human volt meter" on it, it works, but please make sure your hands are dry, etc 

[Mechanical Menace]

Only once. I had a mishap plugging something in when I was a kid, and like an idiot for some reason I had it held with my fingers touching the pins. For some reason it threw my arm away very hard rather than making me grab hold though 

[vinicius.jlantunes]

I have a shock induced Tourette syndrome - my first reaction to an electric shock is always automatic and unavoidable swearing  . Remember it happening when I was repairing an outlet and had turned off the wrong circuit breaker - should've tested with the multimeter first but I didn't. Now I always do and never trust the identification on the breaker panel.

[SteveyG]

I've had one shock when I was installing a TV distribution system at my mother-in-law's house. I had nicely chipped out a nice hole for a standard 35mm metal pattress and made sure it was a slightly snug fit, so pushing hard with both thumbs to seat it in the wall. It made contact with the edge of a nail beneath the plaster holding some metal capping over the lighting supply to the 1st floor, which I knew was there but didn't know had a nail further up the wall driven through the capping and right into the cable.

It was pretty painful, but I was only in contact for a fraction of a second so no burns. That section of wall had to be chased out from floor to ceiling to find where the fault was 

What the heck is a public bath? Don't you have one at home?

[Mechanical Menace]

What the heck is a public bath? Don't you have one at home?

Ye olde talk for a public swimming pool.

[Howardlong]

I regret to say that the result so far is not unexpected, although the UK's Health and Safety Executive appear to be living in utopia ridden parallel universe. While their aim is to be applauded, it appears that based on those of us who have so far registered a vote, that they are living in cloud cuckoo land regarding reality.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/electricity/faq.htm#q2

[4cx10000]

Well, being a ham - radio amateur - which are now and then close by high voltages, of course this apply for those getting into projects with big tube amplifiers. Remember this clearly with kind of horror though it is like 30 years ago... I was working on a grounded grid 4-1000A RF-amplifier at late night with my head full of things my wife wanted me to do. I had a lot of problems with parasitics and other stuff I don't recall right now. This tube can be a real nightmare... The high voltage power supply was in a wooden enclosure with 5KV output through a SO234 and then fed to the amplifier via a RG8 coax. Clever enough I had disconnected the cable with PL259 connector from the HV-psu, but stupid me!!  There was still 5KV at the center of the chassis connector because I did not pull the HV-switch on the amplifier before starting to dig... The psu was standing on the floor beneath the table I had my amplifier on. What happened was, that underside of my foot came close to the connector and BANG!!!  I woke up lying on the floor with abnormally high pain in my foot, the flashover created a small crater into the flesh. I won't try it again!!

[rollatorwieltje]

Most notable ones:
touching a slightly modified electric fly swatter. I wired an extra cap to the grid, giving it more punch. Also removed the bleeder resistor, so it would charge faster. I lost feeling in my finger for about 15 minutes.

Most nasty one was a combo of temperature and shock. Was fixing one of those instant coffee makers, it had a boiler without insulation and live electrodes on the back... During a test run (with the cover off) the damn thing almost fell off the desk. In a dumb reaction I grabbed it by the top, right on the exposed electrodes and the hot boiler housing... Both the shock and the temperature weren't particularly extreme, but the combination sucked It's like the "dropped soldering iron dance", but with some extra spice added.

[Seekonk]

When I was 15 I was reading at my basement work bench with my feet up on the desk.  Lightning struck our back yard and I remember seeing this blue light coming from the basement bulkhead door.  Next thing I remember was waking up about an hour later 15 feet away wedged up against the basement wall. Every bone in my body ached.  Numerous shocks after that have seemed relatively minor.

[ReaDave]

....It's like the "dropped soldering iron dance"....

Now there's an idea for another topic. Great description! I think we can all relate to that one! 

[Phaedrus]

I was working in a lab with a 3kVA AC source powered from 380V 3-phase. It was part of a rack system, and we needed to move it to another room, to hook up to some equipment in our thermal chamber. I had only recently started working there, and was a bit fuzzy from drinking the night before. For some reason I thought I'd turned off the breaker, when I hadn't. So I sat down behind the rack and unscrewed the earth connector, and was about to start unscrewing the live conductors, when my lab partner shouted, "STOP! Don't move!" He ran over and turned off the breaker, and when the enormity of what almost happened hit me I about shat my pants.

Closest call I've had. I'm probably lucky to be alive. Gave me a lot more respect for procedure and checklists.

Hm, haven't actually had any really bad shocks, nothing above ~20V and a few mA, but a guy I was working with once shorted a 400V cap with his screwdriver while working on an off-line SMPS, plugged into mains and turned on. I was looking right at it, and the flash gave me purple spots in my vision for half an hour, and the bang sounded like a .22 rifle. EDIT: No wait, I do remember getting a mains shock once, just briefly while I was unhooking a stereo from behind a TV. I was reaching around behind without a clear view of what I was doing, and I brushed the pins of the mains connector while it was halfway out. Hurt like a sonuva, but no permanent damage.

[ReaDave]

...but a guy I was working with once shorted a 400V cap with his screwdriver while working on an off-line SMPS, plugged into mains and turned on....

Did you get to see what was left of the screwdriver?

[Phaedrus]

...but a guy I was working with once shorted a 400V cap with his screwdriver while working on an off-line SMPS, plugged into mains and turned on....

Did you get to see what was left of the screwdriver?

Scorched, but not melted! We rubbed the char off with some steel wool and I think it's being used in the warehouse still.

The PSU was also fine, aside from some scorch marks around the base of said cap. We replaced it and its parallel partner anyway, just to be safe.

[BillyD]

Was fixing a dishwasher and had just replaced a broken pressure sensor. The sensor fed the timer motor and I wanted to verify that the motor was now turning so I pressed the power button while watching the motor. Carelessly my other hand was resting on the contacts of the door cut-out switch while I did so, and I was kneeling on a damp tiled floor. I can remember the surging sensation coursing through my arms and knees. Got thrown (well probably leapt) back about 6 feed, badly shaken but otherwise unharmed.

Another time I was fixing a pump on a carpet cleaning machine, and unknown to me the bosses 10 year old kid who was behind me innocently plugged it in. I was holding the live cable in my fingers and got a strong tingle rather than a big shock, luckily the workshop floor and my hands were fairly dry.

[hans]

Probably the first to say I haven't had any serious ones.

I don't work a lot on high power or mains stuff. If I do, I only touch metal bits when stuff is clearly off (double check).
Probably the biggest shock I have had was touching radiator and an old unearthed CRT at the same time. That was not too shocking, although it probably is not very nice to have them across both hands. Not sure how many Volts that was.

[Alex Eisenhut]

All I can say is DC shocks are worse. I was tooling around inside my tube-based scope, fooling around with a plugin that uses a cavity oscillator. I was powering this up outside its box with a bunch of cables. Anyways to drive the plate it needed a high voltage DC supply, which I cleverly took from the scope mainframe.

250 volts DC is quite an eye opener. It's like my arm just violently twitched out of the way and knocked all my junk to the floor.

Having worked in an industrial setting, techs who install small motor drives, like fractional HP stuff, confirm that DC feels different and generally worse.

My DC shock hurt for a whole after too. I suppose DC totally depolarizes whatever juice-based wiring is inside me. Painful.

Line AC, 120V, meh, whatever, I brushed up against a live wire once or twice, just a strong buzzing feeling.

[radiomog]

350vac 400Hz

knocked me back.  that was the last time.  I learned my lesson 

[Refrigerator]

There's nothing better that feeling that 220VAC pass through your body....