Tell us about a time you got electrocuted

[signal]

Just curious, tell us about a time when you got electrocuted.  What were you doing? What did you do wrong? Lessons learned!

[c4757p]

electrocution = electric execution = you are deaded. Otherwise it's a shock.

</pedant>

[PE1RKI]

there was a thread about this a few weeks ago.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/electric-shock-experiences-for-those-still-alive/

[nctnico]

I was sitting, or rather laying down in a hospital when they attached the stun probes to my head, never been the same since... but what a buzz 

I helped do that to several thousand chickens today (electrical stunner project at a poultry slaughterhouse). Recently I was ill for a day after eating chicken so it serves them well. Clucking bastards!

[grumpydoc]

I promised myself I would be much too careful around mains to risk problems - but, of course, didn't manage it.

Rewiring a kitchen in France I was removing a circuit I "knew" was dead when I got zapped - I confess I was doubly surprised because I was handling the neutral at the time. The morals of this tale are:

When working on mains treble check that you have turned off the circuit you thought that you did. Having treble checked it, check it again.

Just because a cable is blue (or white if in the USA) does not mean that the SOB who installed the system made it neutral

When you have a report that says the RCD (GFI) isn't tripping in spec it might be worth changing that first (said RCD has now been changed and the replacement verified but it just wasn't all that convenient to do it first).

[AG6QR]

electrocution = electric execution = you are deaded. Otherwise it's a shock.

</pedant>

Some would agree with you, but many authorities, including the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, would accept the word to mean an injury (not necessarily fatal) from electric shock.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/electrocute

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73880/if-someone-is-electrocuted-do-they-have-to-die-or-can-they-just-be-injured

[wraper]

10uF paper in oil cap charged to 700V. Nice smell of barbecue and two holes in the hand when I accidentally touched valve socket in the powered off RF ampliefier. Lesson learned: avoid making return path

[tautech]

10uF paper in oil cap charged to 700V. Nice smell of barbecue and two holes in the hand when I accidentally touched valve socket in the powered off RF ampliefier. Lesson learned: avoid making return path

Pork barbecue smell?

[wraper]

Pork barbecue smell?

Human barbecue

[Artlav]

Learning something new can be shocking...

I was testing breakdown strength of a lamination-type plastic foil.
Two sharp electrodes on either side of an A4 sized piece, 60KV on them.
No breakdown.
Nice.
Turn off the power, discharge everything, remove the foil.

The foil had a strong static cling on it, and i found it fun.
A few seconds of playing with it, i ended up with one back-of-the-palm on one side of the foil, the other one on the other side...
And got one heck of a ZAP!
Not too bad, kind of like touching a larger Van-de-graaf generator, but the surprise factor definitely helped the freak out process.

This is how i learned what "dielectric absorption" is.

[Muttley Snickers]

Our last electricity bill, I was completely shocked...

New house rule : No more welding for friends or family, from now on its super glue to stick metal together unless its my own stuff.


Muttley

[jobog]

Taking an electronics class in the Navy Reserves and learning to measure voltage with a multimeter.  We had a board with several terminals with varying voltages.  Someone asked what terminals are for the 600V.  Never point with two fingers with someone leaning over your shoulder.  Ouch!!

[signal]

I didn't get hurt, but had a shocker one time poking around a Motorola 100W RF UHF/VHF amplifier.  I was using a flathead screwdriver and thought I would short the leads of a big electrolytic on it to discharge it before working on it.  It melted the tip of the screwdriver!  Like literally it was bent over and melted, huge pop, only could imagine what it would have been had that been in contact with my body!

[eas]

Sometime between the age of 2 and 4, the lever from a broken fingernail clipper, my hand, an intriguing fit in one of the slots in a nearby electric socket. What came next was an extremely unpleasant feeling in my hand/arm. Followed by crying and my mother freaking out a bit, not sure the order of those last two.

And here I am, 40 years later.  I've had a few mains shocks since then, but I didn't make that particular mistake twice.

[Ed.Kloonk]

I suppose nobody wants to hear about an incident many years ago involving a car battery, jumper leads and my nipples.

No?

OK.

 O0

[marshallh]

At 5 years old, stuck a bent paperclip into the terminals of an AC outlet.
The paperclip started dribbling onto the floor. I never repeated the experiment

[ez24]

I was under my deck, screwing in hardware cloth (metal screen) against the wall to plug a hole to stop rats.  I was sitting on wet dirt.  I was using a battery impact driver and screwed in a long screw to hold the cloth and used my left hand to balance myself against the metal screen.  Unknown to me there was 110v romex cable on the other side of the wall and the screw hit the hot wire.  The screw made contact with the metal screen and then through my hand then arm to earth.  It was a long shock because my weight pushed me against the metal.  I do not know why I did not die.  My guess is the current entered my left side and went down my side to earth and did not go through my heart.  I think I used up my nine lives at once.

[RickBrant]

Trying out the Heathkit high voltage probe with my recently-built IM17 FET VOM and almost-as-recently-built GR-295 color TV (my parents had bought the TV kit and I built it for them).

I had the bright idea that because the probe was insulated with big impressive discs of plastic it would be safe to unhook it from under the second anode cap while the TV was running. OW.

Of course there's very little current there, but.. OW.

(And: Put me down on the side of rigor in language: You can receive many electric shocks in life, but you can only be electrocuted once.)

[Terabyte2007]

It was about 1989 and I was servicing a Burroughs Terminal. After removing the cover, I grabbed my long thin metal screwdriver which I used to discharge CRT's that I had done a thousand times in the past. Not paying attention and using the One-Handed rule, I placed my other hand on the chassis and must have had my finger touching the metal on the screwdriver and **Wham**, the next thing I remember is being helped up off the floor. I was hit with about 25-30KV. The muscles in my arm and upper body were twitching and very painful for about a week after. It took about 15-20 mins for me to shake it off, but I was lucky, no damage and I lived. Lesson learned? You bet! Pay attention when working around HV. I feel this lesson helped me respect HV much more in the future and still to this day I take every precaution when working around HV.

[wraper]

I suppose nobody wants to hear about an incident many years ago involving a car battery, jumper leads and my nipples.

No?

OK.

 O0

Not with nipples but in my childhood I managed implant the insulation of the wire into my fingers. There was (turned to be not so) dead motorcycle battery. I decided to check it by shorting the terminals. Wire became red and almost instantly burned out but insulation became the part of my skin.

[wraper]

My father told me a story when he still worked at the locomotive repair factory. One of his colleagues tried to piss on the old locomotive battery (110V DC). Guess what part of him got electrocuted.

[Asmyldof]

Hahw. Where do I start?
I did mention I began fiddling when I was 6 in the introduction, so one can imagine that in the early years the attention was not what it should be. Some might say my comparable insanity comes from those days.

But here's a few I can remember (with approximate age where my memory allows me):

• Age 7 or 8 - (Secretly) Disassembling a professional strobe flasher's outer bits to see how it works. Those things have good quality, low self discharge caps - because in the 70's when it was built "portable batteries" weren't cheap - and no discharge resistor. So even after my dad had kept it un-powered for a long time it was still powerful enough to scare the living daylights out of me, (or into me as the case may be?) when I managed to trigger a prefire with my hand. Numb-ish for quite a while
• Age 11 - Again with the flasher tubes! Building my own personal stroboscope, because all the cool kids had them and I was convinced I was a cool kid. God knows why, looking back. Super twist though: It was the mains versus the central-heating radiator. It was also the day my dad told me the One-Hand-In-The-Pocket rule for the fist time.
• Age ?? - Home made tazer-type with second hand CCFL boosters stacked, while sparking around with it at school.
• Age 15 - Building my own PC. The day my dad told me the One-Hand-In-The-Pocket rule for the... let's estimate 5th time. While tweaking some things with a dual power supply set-up I had very cleverly disconnected the power plug from the PC I was working on. But, of course I was comparing measurements I had taken with another PC, which was powered up. I sort of applied the one-hand rule, because I was holding a wire in the turned on PC, while leaning on the floating PC. Then my hand slipped and the probe touched the Phase of the mains and I got the full-body jolt. Why? the other PC was obviously grounded through the PC monitor's cable that was still plugged in.
• Age 17 - While proving the power was turned off at my summer job. It wasn't. Turned out the fuse cabinet network started counting floors at 1 being ground floor, whereas we call floor 1 the one above the ground floor. Hurray for fuseboxes being halfway up a staircase with ambiguous identifiers.
• Age 23 - While working on a University project I got startled by someone violently entering the project room and in the reaction stuck my hand into a model DC-spark-gap array. Tiny, "low" voltage table-top one, but I still have the tiny white upside-down Y scar on my left hand.

Eh... When you do a lot, you are bound to statistically d'Oh more, right? Say yes.

[Jorpy]

At 5 years old, stuck a bent paperclip into the terminals of an AC outlet.
The paperclip started dribbling onto the floor. I never repeated the experiment

When I did that, at the age of 6 though, the light just went out.. Boring modern safety features 

[c4757p]

I suppose nobody wants to hear about an incident many years ago involving a car battery, jumper leads and my nipples.

No?

OK.

 O0

Dunno, I'm pretty curious now. Surely it wasn't worth much at 12V...?

[ronjodu]

About 40 years ago, just out of tech school, working in a factory. Their main power supply was 600 volt 3 phase that ran from one end of the factory floor to the other through 500 MCM cable suspended from the ceiling on insulators. Any time you needed power you just "live tapped" the overhead lines and ran the power to your local disconnect. I was making one of those taps, one hand behind my back    with a razor knife in my other hand, stripping a spot to tap into the 500 MCM. I had 2 of the 3 complete. The third was just beyond my reach so without thinking I reached over with my available hand and grabbed hold of a sprinkler line to steady myself while I overextended my other arm with the razor knife to begin the third tap. As I began cutting into the cable I felt this sledge hammer at full swing hitting me in the chest. I was thrown back 10 feet from where I was, razor knife flew through the air. Had it not been for a heavy coat of red paint on the sprinkler line I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be here to write this.
That was by far the worst for me in the 40 years I've been an electrician.