Does a parrot's foot conduct electricity?

On 2020-02-26, Commander Kinsey <CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:
On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:55:56 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-24, Archer <iam@here.com.invalid> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:56:42 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

My pet parrot has a habit of chewing wires but never got a shock. I tested her feet with a multimeter and it was over 20Mohms. My own dry finger is 1Mohm. Are they safe from shocks due to scaly feet?


https://youtu.be/sWg2xScJ6JM

See the above video showing someone in India who is not affected by
240 v passing through his body

it looks like some sort of trick, there's possibly a triac somewhere in
that setup that's taking most of the current.

Why can't you accept some bodies are different?

Now listen here you cowardly shit for brains.
You do not know what I am thinking.
Take your crypto-racist crap (or whatever it is) elsewhere.
I will have no part of it.

--
Jasen.
 
On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:35:17 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
<CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:40:23 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 19:28:48 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 12:45:55 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:08:45 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:30:55 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:15:28 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

And you shouldn't discount mitigating circumstances if safety is
involved. I was working on my boat, hands covered with salt-water and
figured I'd have no problem with 12V, yet touching the battery leads
reminded me of every little cut, abrasion, torn cuticle, etc., on my
hands. Not lethal maybe, but disagreeable.

I doubt it was even possible to harm you, even a 9V battery on your tongue just stings. Mind you if you're up a ladder anything that gives you a fright can make you fall off. I was painting my neighbour's eaves once and his stupid wife tried to have a bloody conversation with me from below. It was the only time I've used rather strong swearwords at her. Her husband found it amusing.

The salt water and battery thing wasn't dangerous since there needs to
be sufficient current through a vital organ. (the Navy said 100
milliamps - but not how they arrived at that figure) It was
disagreeable enough to make it hard to work on the system.

I heard something I believe is a myth, that someone in the army gave himself a heart attack from a multimeter on resistance mode by holding each end with a cut finger. No way there's many milliamps from those things. I think the accepted amount for death is somewhere around what you said the Navy said (hence breakers trip at 30 or 50mA).

Those old hand-cranked "meggers" (insulation testers) were reputed to
give an impressive shock. I never used one that was the bailiwick of
the antenna people. At a transmitter site I saw one guy have a spark
jump from his ass to the scope cart behind him when the safety
discharge contactors and his shorting stick failed. Old WW2 large HF
transmitter. He wasn't killed but did go into shock after laughing
about it, we had to get him off the mountain and to a hospital.

What a pussy. Awww were his buttocks sore? Hospital indeed....

I doubt he had control. He started shaking, sat down, passed out and
his extremities were getting cold. The building was cold- a twenty
horse blower in the basement blew air up through the transmitters, 200
watts to 100 kw, in Alaska. The transmitters heated the building.
(mostly 40kw SSB rigs fsk modulated)

A jolt through a large muscle shouldn't make you do that. He was clearly a pussy.

And you delight in being obstreperous.
I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.
With all the timers, pumps, lights, and fans, it seemed like a good
idea to check the conductivity. One side is an insulator the other
reads zero ohms everywhere I checked, even 5 feet apart. The stuff
isn't totally light proof it just attenuates the light ~80%, so I know
the aluminum coating can't be very thick.

One day that will fall down and short something and cause a fire, I'd be careful if I were you.

The potential is there. The lights use a current limiter, but the
open circuit voltage is 80 VDC. Current limiting (300 ma) and the
voltage is 30 volts or so. The pumps are 120 V submersible types and
the prime danger IMO. There is a GFI and 5 amp circuit breaker built
in too.

You probably don't need much current to set fire to that blanket. Is it flammable?

It is plastic so I expect it is flammable, but from my experience with
Mylar, it takes a high temperature without melting.

I just tried it. It wouldn't light readily with a match but the torch
did the job and it sustained a flame once lit.

If you have one to spare, you could have some fun passing current through it when in your garden, then you'd know if it's a fire hazard.

No thanks.

Better to know what it might do without trying it in your house.

That's the reason I checked the conductivity. I just need to keep it
away from the mains voltages.
It weighs 50 pounds or so with a large footprint and low center of
gravity,

My house still has fuses. I detest nuisance trips.

My wife's house had plug fuses,

You say "plug fuses" like that's a bad thing. All UK plugs have fuses.

Those edison-base, screw-in, fuses in a panel? Those turkeys are
expensive if you can even find a source today.

No, the fuse is inside the plug, meaning every single appliance has its own protection, like this:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/b6exht/replacing-a-13-amp-fuse-in-a-domestic-uk-electric-plug-b6exht.jpg

That is an excellent idea IMO. We don't have that requirement in the
US, and finding it is rare. I've only seen that once in a US plug.
fabric covered wiring, and no grounds.

Grounds can be dangerous. Consider you touch something that you didn't know was live. Now you need to touch a ground aswell to get a shock. And if that ground is your knee against an appliance while the live is on your finger, your heart is in the middle.

The ground is there so metal parts of a device that you may normally
touch won't be above ground potential. Better the fuse blows or the
GFI trips, than the drill you're gripping in your sweaty hand goes
live.

Except when it's something else that's live and the earthed thing is forming the other half of the circuit.

Does that happen a lot? I think if the whole system was isolated from
ground, lightening may play havoc with it. I used an isolated battery
charger on my motorcycle. Bike on the ground battery charger nearby
with a 3 wire cord. Every year I was replacing diodes in the
rectifier until I made the connection with lightening. Grounding the
minus charger lead fixed the problem.

Lightening can induce high voltages in cables without having to strike
the wires themselves.
The copper was all black with either oxidation or some coating, and
the enclosed lights had insulation that was falling apart.

She paid an electrician some $3,000 to bring it to code.

Why are Americans obsessed with this "code" thing? In the UK we do whatever we like with our own homes.

The electrical code is there for a reason. It is rare to find a code
requirement that doesn't make sense. I do my own wiring. I don't
take chances with things that can hurt other people.

But when it's YOUR house, the government should mind it's own fucking business.

They do. I can do my own wiring, but if a pro were to do it and it
amounts to panel replacement it would have to be inspected. I did fix
a panel problem on the incoming bus in my wife's house.

I called the electrical company and told them I wanted to take the
meter out to make the repair. (the only way, short of climbing the
power distribution pole, to make it safe to work on)

I explained what was wrong and what I wanted to do, he broke the seal,
pulled the meter and slipped some Mylar booties over the prongs and
put the meter back in. Later I pulled the booties off and put the
meter back and called him to put a new seal on the meter.

In my MC bum days I did work a job on a power line construction
outfit. Setting poles, running anchors and guy wires, driving the
truck, working as the ground crew for a lineman, etc.. Safety first,
especially on 25kv lines.

We had one lineman on the crew who drank excessively. In pulling out
the pigtail on a new transformer he was installing, he accidentally
shorted the HT line to ground. That was impressive. No one could see
that and not have a lot of respect for electricity. Didn't seem to
phase the line any, in spite of a loud bang, flash of green light and
big shower of molten metal.

Working on a movie set I heard that bang again, along with the light
momentarily dying on the set. Some careless lineman did die that day.
Employed in industry, some of my work had to pass inspection by
outside under-writers.

In the pharmaceutical industry it was always a war between engineering
and product safety. They want lubricants that can't harm people - the
machines need lubricants that actually work. We want safety valves
and burst disks on our boilers, they are afraid the valves can harbor
bacteria and take them off.

It is nice to be able to point to a requirement for these things...
before it becomes a matter for the lawyers.

It would be nice for everything to work rather than pansy about with safety.

In a perfect world. I take a lot of risks to have fun, but the idea
that my work might harm or kill someone else really bothers me. "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"
I thought
that was a good deal considering the amount of work involved. The
electric range needed 4 wires, and the wall outlets went from 14 AWG
to 12 AWG and 20 amp breakers. I think the only thing that guy didn't
change were the light switches and light fixtures.

I've done some wiring in her house, but I didn't want to tackle that
job.

I'm sure you could have done it for a lot less than $3000 unless it was a 10 bedroom mansion.

I doubt it. Every wire was changed, a new breaker panel installed,
GFI outlets and breakers where needed. It was a two-person job
fishing wires from a sweltering attic down to the rooms. I think they
earned every penny of 3K. $300 went to the power company to provide
an in-ground power delivery to the meter and panel.

I'd be doing it after driving for our bi-monthly visit. I donno about
you, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my wife's company. If I
want something to do, there's always a door that needs fixing, a
computer to fix, a shelf to install, a tree to trim, etc..

But you could have one it without all that pointless shit. I could rewire my house in a few days at a cost of Ł300. I have one box with 5 fuses in it. No breakers, ever. I don't want nuisance trips.

I don't believe you. You are just trying to jerk my chain.

In case the idiom is foreign to you:
jerk (one's) chain
To tease someone, often by trying to convince them of something
untrue.
 
On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:29:35 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
<CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 10:31:07 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 20:02:47 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 13:20:26 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:09:15 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.

You mean marijuana farm :)

Actually no. My marijuana days are over. Too many side effects like
gallons of mint chocolate chip ice cream...

Never happened with me, I never got "munchies", just sleepy.

Besides the "high" I'd occasionally have total memory recall. I would
be able to remember some of my motorcycle bum days camped along the
Snake River in Idaho for instance. But the memory was in color, the
smell of the wood smoke, sound of the river, my GF, splinters,
mosquito bites, quite literally everything, just like being there
again.

The dreams I had while sleeping were much more realistic, like you're describing. But not while I was awake.

The nice thing was being able to revisit the parts of my life that
were exceptionally rewarding. Like that first time with a new woman,
catching a big fish, snorkeling and spear-fishing coral heads, docking
the sailboat into a crowded marina under sail power alone, the majesty
of mountain meadows...

I seldom remember dreams, and can't direct them. Most often if I am
dreaming a lot it is a symptom of something wrong in my life.
I bought my wife one of the Aerogarden planters for Xmas a year ago,
and was so impressed with how well it worked that I had to have one,
so I built it.

I got her the "harvest" version and paid $129 at the time.
https://www.aerogarden.com/

I already had a light frame for growing seedlings, and got tired of

All gardening makes me tired. I'm way too lazy to make plants work. They're so fussy about everything.

I'm not much better. I do love to cook though,

I can't cook for peanuts. I love the invention called the microwave oven.

I worked several low-paying jobs in a hospital kitchen and a couple of
restaurants. Easy to find work that doesn't pay well, but I did learn
to cook and like it.
and there's no dried
herb or spice that can sub for the real thing. I really just wanted
basil in the winter... and I like to tinker with stuff and build
things.

I like to build things, but things that work, like computers. Or stuff made out of wood, like a house extension.

I don't do much in the way of large carpentry. More furniture and
things I need like a coil-winding lathe, kayak carrier, rotary mulch
bin, etc.. I built several decks. I did build a six-sided gazebo with
20 foot span; and I can't calculate compound miters to save my life...
I'm happy making fancy joints and using a chisel. I also made a
couple of ranks of wood organ pipes - I was on a kick exploring
resonance.
 
On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:27:30 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
<CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:55:56 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-24, Archer <iam@here.com.invalid> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:56:42 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

My pet parrot has a habit of chewing wires but never got a shock. I tested her feet with a multimeter and it was over 20Mohms. My own dry finger is 1Mohm. Are they safe from shocks due to scaly feet?


https://youtu.be/sWg2xScJ6JM

See the above video showing someone in India who is not affected by
240 v passing through his body

it looks like some sort of trick, there's possibly a triac somewhere in
that setup that's taking most of the current.

Why can't you accept some bodies are different?

There's an awful lot of utter crap on Utoobe. Perpetual motion
machines, gas engines that burn water, and other stuff that's totally
unworkable (like winding a few turns of copper around a spark plug and
doubling your internet speed)

not saying it can't happen, just that it pays to be skeptical
 
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:16:10 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:35:17 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:40:23 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 19:28:48 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 12:45:55 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:08:45 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:30:55 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:15:28 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

And you shouldn't discount mitigating circumstances if safety is
involved. I was working on my boat, hands covered with salt-water and
figured I'd have no problem with 12V, yet touching the battery leads
reminded me of every little cut, abrasion, torn cuticle, etc., on my
hands. Not lethal maybe, but disagreeable.

I doubt it was even possible to harm you, even a 9V battery on your tongue just stings. Mind you if you're up a ladder anything that gives you a fright can make you fall off. I was painting my neighbour's eaves once and his stupid wife tried to have a bloody conversation with me from below. It was the only time I've used rather strong swearwords at her. Her husband found it amusing.

The salt water and battery thing wasn't dangerous since there needs to
be sufficient current through a vital organ. (the Navy said 100
milliamps - but not how they arrived at that figure) It was
disagreeable enough to make it hard to work on the system.

I heard something I believe is a myth, that someone in the army gave himself a heart attack from a multimeter on resistance mode by holding each end with a cut finger. No way there's many milliamps from those things. I think the accepted amount for death is somewhere around what you said the Navy said (hence breakers trip at 30 or 50mA).

Those old hand-cranked "meggers" (insulation testers) were reputed to
give an impressive shock. I never used one that was the bailiwick of
the antenna people. At a transmitter site I saw one guy have a spark
jump from his ass to the scope cart behind him when the safety
discharge contactors and his shorting stick failed. Old WW2 large HF
transmitter. He wasn't killed but did go into shock after laughing
about it, we had to get him off the mountain and to a hospital.

What a pussy. Awww were his buttocks sore? Hospital indeed....

I doubt he had control. He started shaking, sat down, passed out and
his extremities were getting cold. The building was cold- a twenty
horse blower in the basement blew air up through the transmitters, 200
watts to 100 kw, in Alaska. The transmitters heated the building.
(mostly 40kw SSB rigs fsk modulated)

A jolt through a large muscle shouldn't make you do that. He was clearly a pussy.

And you delight in being obstreperous.

No, just stating a fact.

I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.
With all the timers, pumps, lights, and fans, it seemed like a good
idea to check the conductivity. One side is an insulator the other
reads zero ohms everywhere I checked, even 5 feet apart. The stuff
isn't totally light proof it just attenuates the light ~80%, so I know
the aluminum coating can't be very thick.

One day that will fall down and short something and cause a fire, I'd be careful if I were you.

The potential is there. The lights use a current limiter, but the
open circuit voltage is 80 VDC. Current limiting (300 ma) and the
voltage is 30 volts or so. The pumps are 120 V submersible types and
the prime danger IMO. There is a GFI and 5 amp circuit breaker built
in too.

You probably don't need much current to set fire to that blanket. Is it flammable?

It is plastic so I expect it is flammable, but from my experience with
Mylar, it takes a high temperature without melting.

I just tried it. It wouldn't light readily with a match but the torch
did the job and it sustained a flame once lit.

If you have one to spare, you could have some fun passing current through it when in your garden, then you'd know if it's a fire hazard.

No thanks.

Better to know what it might do without trying it in your house.

That's the reason I checked the conductivity. I just need to keep it
away from the mains voltages.

Floppy things can touch things you don't expect them to.

It weighs 50 pounds or so with a large footprint and low center of
gravity,

My house still has fuses. I detest nuisance trips.

My wife's house had plug fuses,

You say "plug fuses" like that's a bad thing. All UK plugs have fuses.

Those edison-base, screw-in, fuses in a panel? Those turkeys are
expensive if you can even find a source today.

No, the fuse is inside the plug, meaning every single appliance has its own protection, like this:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/b6exht/replacing-a-13-amp-fuse-in-a-domestic-uk-electric-plug-b6exht.jpg

That is an excellent idea IMO. We don't have that requirement in the
US, and finding it is rare. I've only seen that once in a US plug.

We didn't used to have it, but then we had radial connections to outlets.. Each outlet had its own fuse in the main box. Does yours? If not, you've actually got a low current device with a low current cord only protected by a high current fuse.

fabric covered wiring, and no grounds.

Grounds can be dangerous. Consider you touch something that you didn't know was live. Now you need to touch a ground aswell to get a shock. And if that ground is your knee against an appliance while the live is on your finger, your heart is in the middle.

The ground is there so metal parts of a device that you may normally
touch won't be above ground potential. Better the fuse blows or the
GFI trips, than the drill you're gripping in your sweaty hand goes
live.

Except when it's something else that's live and the earthed thing is forming the other half of the circuit.

Does that happen a lot? I think if the whole system was isolated from
ground, lightening may play havoc with it. I used an isolated battery
charger on my motorcycle. Bike on the ground battery charger nearby
with a 3 wire cord. Every year I was replacing diodes in the
rectifier until I made the connection with lightening. Grounding the
minus charger lead fixed the problem.

Lightening can induce high voltages in cables without having to strike
the wires themselves.

I don't know where you live but lightning is rare here. That's not why we have earthed equipment.

The copper was all black with either oxidation or some coating, and
the enclosed lights had insulation that was falling apart.

She paid an electrician some $3,000 to bring it to code.

Why are Americans obsessed with this "code" thing? In the UK we do whatever we like with our own homes.

The electrical code is there for a reason. It is rare to find a code
requirement that doesn't make sense. I do my own wiring. I don't
take chances with things that can hurt other people.

But when it's YOUR house, the government should mind it's own fucking business.

They do. I can do my own wiring, but if a pro were to do it and it
amounts to panel replacement it would have to be inspected.

That's the problem. If I call a pro to do some electrical work on my house, I should be able to say "just get on with the job and forget he code". But he won't, well most won't, the ones that do get my money :)

> I did fix a panel problem on the incoming bus in my wife's house.

Your wife's house? I take it you're no longer an item :p

I called the electrical company and told them I wanted to take the
meter out to make the repair. (the only way, short of climbing the
power distribution pole, to make it safe to work on)

I explained what was wrong and what I wanted to do, he broke the seal,
pulled the meter and slipped some Mylar booties over the prongs and
put the meter back in. Later I pulled the booties off and put the
meter back and called him to put a new seal on the meter.

No problem in the UK, the meter is on the side of my house. There's a 100A fuse before the meter, I can just pull that out. Now there's no power anywhere in my house. It does technically have a seal on it so the power company can see if I was "fiddling the meter", but they don't give a shit. They know you have to pull it when working on your main fuse panel.

In my MC bum days I did work a job on a power line construction
outfit. Setting poles, running anchors and guy wires, driving the
truck, working as the ground crew for a lineman, etc.. Safety first,
especially on 25kv lines.

Safety is for girls.

We had one lineman on the crew who drank excessively. In pulling out
the pigtail on a new transformer he was installing, he accidentally
shorted the HT line to ground. That was impressive. No one could see
that and not have a lot of respect for electricity. Didn't seem to
phase the line any, in spite of a loud bang, flash of green light and
big shower of molten metal.

Sounds fun!

Working on a movie set I heard that bang again, along with the light
momentarily dying on the set. Some careless lineman did die that day.

Employed in industry, some of my work had to pass inspection by
outside under-writers.

In the pharmaceutical industry it was always a war between engineering
and product safety. They want lubricants that can't harm people - the
machines need lubricants that actually work. We want safety valves
and burst disks on our boilers, they are afraid the valves can harbor
bacteria and take them off.

It is nice to be able to point to a requirement for these things...
before it becomes a matter for the lawyers.

It would be nice for everything to work rather than pansy about with safety.

In a perfect world. I take a lot of risks to have fun, but the idea
that my work might harm or kill someone else really bothers me. "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"

Killing someone else is less of a bad thing than killing yourself.

I thought
that was a good deal considering the amount of work involved. The
electric range needed 4 wires, and the wall outlets went from 14 AWG
to 12 AWG and 20 amp breakers. I think the only thing that guy didn't
change were the light switches and light fixtures.

I've done some wiring in her house, but I didn't want to tackle that
job.

I'm sure you could have done it for a lot less than $3000 unless it was a 10 bedroom mansion.

I doubt it. Every wire was changed, a new breaker panel installed,
GFI outlets and breakers where needed. It was a two-person job
fishing wires from a sweltering attic down to the rooms. I think they
earned every penny of 3K. $300 went to the power company to provide
an in-ground power delivery to the meter and panel.

I'd be doing it after driving for our bi-monthly visit. I donno about
you, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my wife's company. If I
want something to do, there's always a door that needs fixing, a
computer to fix, a shelf to install, a tree to trim, etc..

But you could have one it without all that pointless shit. I could rewire my house in a few days at a cost of Ł300. I have one box with 5 fuses in it. No breakers, ever. I don't want nuisance trips.

I don't believe you. You are just trying to jerk my chain.

In case the idiom is foreign to you:
jerk (one's) chain
To tease someone, often by trying to convince them of something
untrue.

Not sure what you're on about, but when something's broken, I fix it myself. A few cables do not amount to 3 grand.
 
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 07:22:44 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-26, Commander Kinsey <CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:
On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:55:56 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-24, Archer <iam@here.com.invalid> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:56:42 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

My pet parrot has a habit of chewing wires but never got a shock. I tested her feet with a multimeter and it was over 20Mohms. My own dry finger is 1Mohm. Are they safe from shocks due to scaly feet?


https://youtu.be/sWg2xScJ6JM

See the above video showing someone in India who is not affected by
240 v passing through his body

it looks like some sort of trick, there's possibly a triac somewhere in
that setup that's taking most of the current.

Why can't you accept some bodies are different?

Now listen here you cowardly shit for brains.
You do not know what I am thinking.
Take your crypto-racist crap (or whatever it is) elsewhere.
I will have no part of it.

What the fuck are you talking about?
 
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:58:13 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
<CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:16:10 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:35:17 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:40:23 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 19:28:48 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 12:45:55 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:08:45 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:30:55 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:15:28 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

And you shouldn't discount mitigating circumstances if safety is
involved. I was working on my boat, hands covered with salt-water and
figured I'd have no problem with 12V, yet touching the battery leads
reminded me of every little cut, abrasion, torn cuticle, etc., on my
hands. Not lethal maybe, but disagreeable.

I doubt it was even possible to harm you, even a 9V battery on your tongue just stings. Mind you if you're up a ladder anything that gives you a fright can make you fall off. I was painting my neighbour's eaves once and his stupid wife tried to have a bloody conversation with me from below. It was the only time I've used rather strong swearwords at her. Her husband found it amusing.

The salt water and battery thing wasn't dangerous since there needs to
be sufficient current through a vital organ. (the Navy said 100
milliamps - but not how they arrived at that figure) It was
disagreeable enough to make it hard to work on the system.

I heard something I believe is a myth, that someone in the army gave himself a heart attack from a multimeter on resistance mode by holding each end with a cut finger. No way there's many milliamps from those things. I think the accepted amount for death is somewhere around what you said the Navy said (hence breakers trip at 30 or 50mA).

Those old hand-cranked "meggers" (insulation testers) were reputed to
give an impressive shock. I never used one that was the bailiwick of
the antenna people. At a transmitter site I saw one guy have a spark
jump from his ass to the scope cart behind him when the safety
discharge contactors and his shorting stick failed. Old WW2 large HF
transmitter. He wasn't killed but did go into shock after laughing
about it, we had to get him off the mountain and to a hospital.

What a pussy. Awww were his buttocks sore? Hospital indeed....

I doubt he had control. He started shaking, sat down, passed out and
his extremities were getting cold. The building was cold- a twenty
horse blower in the basement blew air up through the transmitters, 200
watts to 100 kw, in Alaska. The transmitters heated the building.
(mostly 40kw SSB rigs fsk modulated)

A jolt through a large muscle shouldn't make you do that. He was clearly a pussy.

And you delight in being obstreperous.

No, just stating a fact.

The shorting hook (used to discharge the caps before working on the
xmitter) was in one hand and the path was from that arm through his
body and out his ass. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys etc., are "vital
organs."
I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.
With all the timers, pumps, lights, and fans, it seemed like a good
idea to check the conductivity. One side is an insulator the other
reads zero ohms everywhere I checked, even 5 feet apart. The stuff
isn't totally light proof it just attenuates the light ~80%, so I know
the aluminum coating can't be very thick.

One day that will fall down and short something and cause a fire, I'd be careful if I were you.

The potential is there. The lights use a current limiter, but the
open circuit voltage is 80 VDC. Current limiting (300 ma) and the
voltage is 30 volts or so. The pumps are 120 V submersible types and
the prime danger IMO. There is a GFI and 5 amp circuit breaker built
in too.

You probably don't need much current to set fire to that blanket. Is it flammable?

It is plastic so I expect it is flammable, but from my experience with
Mylar, it takes a high temperature without melting.

I just tried it. It wouldn't light readily with a match but the torch
did the job and it sustained a flame once lit.

If you have one to spare, you could have some fun passing current through it when in your garden, then you'd know if it's a fire hazard.

No thanks.

Better to know what it might do without trying it in your house.

That's the reason I checked the conductivity. I just need to keep it
away from the mains voltages.

Floppy things can touch things you don't expect them to.

I'll keep that in mind. The risk is mine, no one else's.
It weighs 50 pounds or so with a large footprint and low center of
gravity,

My house still has fuses. I detest nuisance trips.

My wife's house had plug fuses,

You say "plug fuses" like that's a bad thing. All UK plugs have fuses.

Those edison-base, screw-in, fuses in a panel? Those turkeys are
expensive if you can even find a source today.

No, the fuse is inside the plug, meaning every single appliance has its own protection, like this:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/b6exht/replacing-a-13-amp-fuse-in-a-domestic-uk-electric-plug-b6exht.jpg

That is an excellent idea IMO. We don't have that requirement in the
US, and finding it is rare. I've only seen that once in a US plug.

We didn't used to have it, but then we had radial connections to outlets. Each outlet had its own fuse in the main box. Does yours? If not, you've actually got a low current device with a low current cord only protected by a high current fuse.

That's a serious weakness in our system IMO. You can have 16-18 AWG
wire serving a circuit capable of 20 amps fed by 12 gauge wire.

I installed a "mini-split" AC at home. It had 10 gauge in a 25 amp
240 circuit, then they used 18 gauge for the run between the
compressor and indoor units. The wire is mostly outside, but it
passes through a wall to the inside and runs across the back of the
indoor unit. It bothered me enough to go back and install a pair of 7
amp fast blow fuses in the compressor unit to the indoor unit.
fabric covered wiring, and no grounds.

Grounds can be dangerous. Consider you touch something that you didn't know was live. Now you need to touch a ground aswell to get a shock. And if that ground is your knee against an appliance while the live is on your finger, your heart is in the middle.

The ground is there so metal parts of a device that you may normally
touch won't be above ground potential. Better the fuse blows or the
GFI trips, than the drill you're gripping in your sweaty hand goes
live.

Except when it's something else that's live and the earthed thing is forming the other half of the circuit.

Does that happen a lot? I think if the whole system was isolated from
ground, lightening may play havoc with it. I used an isolated battery
charger on my motorcycle. Bike on the ground battery charger nearby
with a 3 wire cord. Every year I was replacing diodes in the
rectifier until I made the connection with lightening. Grounding the
minus charger lead fixed the problem.

Lightening can induce high voltages in cables without having to strike
the wires themselves.

I don't know where you live but lightning is rare here. That's not why we have earthed equipment.

We are second only to Florida for lightening. I had a strike hit the
house and it popped two circuit breakers, damaged the TV, modem, KVM
switch, destroyed my LV outdoor lights, android TV box, and destroyed
the GFI serving the outdoor workbench. (that I know of)

I was camping on the beach and had rigged a light on a long pair of
wires so I could light my tent. It was looking like rain and I
figured I'd be in the tent reading through the storm. While I was
paying out wire from the bike's battery to the tent a lightening
strike hit about 30 miles offshore and I got a jolt from the wire in
my hand.
The copper was all black with either oxidation or some coating, and
the enclosed lights had insulation that was falling apart.

She paid an electrician some $3,000 to bring it to code.

Why are Americans obsessed with this "code" thing? In the UK we do whatever we like with our own homes.

The electrical code is there for a reason. It is rare to find a code
requirement that doesn't make sense. I do my own wiring. I don't
take chances with things that can hurt other people.

But when it's YOUR house, the government should mind it's own fucking business.

They do. I can do my own wiring, but if a pro were to do it and it
amounts to panel replacement it would have to be inspected.

That's the problem. If I call a pro to do some electrical work on my house, I should be able to say "just get on with the job and forget he code". But he won't, well most won't, the ones that do get my money :)

I figure most electricians are following rules without understanding
why they are doing things. Someone should be checking their work IMO.

One lab I worked at, had a new area opened up with new lab benches and
they contracted the work to outside electricians (big place with lots
of in-house talent but they let a contractor do this lab).

That turned up two mistakes some weeks later when the analyst running
the lab complained that he got a shock. The idiots had the ground
switched with the neutral at the electrical outlet, which was further
compounded with the instrument having the neutral wire connected to
the case and no ground wire - it was even in the schematics that way!
I called them and it turned out in the early models they had an
electrical noise problem and that was the fix.

Unlike residential houses this bench did not require a GFI outlet. If
it had been required that could not have happened - newer GFI's can
detect a ground/neutral switch.
I did fix a panel problem on the incoming bus in my wife's house.

Your wife's house? I take it you're no longer an item :p

It just worked out that way. She's was a "control scientist" at the
place I worked and divorced. She had her own house. I wanted to move
to the coast to sail and fish so got a job at a small lab by the
coast, then bought a house. She paid off her house with a stock
option scheme she was in, I paid off mine by doubling down on the
principle each month and had it paid in 4 years. We are still married
and take turns driving to see each other on weekends and vacations,
and other things. We love each other without doubt.

I had lots of chances to cheat and I never promised I would remain
faithful... I did promise to tell her if I did "cheat." (but that's
hardly cheating) I even got propositioned a few times and turned down
women because our own love-life was always very satisfying and I'd
already had a number of women before her and figured none could
compare.

She's honest and ethical, we like the same music, like to cook,
explore abandoned buildings, fish, sail, kayak, etc., and just be
together.

I called the electrical company and told them I wanted to take the
meter out to make the repair. (the only way, short of climbing the
power distribution pole, to make it safe to work on)

I explained what was wrong and what I wanted to do, he broke the seal,
pulled the meter and slipped some Mylar booties over the prongs and
put the meter back in. Later I pulled the booties off and put the
meter back and called him to put a new seal on the meter.

No problem in the UK, the meter is on the side of my house. There's a 100A fuse before the meter, I can just pull that out. Now there's no power anywhere in my house. It does technically have a seal on it so the power company can see if I was "fiddling the meter", but they don't give a shit. They know you have to pull it when working on your main fuse panel.

BTW the old mechanical watt-hour meters could be diddled without
breaking a seal. They used magnetic bearings in the rotors for
non-contact bearings, a strong magnet (from large old 10" hard drives)
could send the suspended rotor's spindle off-center and it would rub
the magnet and stop spinning or slow down a lot.
In my MC bum days I did work a job on a power line construction
outfit. Setting poles, running anchors and guy wires, driving the
truck, working as the ground crew for a lineman, etc.. Safety first,
especially on 25kv lines.

Safety is for girls.

Machismo, is for Darwin Award contestants.
We had one lineman on the crew who drank excessively. In pulling out
the pigtail on a new transformer he was installing, he accidentally
shorted the HT line to ground. That was impressive. No one could see
that and not have a lot of respect for electricity. Didn't seem to
phase the line any, in spite of a loud bang, flash of green light and
big shower of molten metal.

Sounds fun!

Seeing the foreman running around yelling, was fun.
Working on a movie set I heard that bang again, along with the light
momentarily dying on the set. Some careless lineman did die that day.

Employed in industry, some of my work had to pass inspection by
outside under-writers.

In the pharmaceutical industry it was always a war between engineering
and product safety. They want lubricants that can't harm people - the
machines need lubricants that actually work. We want safety valves
and burst disks on our boilers, they are afraid the valves can harbor
bacteria and take them off.

It is nice to be able to point to a requirement for these things...
before it becomes a matter for the lawyers.

It would be nice for everything to work rather than pansy about with safety.

In a perfect world. I take a lot of risks to have fun, but the idea
that my work might harm or kill someone else really bothers me. "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"

Killing someone else is less of a bad thing than killing yourself.

Ya think? I might be killing one of the lab-rats or manufacturing
techs; people I go out drinking with and know.
I thought
that was a good deal considering the amount of work involved. The
electric range needed 4 wires, and the wall outlets went from 14 AWG
to 12 AWG and 20 amp breakers. I think the only thing that guy didn't
change were the light switches and light fixtures.

I've done some wiring in her house, but I didn't want to tackle that
job.

I'm sure you could have done it for a lot less than $3000 unless it was a 10 bedroom mansion.

I doubt it. Every wire was changed, a new breaker panel installed,
GFI outlets and breakers where needed. It was a two-person job
fishing wires from a sweltering attic down to the rooms. I think they
earned every penny of 3K. $300 went to the power company to provide
an in-ground power delivery to the meter and panel.

I'd be doing it after driving for our bi-monthly visit. I donno about
you, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my wife's company. If I
want something to do, there's always a door that needs fixing, a
computer to fix, a shelf to install, a tree to trim, etc..

But you could have one it without all that pointless shit. I could rewire my house in a few days at a cost of Ł300. I have one box with 5 fuses in it. No breakers, ever. I don't want nuisance trips.

I don't believe you. You are just trying to jerk my chain.

In case the idiom is foreign to you:
jerk (one's) chain
To tease someone, often by trying to convince them of something
untrue.

Not sure what you're on about, but when something's broken, I fix it myself. A few cables do not amount to 3 grand.

Copper wire (I'm sure they recycled the scrap) isn't cheap. It took
two people three days to do the job. AND I didn't have to get up in
that attic and crawl around in 120 degree heat.
 
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:33:20 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:29:35 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 10:31:07 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 20:02:47 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 13:20:26 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:09:15 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.

You mean marijuana farm :)

Actually no. My marijuana days are over. Too many side effects like
gallons of mint chocolate chip ice cream...

Never happened with me, I never got "munchies", just sleepy.

Besides the "high" I'd occasionally have total memory recall. I would
be able to remember some of my motorcycle bum days camped along the
Snake River in Idaho for instance. But the memory was in color, the
smell of the wood smoke, sound of the river, my GF, splinters,
mosquito bites, quite literally everything, just like being there
again.

The dreams I had while sleeping were much more realistic, like you're describing. But not while I was awake.

The nice thing was being able to revisit the parts of my life that
were exceptionally rewarding. Like that first time with a new woman,
catching a big fish, snorkeling and spear-fishing coral heads, docking
the sailboat into a crowded marina under sail power alone, the majesty
of mountain meadows...

I seldom remember dreams, and can't direct them. Most often if I am
dreaming a lot it is a symptom of something wrong in my life.

Remembering dreams just means you happen to wake up during them. All it means is you're a light sleeper. I bought something when I was a teenager called a Novadreamer. It's a mask you put over your eyes during sleep with LEDs in it, and a motion sensor. When it detects your eyes twitching during REM sleep, it flashes the LEDs which slightly wakes you up. You stay sleeping and dreaming, but you're now awake enough to control your dream and remember it. When I stopped using it I retained the ability. And it probably permanently fucked me in the head.

I bought my wife one of the Aerogarden planters for Xmas a year ago,
and was so impressed with how well it worked that I had to have one,
so I built it.

I got her the "harvest" version and paid $129 at the time.
https://www.aerogarden.com/

I already had a light frame for growing seedlings, and got tired of

All gardening makes me tired. I'm way too lazy to make plants work. They're so fussy about everything.

I'm not much better. I do love to cook though,

I can't cook for peanuts. I love the invention called the microwave oven.

I worked several low-paying jobs in a hospital kitchen and a couple of
restaurants. Easy to find work that doesn't pay well, but I did learn
to cook and like it.

I have a problem with cooking. The food makes me hungry and I eat lots of it.

and there's no dried
herb or spice that can sub for the real thing. I really just wanted
basil in the winter... and I like to tinker with stuff and build
things.

I like to build things, but things that work, like computers. Or stuff made out of wood, like a house extension.

I don't do much in the way of large carpentry. More furniture and
things I need like a coil-winding lathe, kayak carrier, rotary mulch
bin, etc.. I built several decks. I did build a six-sided gazebo with
20 foot span; and I can't calculate compound miters to save my life...
I'm happy making fancy joints and using a chisel. I also made a
couple of ranks of wood organ pipes - I was on a kick exploring
resonance.

You sound very similar to me. Hey if it's too hard, just look it up on Google, that's what I do.
 
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:39:34 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:27:30 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:55:56 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-24, Archer <iam@here.com.invalid> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:56:42 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

My pet parrot has a habit of chewing wires but never got a shock. I tested her feet with a multimeter and it was over 20Mohms. My own dry finger is 1Mohm. Are they safe from shocks due to scaly feet?


https://youtu.be/sWg2xScJ6JM

See the above video showing someone in India who is not affected by
240 v passing through his body

it looks like some sort of trick, there's possibly a triac somewhere in
that setup that's taking most of the current.

Why can't you accept some bodies are different?

There's an awful lot of utter crap on Utoobe. Perpetual motion
machines, gas engines that burn water, and other stuff that's totally
unworkable (like winding a few turns of copper around a spark plug and
doubling your internet speed)

not saying it can't happen, just that it pays to be skeptical

Sure, if you see something that looks like a UFO, be skeptical, but I can't see why someone couldn't conduct electricity. For example, some people freak out with the mildest of shocks, yet I don't. I did an army assault course which had some electric fences placed in it for a laugh, some people were jumping about, falling over, unable to control themselves. I think the most I did was say "ouch".
 
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 23:13:38 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:58:13 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:16:10 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:35:17 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:40:23 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 19:28:48 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 12:45:55 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:08:45 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:30:55 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:15:28 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

And you shouldn't discount mitigating circumstances if safety is
involved. I was working on my boat, hands covered with salt-water and
figured I'd have no problem with 12V, yet touching the battery leads
reminded me of every little cut, abrasion, torn cuticle, etc.., on my
hands. Not lethal maybe, but disagreeable.

I doubt it was even possible to harm you, even a 9V battery on your tongue just stings. Mind you if you're up a ladder anything that gives you a fright can make you fall off. I was painting my neighbour's eaves once and his stupid wife tried to have a bloody conversation with me from below. It was the only time I've used rather strong swearwords at her. Her husband found it amusing.

The salt water and battery thing wasn't dangerous since there needs to
be sufficient current through a vital organ. (the Navy said 100
milliamps - but not how they arrived at that figure) It was
disagreeable enough to make it hard to work on the system.

I heard something I believe is a myth, that someone in the army gave himself a heart attack from a multimeter on resistance mode by holding each end with a cut finger. No way there's many milliamps from those things. I think the accepted amount for death is somewhere around what you said the Navy said (hence breakers trip at 30 or 50mA).

Those old hand-cranked "meggers" (insulation testers) were reputed to
give an impressive shock. I never used one that was the bailiwick of
the antenna people. At a transmitter site I saw one guy have a spark
jump from his ass to the scope cart behind him when the safety
discharge contactors and his shorting stick failed. Old WW2 large HF
transmitter. He wasn't killed but did go into shock after laughing
about it, we had to get him off the mountain and to a hospital.

What a pussy. Awww were his buttocks sore? Hospital indeed....

I doubt he had control. He started shaking, sat down, passed out and
his extremities were getting cold. The building was cold- a twenty
horse blower in the basement blew air up through the transmitters, 200
watts to 100 kw, in Alaska. The transmitters heated the building.
(mostly 40kw SSB rigs fsk modulated)

A jolt through a large muscle shouldn't make you do that. He was clearly a pussy.

And you delight in being obstreperous.

No, just stating a fact.

The shorting hook (used to discharge the caps before working on the
xmitter) was in one hand and the path was from that arm through his
body and out his ass. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys etc., are "vital
organs."

And get damaged immediately, not later. He managed to laugh, THEN went into shock? Shock is your brain giving up because it's useless.

I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.
With all the timers, pumps, lights, and fans, it seemed like a good
idea to check the conductivity. One side is an insulator the other
reads zero ohms everywhere I checked, even 5 feet apart. The stuff
isn't totally light proof it just attenuates the light ~80%, so I know
the aluminum coating can't be very thick.

One day that will fall down and short something and cause a fire, I'd be careful if I were you.

The potential is there. The lights use a current limiter, but the
open circuit voltage is 80 VDC. Current limiting (300 ma) and the
voltage is 30 volts or so. The pumps are 120 V submersible types and
the prime danger IMO. There is a GFI and 5 amp circuit breaker built
in too.

You probably don't need much current to set fire to that blanket. Is it flammable?

It is plastic so I expect it is flammable, but from my experience with
Mylar, it takes a high temperature without melting.

I just tried it. It wouldn't light readily with a match but the torch
did the job and it sustained a flame once lit.

If you have one to spare, you could have some fun passing current through it when in your garden, then you'd know if it's a fire hazard.

No thanks.

Better to know what it might do without trying it in your house.

That's the reason I checked the conductivity. I just need to keep it
away from the mains voltages.

Floppy things can touch things you don't expect them to.

I'll keep that in mind. The risk is mine, no one else's.

You are one of a very small number of people with that common sense. Most seem to think everyone must be safe at all costs or be jailed for life.

It weighs 50 pounds or so with a large footprint and low center of
gravity,

My house still has fuses. I detest nuisance trips.

My wife's house had plug fuses,

You say "plug fuses" like that's a bad thing. All UK plugs have fuses.

Those edison-base, screw-in, fuses in a panel? Those turkeys are
expensive if you can even find a source today.

No, the fuse is inside the plug, meaning every single appliance has its own protection, like this:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/b6exht/replacing-a-13-amp-fuse-in-a-domestic-uk-electric-plug-b6exht.jpg

That is an excellent idea IMO. We don't have that requirement in the
US, and finding it is rare. I've only seen that once in a US plug.

We didn't used to have it, but then we had radial connections to outlets. Each outlet had its own fuse in the main box. Does yours? If not, you've actually got a low current device with a low current cord only protected by a high current fuse.

That's a serious weakness in our system IMO. You can have 16-18 AWG
wire serving a circuit capable of 20 amps fed by 12 gauge wire.

I installed a "mini-split" AC at home. It had 10 gauge in a 25 amp
240 circuit, then they used 18 gauge for the run between the
compressor and indoor units. The wire is mostly outside, but it
passes through a wall to the inside and runs across the back of the
indoor unit. It bothered me enough to go back and install a pair of 7
amp fast blow fuses in the compressor unit to the indoor unit.

Why do you have this "guage" measurement? It's meaningless to me. In the UK it's in mm^2. At least I know what that means, it's a simple cross sectional area in mm. And as a rule of thumb, 1mm^2 carries 10 amps.

fabric covered wiring, and no grounds.

Grounds can be dangerous. Consider you touch something that you didn't know was live. Now you need to touch a ground aswell to get a shock. And if that ground is your knee against an appliance while the live is on your finger, your heart is in the middle.

The ground is there so metal parts of a device that you may normally
touch won't be above ground potential. Better the fuse blows or the
GFI trips, than the drill you're gripping in your sweaty hand goes
live.

Except when it's something else that's live and the earthed thing is forming the other half of the circuit.

Does that happen a lot? I think if the whole system was isolated from
ground, lightening may play havoc with it. I used an isolated battery
charger on my motorcycle. Bike on the ground battery charger nearby
with a 3 wire cord. Every year I was replacing diodes in the
rectifier until I made the connection with lightening. Grounding the
minus charger lead fixed the problem.

Lightening can induce high voltages in cables without having to strike
the wires themselves.

I don't know where you live but lightning is rare here. That's not why we have earthed equipment.

We are second only to Florida for lightening. I had a strike hit the
house and it popped two circuit breakers, damaged the TV, modem, KVM
switch, destroyed my LV outdoor lights, android TV box, and destroyed
the GFI serving the outdoor workbench. (that I know of)

I was camping on the beach and had rigged a light on a long pair of
wires so I could light my tent. It was looking like rain and I
figured I'd be in the tent reading through the storm. While I was
paying out wire from the bike's battery to the tent a lightening
strike hit about 30 miles offshore and I got a jolt from the wire in
my hand.

Bloody hell. The worst I've seen in the UK is minor damage to computers - eg a sound card or network card fried, but the rest of it ran fine. I did once see a tree that had clearly evaporated though.

The copper was all black with either oxidation or some coating, and
the enclosed lights had insulation that was falling apart.

She paid an electrician some $3,000 to bring it to code.

Why are Americans obsessed with this "code" thing? In the UK we do whatever we like with our own homes.

The electrical code is there for a reason. It is rare to find a code
requirement that doesn't make sense. I do my own wiring. I don't
take chances with things that can hurt other people.

But when it's YOUR house, the government should mind it's own fucking business.

They do. I can do my own wiring, but if a pro were to do it and it
amounts to panel replacement it would have to be inspected.

That's the problem. If I call a pro to do some electrical work on my house, I should be able to say "just get on with the job and forget he code". But he won't, well most won't, the ones that do get my money :)

I figure most electricians are following rules without understanding
why they are doing things. Someone should be checking their work IMO.

One lab I worked at, had a new area opened up with new lab benches and
they contracted the work to outside electricians (big place with lots
of in-house talent but they let a contractor do this lab).

That turned up two mistakes some weeks later when the analyst running
the lab complained that he got a shock. The idiots had the ground
switched with the neutral at the electrical outlet, which was further
compounded with the instrument having the neutral wire connected to
the case and no ground wire - it was even in the schematics that way!
I called them and it turned out in the early models they had an
electrical noise problem and that was the fix.

Where I worked some Irish (as in morons) electricians mixed up a neutral with a live. It was because the UK colour coding had changed to the stupid EU colour coding, and the building had half of each while they were extending it. Since we had a large building and all three phases, what they ended up with was two phases connected to the outlets in a room full of computers, instead of one phase and neutral. So 340V instead of 240V to 20 computers. Much smoke, bad smell, I got called to see what was wrong.

My insurance claim to electricians: 20 expensive computers destroyed.
Reality: 20 of Ł0.50 capacitors destroyed in the PSUs.
Insurance payout: large.
Cost to the company: fuck all.

Unlike residential houses this bench did not require a GFI outlet. If
it had been required that could not have happened - newer GFI's can
detect a ground/neutral switch.

GFIs are for pussies.

I did fix a panel problem on the incoming bus in my wife's house.

Your wife's house? I take it you're no longer an item :p

It just worked out that way. She's was a "control scientist" at the
place I worked and divorced. She had her own house. I wanted to move
to the coast to sail and fish so got a job at a small lab by the
coast, then bought a house. She paid off her house with a stock
option scheme she was in, I paid off mine by doubling down on the
principle each month and had it paid in 4 years. We are still married
and take turns driving to see each other on weekends and vacations,
and other things. We love each other without doubt.

I had lots of chances to cheat and I never promised I would remain
faithful... I did promise to tell her if I did "cheat." (but that's
hardly cheating) I even got propositioned a few times and turned down
women because our own love-life was always very satisfying and I'd
already had a number of women before her and figured none could
compare.

She's honest and ethical, we like the same music, like to cook,
explore abandoned buildings, fish, sail, kayak, etc., and just be
together.

Sounds good.

I called the electrical company and told them I wanted to take the
meter out to make the repair. (the only way, short of climbing the
power distribution pole, to make it safe to work on)

I explained what was wrong and what I wanted to do, he broke the seal,
pulled the meter and slipped some Mylar booties over the prongs and
put the meter back in. Later I pulled the booties off and put the
meter back and called him to put a new seal on the meter.

No problem in the UK, the meter is on the side of my house. There's a 100A fuse before the meter, I can just pull that out. Now there's no power anywhere in my house. It does technically have a seal on it so the power company can see if I was "fiddling the meter", but they don't give a shit. They know you have to pull it when working on your main fuse panel.

BTW the old mechanical watt-hour meters could be diddled without
breaking a seal. They used magnetic bearings in the rotors for
non-contact bearings, a strong magnet (from large old 10" hard drives)
could send the suspended rotor's spindle off-center and it would rub
the magnet and stop spinning or slow down a lot.

Indeed, but there are easier ways with any meter.

In my MC bum days I did work a job on a power line construction
outfit. Setting poles, running anchors and guy wires, driving the
truck, working as the ground crew for a lineman, etc.. Safety first,
especially on 25kv lines.

Safety is for girls.

Machismo, is for Darwin Award contestants.

Only if you do it wrong.

We had one lineman on the crew who drank excessively. In pulling out
the pigtail on a new transformer he was installing, he accidentally
shorted the HT line to ground. That was impressive. No one could see
that and not have a lot of respect for electricity. Didn't seem to
phase the line any, in spite of a loud bang, flash of green light and
big shower of molten metal.

Sounds fun!

Seeing the foreman running around yelling, was fun.

Foremen are always funny. One once told me I "can't be here". I corrected his poor English (he was Irish) and told him that I already was here and there was nothing he could do about it, then I pointed out he was a "fucking subcontractor" and I actually work here. He made a formal complaint which my boss ignored.

Working on a movie set I heard that bang again, along with the light
momentarily dying on the set. Some careless lineman did die that day.

Employed in industry, some of my work had to pass inspection by
outside under-writers.

In the pharmaceutical industry it was always a war between engineering
and product safety. They want lubricants that can't harm people - the
machines need lubricants that actually work. We want safety valves
and burst disks on our boilers, they are afraid the valves can harbor
bacteria and take them off.

It is nice to be able to point to a requirement for these things....
before it becomes a matter for the lawyers.

It would be nice for everything to work rather than pansy about with safety.

In a perfect world. I take a lot of risks to have fun, but the idea
that my work might harm or kill someone else really bothers me. "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"

Killing someone else is less of a bad thing than killing yourself.

Ya think? I might be killing one of the lab-rats or manufacturing
techs; people I go out drinking with and know.

But you'll still be alive. Killing yourself is always the worst thing to do.

I thought
that was a good deal considering the amount of work involved. The
electric range needed 4 wires, and the wall outlets went from 14 AWG
to 12 AWG and 20 amp breakers. I think the only thing that guy didn't
change were the light switches and light fixtures.

I've done some wiring in her house, but I didn't want to tackle that
job.

I'm sure you could have done it for a lot less than $3000 unless it was a 10 bedroom mansion.

I doubt it. Every wire was changed, a new breaker panel installed,
GFI outlets and breakers where needed. It was a two-person job
fishing wires from a sweltering attic down to the rooms. I think they
earned every penny of 3K. $300 went to the power company to provide
an in-ground power delivery to the meter and panel.

I'd be doing it after driving for our bi-monthly visit. I donno about
you, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my wife's company. If I
want something to do, there's always a door that needs fixing, a
computer to fix, a shelf to install, a tree to trim, etc..

But you could have one it without all that pointless shit. I could rewire my house in a few days at a cost of Ł300. I have one box with 5 fuses in it. No breakers, ever. I don't want nuisance trips.

I don't believe you. You are just trying to jerk my chain.

In case the idiom is foreign to you:
jerk (one's) chain
To tease someone, often by trying to convince them of something
untrue.

Not sure what you're on about, but when something's broken, I fix it myself. A few cables do not amount to 3 grand.

Copper wire (I'm sure they recycled the scrap) isn't cheap. It took
two people three days to do the job. AND I didn't have to get up in
that attic and crawl around in 120 degree heat.

That must be a big house.
 
On Sat, 29 Feb 2020 20:33:44 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
<CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:39:34 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:27:30 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:55:56 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-24, Archer <iam@here.com.invalid> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:56:42 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

My pet parrot has a habit of chewing wires but never got a shock. I tested her feet with a multimeter and it was over 20Mohms. My own dry finger is 1Mohm. Are they safe from shocks due to scaly feet?


https://youtu.be/sWg2xScJ6JM

See the above video showing someone in India who is not affected by
240 v passing through his body

it looks like some sort of trick, there's possibly a triac somewhere in
that setup that's taking most of the current.

Why can't you accept some bodies are different?

There's an awful lot of utter crap on Utoobe. Perpetual motion
machines, gas engines that burn water, and other stuff that's totally
unworkable (like winding a few turns of copper around a spark plug and
doubling your internet speed)

not saying it can't happen, just that it pays to be skeptical

Sure, if you see something that looks like a UFO, be skeptical, but I can't see why someone couldn't conduct electricity. For example, some people freak out with the mildest of shocks, yet I don't. I did an army assault course which had some electric fences placed in it for a laugh, some people were jumping about, falling over, unable to control themselves. I think the most I did was say "ouch".

I was playing with electricity when I was 6. I learned to avoid
shocks after a few good hits. We used vacuum tubes (valves) in those
days, they used high voltages.
 
On Sat, 29 Feb 2020 22:13:32 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
<CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 23:13:38 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:58:13 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:16:10 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:35:17 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:40:23 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 19:28:48 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 12:45:55 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:08:45 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:57:08 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 18:30:55 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:15:28 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

And you shouldn't discount mitigating circumstances if safety is
involved. I was working on my boat, hands covered with salt-water and
figured I'd have no problem with 12V, yet touching the battery leads
reminded me of every little cut, abrasion, torn cuticle, etc., on my
hands. Not lethal maybe, but disagreeable.

I doubt it was even possible to harm you, even a 9V battery on your tongue just stings. Mind you if you're up a ladder anything that gives you a fright can make you fall off. I was painting my neighbour's eaves once and his stupid wife tried to have a bloody conversation with me from below. It was the only time I've used rather strong swearwords at her. Her husband found it amusing.

The salt water and battery thing wasn't dangerous since there needs to
be sufficient current through a vital organ. (the Navy said 100
milliamps - but not how they arrived at that figure) It was
disagreeable enough to make it hard to work on the system.

I heard something I believe is a myth, that someone in the army gave himself a heart attack from a multimeter on resistance mode by holding each end with a cut finger. No way there's many milliamps from those things. I think the accepted amount for death is somewhere around what you said the Navy said (hence breakers trip at 30 or 50mA).

Those old hand-cranked "meggers" (insulation testers) were reputed to
give an impressive shock. I never used one that was the bailiwick of
the antenna people. At a transmitter site I saw one guy have a spark
jump from his ass to the scope cart behind him when the safety
discharge contactors and his shorting stick failed. Old WW2 large HF
transmitter. He wasn't killed but did go into shock after laughing
about it, we had to get him off the mountain and to a hospital.

What a pussy. Awww were his buttocks sore? Hospital indeed....

I doubt he had control. He started shaking, sat down, passed out and
his extremities were getting cold. The building was cold- a twenty
horse blower in the basement blew air up through the transmitters, 200
watts to 100 kw, in Alaska. The transmitters heated the building.
(mostly 40kw SSB rigs fsk modulated)

A jolt through a large muscle shouldn't make you do that. He was clearly a pussy.

And you delight in being obstreperous.

No, just stating a fact.

The shorting hook (used to discharge the caps before working on the
xmitter) was in one hand and the path was from that arm through his
body and out his ass. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys etc., are "vital
organs."

And get damaged immediately, not later. He managed to laugh, THEN went into shock? Shock is your brain giving up because it's useless.

Perhaps it was psychological due to the realization of how close he'd
come, or maybe a physiological response to the incident. I certainly
don't have the knowledge to make that determination.
I'm using one of those so-called space blankets (aluminized polyester
film) to shield the light emanating from a indoor hydroponic planter.
With all the timers, pumps, lights, and fans, it seemed like a good
idea to check the conductivity. One side is an insulator the other
reads zero ohms everywhere I checked, even 5 feet apart. The stuff
isn't totally light proof it just attenuates the light ~80%, so I know
the aluminum coating can't be very thick.

One day that will fall down and short something and cause a fire, I'd be careful if I were you.

The potential is there. The lights use a current limiter, but the
open circuit voltage is 80 VDC. Current limiting (300 ma) and the
voltage is 30 volts or so. The pumps are 120 V submersible types and
the prime danger IMO. There is a GFI and 5 amp circuit breaker built
in too.

You probably don't need much current to set fire to that blanket. Is it flammable?

It is plastic so I expect it is flammable, but from my experience with
Mylar, it takes a high temperature without melting.

I just tried it. It wouldn't light readily with a match but the torch
did the job and it sustained a flame once lit.

If you have one to spare, you could have some fun passing current through it when in your garden, then you'd know if it's a fire hazard.

No thanks.

Better to know what it might do without trying it in your house.

That's the reason I checked the conductivity. I just need to keep it
away from the mains voltages.

Floppy things can touch things you don't expect them to.

I'll keep that in mind. The risk is mine, no one else's.

You are one of a very small number of people with that common sense. Most seem to think everyone must be safe at all costs or be jailed for life.

I pay attention to the near misses. Most accidents can be predicted
by previous behavior, so it makes sense to treat a near miss the same
as you would an accident.
It weighs 50 pounds or so with a large footprint and low center of
gravity,

My house still has fuses. I detest nuisance trips.

My wife's house had plug fuses,

You say "plug fuses" like that's a bad thing. All UK plugs have fuses.

Those edison-base, screw-in, fuses in a panel? Those turkeys are
expensive if you can even find a source today.

No, the fuse is inside the plug, meaning every single appliance has its own protection, like this:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/b6exht/replacing-a-13-amp-fuse-in-a-domestic-uk-electric-plug-b6exht.jpg

That is an excellent idea IMO. We don't have that requirement in the
US, and finding it is rare. I've only seen that once in a US plug.

We didn't used to have it, but then we had radial connections to outlets. Each outlet had its own fuse in the main box. Does yours? If not, you've actually got a low current device with a low current cord only protected by a high current fuse.

That's a serious weakness in our system IMO. You can have 16-18 AWG
wire serving a circuit capable of 20 amps fed by 12 gauge wire.

I installed a "mini-split" AC at home. It had 10 gauge in a 25 amp
240 circuit, then they used 18 gauge for the run between the
compressor and indoor units. The wire is mostly outside, but it
passes through a wall to the inside and runs across the back of the
indoor unit. It bothered me enough to go back and install a pair of 7
amp fast blow fuses in the compressor unit to the indoor unit.

Why do you have this "guage" measurement? It's meaningless to me. In the UK it's in mm^2. At least I know what that means, it's a simple cross sectional area in mm. And as a rule of thumb, 1mm^2 carries 10 amps.

It's historical. Back in the day (so I'm told) they'd count the dies
the wire was drawn through to reduce the diameter. We still use
inches, fractions, and feet, Fahrenheit, and a 12 hour clock showing
local time.

When it comes to woodworking I'm strictly inches and fractions, in the
lab it's meters, Celsius, liters. It does make for expensive mistakes
from time to time.
fabric covered wiring, and no grounds.

Grounds can be dangerous. Consider you touch something that you didn't know was live. Now you need to touch a ground aswell to get a shock. And if that ground is your knee against an appliance while the live is on your finger, your heart is in the middle.

The ground is there so metal parts of a device that you may normally
touch won't be above ground potential. Better the fuse blows or the
GFI trips, than the drill you're gripping in your sweaty hand goes
live.

Except when it's something else that's live and the earthed thing is forming the other half of the circuit.

Does that happen a lot? I think if the whole system was isolated from
ground, lightening may play havoc with it. I used an isolated battery
charger on my motorcycle. Bike on the ground battery charger nearby
with a 3 wire cord. Every year I was replacing diodes in the
rectifier until I made the connection with lightening. Grounding the
minus charger lead fixed the problem.

Lightening can induce high voltages in cables without having to strike
the wires themselves.

I don't know where you live but lightning is rare here. That's not why we have earthed equipment.

We are second only to Florida for lightening. I had a strike hit the
house and it popped two circuit breakers, damaged the TV, modem, KVM
switch, destroyed my LV outdoor lights, android TV box, and destroyed
the GFI serving the outdoor workbench. (that I know of)

I was camping on the beach and had rigged a light on a long pair of
wires so I could light my tent. It was looking like rain and I
figured I'd be in the tent reading through the storm. While I was
paying out wire from the bike's battery to the tent a lightening
strike hit about 30 miles offshore and I got a jolt from the wire in
my hand.

Bloody hell. The worst I've seen in the UK is minor damage to computers - eg a sound card or network card fried, but the rest of it ran fine. I did once see a tree that had clearly evaporated though.

When I retired I built a series of Tesla coils and a large induction
coil. The old computer I had was susceptible to electrical
discharges. When I was playing with HV I'd have to go into the CMOS
and reset the parameters, somehow the stuff could change the settings,
but didn't damage anything.

I was using up to ~1 kilowatt on the spark exciter but anything over
300 watts would affect the computer.
The copper was all black with either oxidation or some coating, and
the enclosed lights had insulation that was falling apart.

She paid an electrician some $3,000 to bring it to code.

Why are Americans obsessed with this "code" thing? In the UK we do whatever we like with our own homes.

The electrical code is there for a reason. It is rare to find a code
requirement that doesn't make sense. I do my own wiring. I don't
take chances with things that can hurt other people.

But when it's YOUR house, the government should mind it's own fucking business.

They do. I can do my own wiring, but if a pro were to do it and it
amounts to panel replacement it would have to be inspected.

That's the problem. If I call a pro to do some electrical work on my house, I should be able to say "just get on with the job and forget he code". But he won't, well most won't, the ones that do get my money :)

I figure most electricians are following rules without understanding
why they are doing things. Someone should be checking their work IMO.

One lab I worked at, had a new area opened up with new lab benches and
they contracted the work to outside electricians (big place with lots
of in-house talent but they let a contractor do this lab).

That turned up two mistakes some weeks later when the analyst running
the lab complained that he got a shock. The idiots had the ground
switched with the neutral at the electrical outlet, which was further
compounded with the instrument having the neutral wire connected to
the case and no ground wire - it was even in the schematics that way!
I called them and it turned out in the early models they had an
electrical noise problem and that was the fix.

Where I worked some Irish (as in morons) electricians mixed up a neutral with a live. It was because the UK colour coding had changed to the stupid EU colour coding, and the building had half of each while they were extending it. Since we had a large building and all three phases, what they ended up with was two phases connected to the outlets in a room full of computers, instead of one phase and neutral. So 340V instead of 240V to 20 computers. Much smoke, bad smell, I got called to see what was wrong.

My insurance claim to electricians: 20 expensive computers destroyed.
Reality: 20 of Ł0.50 capacitors destroyed in the PSUs.
Insurance payout: large.
Cost to the company: fuck all.

Unlike residential houses this bench did not require a GFI outlet. If
it had been required that could not have happened - newer GFI's can
detect a ground/neutral switch.

GFIs are for pussies.

I'd rather be a pussy than win the Darwin award. My homemade
aerogarden has a circuit breaker and GFI. (a reason using conductive
foil doesn't bother me too much)

I did trip a GFI once and it wasn't pleasant...
I did fix a panel problem on the incoming bus in my wife's house.

Your wife's house? I take it you're no longer an item :p

It just worked out that way. She's was a "control scientist" at the
place I worked and divorced. She had her own house. I wanted to move
to the coast to sail and fish so got a job at a small lab by the
coast, then bought a house. She paid off her house with a stock
option scheme she was in, I paid off mine by doubling down on the
principle each month and had it paid in 4 years. We are still married
and take turns driving to see each other on weekends and vacations,
and other things. We love each other without doubt.

I had lots of chances to cheat and I never promised I would remain
faithful... I did promise to tell her if I did "cheat." (but that's
hardly cheating) I even got propositioned a few times and turned down
women because our own love-life was always very satisfying and I'd
already had a number of women before her and figured none could
compare.

She's honest and ethical, we like the same music, like to cook,
explore abandoned buildings, fish, sail, kayak, etc., and just be
together.

Sounds good.

I'm lucky - I think we both feel that way.
I called the electrical company and told them I wanted to take the
meter out to make the repair. (the only way, short of climbing the
power distribution pole, to make it safe to work on)

I explained what was wrong and what I wanted to do, he broke the seal,
pulled the meter and slipped some Mylar booties over the prongs and
put the meter back in. Later I pulled the booties off and put the
meter back and called him to put a new seal on the meter.

No problem in the UK, the meter is on the side of my house. There's a 100A fuse before the meter, I can just pull that out. Now there's no power anywhere in my house. It does technically have a seal on it so the power company can see if I was "fiddling the meter", but they don't give a shit. They know you have to pull it when working on your main fuse panel.

BTW the old mechanical watt-hour meters could be diddled without
breaking a seal. They used magnetic bearings in the rotors for
non-contact bearings, a strong magnet (from large old 10" hard drives)
could send the suspended rotor's spindle off-center and it would rub
the magnet and stop spinning or slow down a lot.

Indeed, but there are easier ways with any meter.

In my MC bum days I did work a job on a power line construction
outfit. Setting poles, running anchors and guy wires, driving the
truck, working as the ground crew for a lineman, etc.. Safety first,
especially on 25kv lines.

Safety is for girls.

Machismo, is for Darwin Award contestants.

Only if you do it wrong.

Or in other words "be unsafe."

I notice there's a positive correlation between my testosterone level
and the time the front wheel of the motorcycle is touching the ground,
and a negative correlation between the mast of my sailboat and the
height of the swells.
We had one lineman on the crew who drank excessively. In pulling out
the pigtail on a new transformer he was installing, he accidentally
shorted the HT line to ground. That was impressive. No one could see
that and not have a lot of respect for electricity. Didn't seem to
phase the line any, in spite of a loud bang, flash of green light and
big shower of molten metal.

Sounds fun!

Seeing the foreman running around yelling, was fun.

Foremen are always funny. One once told me I "can't be here". I corrected his poor English (he was Irish) and told him that I already was here and there was nothing he could do about it, then I pointed out he was a "fucking subcontractor" and I actually work here. He made a formal complaint which my boss ignored.

Working on a movie set I heard that bang again, along with the light
momentarily dying on the set. Some careless lineman did die that day.

Employed in industry, some of my work had to pass inspection by
outside under-writers.

In the pharmaceutical industry it was always a war between engineering
and product safety. They want lubricants that can't harm people - the
machines need lubricants that actually work. We want safety valves
and burst disks on our boilers, they are afraid the valves can harbor
bacteria and take them off.

It is nice to be able to point to a requirement for these things...
before it becomes a matter for the lawyers.

It would be nice for everything to work rather than pansy about with safety.

In a perfect world. I take a lot of risks to have fun, but the idea
that my work might harm or kill someone else really bothers me. "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"

Killing someone else is less of a bad thing than killing yourself.

Ya think? I might be killing one of the lab-rats or manufacturing
techs; people I go out drinking with and know.

But you'll still be alive. Killing yourself is always the worst thing to do.

Not if you have to live with a conscience and hold yourself to a
standard.
I thought
that was a good deal considering the amount of work involved. The
electric range needed 4 wires, and the wall outlets went from 14 AWG
to 12 AWG and 20 amp breakers. I think the only thing that guy didn't
change were the light switches and light fixtures.

I've done some wiring in her house, but I didn't want to tackle that
job.

I'm sure you could have done it for a lot less than $3000 unless it was a 10 bedroom mansion.

I doubt it. Every wire was changed, a new breaker panel installed,
GFI outlets and breakers where needed. It was a two-person job
fishing wires from a sweltering attic down to the rooms. I think they
earned every penny of 3K. $300 went to the power company to provide
an in-ground power delivery to the meter and panel.

I'd be doing it after driving for our bi-monthly visit. I donno about
you, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my wife's company. If I
want something to do, there's always a door that needs fixing, a
computer to fix, a shelf to install, a tree to trim, etc..

But you could have one it without all that pointless shit. I could rewire my house in a few days at a cost of Ł300. I have one box with 5 fuses in it. No breakers, ever. I don't want nuisance trips.

I don't believe you. You are just trying to jerk my chain.

In case the idiom is foreign to you:
jerk (one's) chain
To tease someone, often by trying to convince them of something
untrue.

Not sure what you're on about, but when something's broken, I fix it myself. A few cables do not amount to 3 grand.

Copper wire (I'm sure they recycled the scrap) isn't cheap. It took
two people three days to do the job. AND I didn't have to get up in
that attic and crawl around in 120 degree heat.

That must be a big house.

Had I put in a CB panel and tried to have the utility people connect
to it, they probably would have insisted on an inspection as a means
of avoiding liability.

The fuse box was inside a kitchen cabinet, the code now requires
clearances around fuse panels and circuit breakers, so that had to
move to a different room. If I did it, and didn't follow the code,
that'd be an expensive mistake. She'd be without power, and I'd have
to set up a temporary construction permitted electrical service and
all that entails.
 
On Sun, 01 Mar 2020 03:34:01 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sat, 29 Feb 2020 22:13:32 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 23:13:38 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:58:13 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:16:10 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:35:17 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

A jolt through a large muscle shouldn't make you do that. He was clearly a pussy.

And you delight in being obstreperous.

No, just stating a fact.

The shorting hook (used to discharge the caps before working on the
xmitter) was in one hand and the path was from that arm through his
body and out his ass. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys etc., are "vital
organs."

And get damaged immediately, not later. He managed to laugh, THEN went into shock? Shock is your brain giving up because it's useless.

Perhaps it was psychological due to the realization of how close he'd
come, or maybe a physiological response to the incident. I certainly
don't have the knowledge to make that determination.

So he survived, THEN panicked? How pathetic.

Better to know what it might do without trying it in your house.

That's the reason I checked the conductivity. I just need to keep it
away from the mains voltages.

Floppy things can touch things you don't expect them to.

I'll keep that in mind. The risk is mine, no one else's.

You are one of a very small number of people with that common sense. Most seem to think everyone must be safe at all costs or be jailed for life.

I pay attention to the near misses. Most accidents can be predicted
by previous behavior, so it makes sense to treat a near miss the same
as you would an accident.

Nah, a near miss is something that I avoided, so I'm happy that my skill and judgement avoided it. I know that next time my subconscious will be even better at avoiding the same thing, so I need take no action.

No, the fuse is inside the plug, meaning every single appliance has its own protection, like this:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/b6exht/replacing-a-13-amp-fuse-in-a-domestic-uk-electric-plug-b6exht.jpg

That is an excellent idea IMO. We don't have that requirement in the
US, and finding it is rare. I've only seen that once in a US plug..

We didn't used to have it, but then we had radial connections to outlets. Each outlet had its own fuse in the main box. Does yours? If not, you've actually got a low current device with a low current cord only protected by a high current fuse.

That's a serious weakness in our system IMO. You can have 16-18 AWG
wire serving a circuit capable of 20 amps fed by 12 gauge wire.

I installed a "mini-split" AC at home. It had 10 gauge in a 25 amp
240 circuit, then they used 18 gauge for the run between the
compressor and indoor units. The wire is mostly outside, but it
passes through a wall to the inside and runs across the back of the
indoor unit. It bothered me enough to go back and install a pair of 7
amp fast blow fuses in the compressor unit to the indoor unit.

Why do you have this "guage" measurement? It's meaningless to me. In the UK it's in mm^2. At least I know what that means, it's a simple cross sectional area in mm. And as a rule of thumb, 1mm^2 carries 10 amps.

It's historical. Back in the day (so I'm told) they'd count the dies
the wire was drawn through to reduce the diameter. We still use
inches, fractions, and feet, Fahrenheit, and a 12 hour clock showing
local time.

When it comes to woodworking I'm strictly inches and fractions, in the
lab it's meters, Celsius, liters. It does make for expensive mistakes
from time to time.

Indeed. Metric is way easier to make calculations in. And when I were a lad I actually grew up using F for room temperature and C for outside temperature (I'm C everywhere now). Although my parents used F all the time, I found C to be way easier for outside, since 0 was a very convenient point - when the ground got slippy.

fabric covered wiring, and no grounds.

Grounds can be dangerous. Consider you touch something that you didn't know was live. Now you need to touch a ground aswell to get a shock. And if that ground is your knee against an appliance while the live is on your finger, your heart is in the middle.

The ground is there so metal parts of a device that you may normally
touch won't be above ground potential. Better the fuse blows or the
GFI trips, than the drill you're gripping in your sweaty hand goes
live.

Except when it's something else that's live and the earthed thing is forming the other half of the circuit.

Does that happen a lot? I think if the whole system was isolated from
ground, lightening may play havoc with it. I used an isolated battery
charger on my motorcycle. Bike on the ground battery charger nearby
with a 3 wire cord. Every year I was replacing diodes in the
rectifier until I made the connection with lightening. Grounding the
minus charger lead fixed the problem.

Lightening can induce high voltages in cables without having to strike
the wires themselves.

I don't know where you live but lightning is rare here. That's not why we have earthed equipment.

We are second only to Florida for lightening. I had a strike hit the
house and it popped two circuit breakers, damaged the TV, modem, KVM
switch, destroyed my LV outdoor lights, android TV box, and destroyed
the GFI serving the outdoor workbench. (that I know of)

I was camping on the beach and had rigged a light on a long pair of
wires so I could light my tent. It was looking like rain and I
figured I'd be in the tent reading through the storm. While I was
paying out wire from the bike's battery to the tent a lightening
strike hit about 30 miles offshore and I got a jolt from the wire in
my hand.

Bloody hell. The worst I've seen in the UK is minor damage to computers - eg a sound card or network card fried, but the rest of it ran fine.. I did once see a tree that had clearly evaporated though.

When I retired I built a series of Tesla coils and a large induction
coil. The old computer I had was susceptible to electrical
discharges. When I was playing with HV I'd have to go into the CMOS
and reset the parameters, somehow the stuff could change the settings,
but didn't damage anything.

I was using up to ~1 kilowatt on the spark exciter but anything over
300 watts would affect the computer.

I think perhaps you needed to put your computer in a jolly good Faraday cage.

The copper was all black with either oxidation or some coating, and
the enclosed lights had insulation that was falling apart.

She paid an electrician some $3,000 to bring it to code.

Why are Americans obsessed with this "code" thing? In the UK we do whatever we like with our own homes.

The electrical code is there for a reason. It is rare to find a code
requirement that doesn't make sense. I do my own wiring. I don't
take chances with things that can hurt other people.

But when it's YOUR house, the government should mind it's own fucking business.

They do. I can do my own wiring, but if a pro were to do it and it
amounts to panel replacement it would have to be inspected.

That's the problem. If I call a pro to do some electrical work on my house, I should be able to say "just get on with the job and forget he code". But he won't, well most won't, the ones that do get my money :)

I figure most electricians are following rules without understanding
why they are doing things. Someone should be checking their work IMO.

One lab I worked at, had a new area opened up with new lab benches and
they contracted the work to outside electricians (big place with lots
of in-house talent but they let a contractor do this lab).

That turned up two mistakes some weeks later when the analyst running
the lab complained that he got a shock. The idiots had the ground
switched with the neutral at the electrical outlet, which was further
compounded with the instrument having the neutral wire connected to
the case and no ground wire - it was even in the schematics that way!
I called them and it turned out in the early models they had an
electrical noise problem and that was the fix.

Where I worked some Irish (as in morons) electricians mixed up a neutral with a live. It was because the UK colour coding had changed to the stupid EU colour coding, and the building had half of each while they were extending it. Since we had a large building and all three phases, what they ended up with was two phases connected to the outlets in a room full of computers, instead of one phase and neutral. So 340V instead of 240V to 20 computers. Much smoke, bad smell, I got called to see what was wrong.

My insurance claim to electricians: 20 expensive computers destroyed.
Reality: 20 of Ł0.50 capacitors destroyed in the PSUs.
Insurance payout: large.
Cost to the company: fuck all.

Unlike residential houses this bench did not require a GFI outlet. If
it had been required that could not have happened - newer GFI's can
detect a ground/neutral switch.

GFIs are for pussies.

I'd rather be a pussy than win the Darwin award. My homemade
aerogarden has a circuit breaker and GFI. (a reason using conductive
foil doesn't bother me too much)

I did trip a GFI once and it wasn't pleasant...

Bollocks. Those things trip at 30mA. You can't even feel that. Anyway, they're practically useless. Try touching neutral and live, they won't know that you're not just another load. My neighbour is a tradesman, he managed to touch a live and neutral at once while upgrading some lighting. The electricity didn't harm him at all, but falling off the ladder gave him a few bruises.

I did fix a panel problem on the incoming bus in my wife's house.

Your wife's house? I take it you're no longer an item :p

It just worked out that way. She's was a "control scientist" at the
place I worked and divorced. She had her own house. I wanted to move
to the coast to sail and fish so got a job at a small lab by the
coast, then bought a house. She paid off her house with a stock
option scheme she was in, I paid off mine by doubling down on the
principle each month and had it paid in 4 years. We are still married
and take turns driving to see each other on weekends and vacations,
and other things. We love each other without doubt.

I had lots of chances to cheat and I never promised I would remain
faithful... I did promise to tell her if I did "cheat." (but that's
hardly cheating) I even got propositioned a few times and turned down
women because our own love-life was always very satisfying and I'd
already had a number of women before her and figured none could
compare.

She's honest and ethical, we like the same music, like to cook,
explore abandoned buildings, fish, sail, kayak, etc., and just be
together.

Sounds good.

I'm lucky - I think we both feel that way.

That virtually never happens. 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce. You're one of the lucky ones.

I called the electrical company and told them I wanted to take the
meter out to make the repair. (the only way, short of climbing the
power distribution pole, to make it safe to work on)

I explained what was wrong and what I wanted to do, he broke the seal,
pulled the meter and slipped some Mylar booties over the prongs and
put the meter back in. Later I pulled the booties off and put the
meter back and called him to put a new seal on the meter.

No problem in the UK, the meter is on the side of my house. There's a 100A fuse before the meter, I can just pull that out. Now there's no power anywhere in my house. It does technically have a seal on it so the power company can see if I was "fiddling the meter", but they don't give a shit. They know you have to pull it when working on your main fuse panel.

BTW the old mechanical watt-hour meters could be diddled without
breaking a seal. They used magnetic bearings in the rotors for
non-contact bearings, a strong magnet (from large old 10" hard drives)
could send the suspended rotor's spindle off-center and it would rub
the magnet and stop spinning or slow down a lot.

Indeed, but there are easier ways with any meter.

In my MC bum days I did work a job on a power line construction
outfit. Setting poles, running anchors and guy wires, driving the
truck, working as the ground crew for a lineman, etc.. Safety first,
especially on 25kv lines.

Safety is for girls.

Machismo, is for Darwin Award contestants.

Only if you do it wrong.

Or in other words "be unsafe."

I notice there's a positive correlation between my testosterone level
and the time the front wheel of the motorcycle is touching the ground,
and a negative correlation between the mast of my sailboat and the
height of the swells.

I always put fun before safety. People think I'm nuts when I come flying off my windsurf into large waves in the middle of winter wearing a pair of skimpy speedos. I can swim, and only girls get cold :)

In the pharmaceutical industry it was always a war between engineering
and product safety. They want lubricants that can't harm people - the
machines need lubricants that actually work. We want safety valves
and burst disks on our boilers, they are afraid the valves can harbor
bacteria and take them off.

It is nice to be able to point to a requirement for these things....
before it becomes a matter for the lawyers.

It would be nice for everything to work rather than pansy about with safety.

In a perfect world. I take a lot of risks to have fun, but the idea
that my work might harm or kill someone else really bothers me. "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"

Killing someone else is less of a bad thing than killing yourself.

Ya think? I might be killing one of the lab-rats or manufacturing
techs; people I go out drinking with and know.

But you'll still be alive. Killing yourself is always the worst thing to do.

Not if you have to live with a conscience and hold yourself to a
standard.

If you kill yourself your conscience is deleted.

I thought
that was a good deal considering the amount of work involved. The
electric range needed 4 wires, and the wall outlets went from 14 AWG
to 12 AWG and 20 amp breakers. I think the only thing that guy didn't
change were the light switches and light fixtures.

I've done some wiring in her house, but I didn't want to tackle that
job.

I'm sure you could have done it for a lot less than $3000 unless it was a 10 bedroom mansion.

I doubt it. Every wire was changed, a new breaker panel installed,
GFI outlets and breakers where needed. It was a two-person job
fishing wires from a sweltering attic down to the rooms. I think they
earned every penny of 3K. $300 went to the power company to provide
an in-ground power delivery to the meter and panel.

I'd be doing it after driving for our bi-monthly visit. I donno about
you, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my wife's company. If I
want something to do, there's always a door that needs fixing, a
computer to fix, a shelf to install, a tree to trim, etc..

But you could have one it without all that pointless shit. I could rewire my house in a few days at a cost of Ł300. I have one box with 5 fuses in it. No breakers, ever. I don't want nuisance trips.

I don't believe you. You are just trying to jerk my chain.

In case the idiom is foreign to you:
jerk (one's) chain
To tease someone, often by trying to convince them of something
untrue.

Not sure what you're on about, but when something's broken, I fix it myself. A few cables do not amount to 3 grand.

Copper wire (I'm sure they recycled the scrap) isn't cheap. It took
two people three days to do the job. AND I didn't have to get up in
that attic and crawl around in 120 degree heat.

That must be a big house.

Had I put in a CB panel and tried to have the utility people connect
to it, they probably would have insisted on an inspection as a means
of avoiding liability.

The fuse box was inside a kitchen cabinet, the code now requires
clearances around fuse panels and circuit breakers, so that had to
move to a different room. If I did it, and didn't follow the code,
that'd be an expensive mistake. She'd be without power, and I'd have
to set up a temporary construction permitted electrical service and
all that entails.

WTF is wrong with your country? In the UK, I have a cable running up my driveway (underground) to a meter box on the side of my house. That cable and the meter are the property of the electric company. After that meter, I do whatever the fuck I want. My fusebox (or breaker box for pansies) is mine. All the wires are mine. They are nobody else's business. How can you accept anyone but you taking responsibility for your own property?
 
On Sun, 01 Mar 2020 03:38:56 -0000, default <default@defaulter.net> wrote:

On Sat, 29 Feb 2020 20:33:44 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:39:34 -0000, default <default@defaulter.neo> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:27:30 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:55:56 -0000, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2020-02-24, Archer <iam@here.com.invalid> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:56:42 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
CFKinsey@military.org.jp> wrote:

My pet parrot has a habit of chewing wires but never got a shock. I tested her feet with a multimeter and it was over 20Mohms. My own dry finger is 1Mohm. Are they safe from shocks due to scaly feet?


https://youtu.be/sWg2xScJ6JM

See the above video showing someone in India who is not affected by
240 v passing through his body

it looks like some sort of trick, there's possibly a triac somewhere in
that setup that's taking most of the current.

Why can't you accept some bodies are different?

There's an awful lot of utter crap on Utoobe. Perpetual motion
machines, gas engines that burn water, and other stuff that's totally
unworkable (like winding a few turns of copper around a spark plug and
doubling your internet speed)

not saying it can't happen, just that it pays to be skeptical

Sure, if you see something that looks like a UFO, be skeptical, but I can't see why someone couldn't conduct electricity. For example, some people freak out with the mildest of shocks, yet I don't. I did an army assault course which had some electric fences placed in it for a laugh, some people were jumping about, falling over, unable to control themselves. I think the most I did was say "ouch".

I was playing with electricity when I was 6. I learned to avoid
shocks after a few good hits. We used vacuum tubes (valves) in those
days, they used high voltages.

I learned a good jolt wasn't the end of the world. And was quite amusing when you caused a friend to get one. I was out with two friends one summer and I grabbed an electric fence with no result. One of my friends had taken off his shoes to paddle in a stream to catch fish. He touched the fence and jumped up in the air, which was funny. I was then stupid enough to explain with a demonstration to my other friend that I had to be grounded. I placed one hand on the ground and the other on the fence, and did an involuntary Mexican wave, then landed on my arse.
 

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