Deadly!

[GreenJelly]

People seem so uneducated about electricity to the point of beign down right dangerous. I have heard people say that 3 9v batteries are harmless too the extreme, "That car battery wont hurt you!"

ZAP!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock

Most fans use more power then it would take to possibly cause death!

Its not that I want people to be afraid of electricity, its just that they should respect it.

We warn people against the cold soldering iron, shouldnt we warn people to not play with electricity. I think that sounds silly but the stupid things I see people say are abundant in quantity.

 

[Psycogeec]

the 3.9v battery would have to do some neat tricks to make my muscles jump, let alone reach my heart and make it jump.
a car battry can only singe and stuff, it takes a nice flyback from the spark coil or something to really wake a person up

you say people should be paranoid, i say being scared is more likly to give me a heart attack when i get shocked. also it is good to get really scared, so your hands are all wet and salty , that way the conduction is improved a lot.
nothing beats having both hands sweating , and making great contact, as the energy passes down your arms to your heart.

so sure be carefull with any kind of electricty, but if your going to go into a mental breakdown from a simple shock, your brain could do more damage than the electricity.
.

 

[Psycogeec]

here is a good link
"first time i got zapped"
http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/lofiversion/index.php?t41678-0.html
look how many people reported they got it via some faulty PSU.
one time my whole computer case was charged with AC, due to some faulty PSU, i didnt notice it until i got the right conduction conditions.


dying from a 9V battery
http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
if you believe it when in the service, they used scare tactics to teach about VD , the stories werent real, but the tacticks sure kept the population down

how not to hook up a battery?

 

[GreenJelly]

A 9v battery is .5 mA, enough to stop your heart alone. 3 of them well...

A tasser uses a 9v battery, and is designed very carefully to NOT to cause heart attacks. It has a voltage drop after the two ends make connection etc.

I can use a few car batteries to make a Arc Welder (not recommended)...

 

[GreenJelly]

BTW, why the hell did she change the battery connectors?

 

[Psycogeec]

A 9v battery is .5 mA, enough to stop your heart alone. 3 of them well...

A tasser uses a 9v battery, and is designed very carefully to NOT to cause heart attacks. It has a voltage drop after the two ends make connection etc.

I can use a few car batteries to make a Arc Welder (not recommended)...

i have had 9x 9v batteries tied together, and touched it a few time, course i was not going to test it on my tounge anymore
we used to play with stuff like that all the time as kids, rarely even notice anything without a coil, or a alternating or chopped dc current.

the .5ma isnt that the quantity that has to get TO the heart? and on the way there , there are many paths the electricity can take, so its going to take a lot more than a .5ma on the outside to get it to jerk the heart around on the inside.

a scientist dude calculated the energy that would reach a heart via even a good conduction, and deemed that 12v could not cause that kind of problem, the least voltage he calculated would be more like 15+. anyone dying from 12v DC, had to do something real stupid, or was easily suseptable.

a taser might use a 9v battery, or any other power source, but that is not what they hit the human with, the power source is converted it into VERY high voltage, and very tiny amps. and specific frequency, it does not penetrate well, but it can still kill someone,

everyone reacts different to different levels (in everything) . there are certannly ways to get electrocuted, but consumer batteries are designed for consumers, most of them you would have to work hard to get them to kill you.
On the other hand, there are lots of curcuits that can be added to change things so that could happen.

If 12v could kill people easily, there would be about 6 car mechanics left in the world.
.

 

[GreenJelly]

I think if we had this conversation in a forum labelled batteries, I would tend to agree... But we are having this conversation in Volt Modding and circuitry.

Even a lightning strike, that has way more amps then I think you could possibly get hit with in any man made environment rarely kills as it generally takes a path along the skin. In fact most people who get hit by lightning rarely report it as it happens on sunny days and they don't even know that it was lightning that caused it. Even when they report it, lightning is rarely the diagnosis. With that said, I don't recommend you go out on the lake during a lightning strike with a 10 foot metal rod every time it rains. I have also seen plenty of people get zapped by 110v AC, and usually left with nothing more then a sigh of release.

I'm scared of electricity, but It doesn't prevent me from working on it. My neighbor is scared of electricity and he is a certified industrial, commercial and residential electrical. Same with My father who is an Electrical Engineer. That fear keeps you safe, without it you probably shouldn't be doing what your doing. I guess that is really all I have.

 

[CompuTamer]

The trick with power across the heart, is that it has to GET across the heart.

While i agree that electricity should be respected, 12volts is hardly enough to get across a few inches of skin, let alone go from one hand, across your heart, out the other hand. You'd need a few hundred volts to do that. Car batteries singe people because it's a TON of amperage across a small patch of skin.

Don't be stupid and go take some leads from a car battery and expect it to not hurt. It CAN kill you, but the chances are very very low. It WILL hurt though. A 9 volt battery can hurt under the right conditions. 120 volts is coming close to what it takes to kill. 240 can kill easily.

Tasers work by stepping the voltage up to 600,000 or so volts. Hurts like crap, but when used right, there's no amperage to get across your heart to stop it.

 

[larrymoencurly]

The trick with power across the heart, is that it has to GET across the heart.

While i agree that electricity should be respected, 12volts is hardly enough to get across a few inches of skin, let alone go from one hand, across your heart, out the other hand. You'd need a few hundred volts to do that. Car batteries singe people because it's a TON of amperage across a small patch of skin.

Don't be stupid and go take some leads from a car battery and expect it to not hurt. It CAN kill you, but the chances are very very low.

So the opening scene from the movie Lethal Weapon was realistic? I thought the bigger dangers from a car battery were hydrogen explosion and spray of acid from a spark or the arc from a short burning the skin or heating up whatever caused the arc, like a wrench dropped across the terminals.

 

[Mehovoric]

Battery is DC (Direct Current). In the electronics lab in the school that I used to go to we had DC Generators so we could quickly test out circuits. It was always fun to freak the new students out that didn't know anything about electricity and electronics. So I would crank it up to 30 Volts and put the leads across my tongue and pretend like I shocked myself. In reality, I felt noting. Most people don't realize that its not that voltage that will kill you. Its the current. On the DC generator there's a amperage knob that I just left turned down .


Fun fact about electricity: Did you know that if you stuck a light bulb AND its socket into a plain glass of tap water, and turn it on, you can drink out of the glass without getting shocked, as long as the circuit is properly bonded!