The cost of a breaker IF it failed may still be a bargain if it finds the problem in 2 minutes instead of spending 2 hours - - -
I've seen it numerous times.
I've had phantom voltage from a cable adaper (cable tv) put enoug voltage into a TV to give a pretty nasty "tingle" that totally went away when the TV cable was properly grounded.
Not necessarily. A bit of leakage is almost considered normal on some electrical equipment - and it may not even BE real leakage - it could be inductive or capacitive inductance
If you are afraid of the spark or electrocution hazard jumping the meter, shut off the mains first and jumper it while it is dead.
Years ago, we had a car club in an old chicken barn, which we had clad with steel siding. We had poured concrete floor in part of it - with fence wire for re-enforcement. In the "club room" we had a CB radio base station sitting on top of an old refrigerator.
Every once in a while one of the guys would report getting a "small shock" when opening the door. We didn't think much of it, untill one day I was doing some grinding with a hand grinder on a body repair when my knee touched a spot where the fence wire just poked through the rough concrete job - and I got a REAL zap. I thought there was a problem with the grinder, untill I tested it and everything was OK. THEN I started looking. Ends up the power transformer on the base station had smoked, and it was pumping 115 volts out the antenna, which under certain conditions (like rain or heavy dew) shorted with fairly high resistance to the metal siding - which connected to the fencewire in the concrete - and found ground through me to the grounded grinder. When I directly grounded the fence wire, it popped the fuse in the radio, and the voltage went away.
Have you looked at what often passes as the meter shunt? A clamp made of iron strapping wrapped around the pipe, with the copper cable bolted to it. Condensation keeps it damp to wet, and the strap corrodes off the pipe - you get a ground failure. Not suddenly, but eventually. One day it gets bad enough that it doesn't ground any more ---
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't expect to find the Spanish Inquisition nor was I writing for a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I was specifically thinking of what the Verizon installer did when I got my last copper POTS line installed on the second floor on the side of the house not near the service entrance (they really balked at doing that, BTW, saying they don't like to "box" installations like that - my other phone lines enter at the same side that the power lines do).
He said he had to run a ground wire from the network interface box all the way back to the circuit panel and had to test to make sure he was hooking into a valid ground. Clamping a ground wire to a nearby water pipe was no longer considered code for new work, at least according to him. I have to assume he knows what's up to code and what's not when installing a new phone line since it does it several times a day.
The considerable noise and harping surrounding my comments are just NDBF because the OP apparently wouldn't know or care about the finer points of the NEC. It's pretty clear this is a case of someone acting like the Wicked Witch of the West and thinking "I'll get that Bobby Green and his little dog Toto if it's the last thing I ever do!" (-: It makes it clear to me who's interesting in solving the OP's problem and who's interesting in scoring points in some game of canis mas macho. Yes, it's important to be absolutely correct but at some point, it's counterproductive to helping the OP with his problems which in this case was not to be electrocuted.
The most important reason for suggesting that the OP look for grounding clamps on the pipe was because it was non-destructive, non-lethal, required no special skills or tools and could be done with the power shut off. If there was a device that had failed and was energizing the line, being able to quickly show the electrician the location of possible suspect connections might have saved some time. Considering some of the other advice given, it seems especially suspect to become obsessed over what apparently was quite clear to you.
If the pipes are not providing a continuous ground path, a grounding clamp on a section of isolated pipe could indeed be the source of the current if the equipment it's connected to has failed. Of course, since this was apparently a cowardly troll post to begin with, we'll never know any real details. Too bad.
Thanks for reminding me to take the high road. (-: I have been sorely tempted to reply to Charlie Brown but you and others have made it clear I don't need to and shouldn't. It would generate lots of heat but very little light. This place is already as troll-infested as Somalia it pirate-infested and for much the same reason.
On the positive side, there's still plenty of valuable discussion left in this thread. The subject of tingling pipes, even though the original post was probably a troll, is a good "safety drill" sort of discussion. I've certainly developed a new perspective - shut off the power, call the electric company and don't screw around - especially if there are other people in the house. One of the worst outcomes I can imagine is to think the problem was inside the house and that you solved it when in fact it was external and intermittent, making it seem solved, and when it next occurs, you get zapped.
There's a tendency with the many folks here (raises hand) who like to solve problems to get lost in the weeds. They focus in on one aspect of the problem and then think details and forget the big picture. In this case there's significant lethality at risk with energized pipes. Unless the guy making the post clearly indicates he's a pretty good DIY electrician (by what he says and not just what he thinks of himself) I think the only right answer is "shut her down" and get the pros.
Working through the details of this hypothetical incident makes people better prepared for real emergencies and that's a good thing. I'll bet more than one reader learned about how the changing nature of plumbing materials effects the home's wiring. I still have to figure out when to trust the new pen meter that Nate turned me onto. It detects voltage from
12VDC UPS batteries on the highest setting. (-:
Finally, there's also a great deal of satisfaction in taking a dumb "cry wolf" troll post and turning it into a learning discussion. I am sure that was never "Fred's" intention.
You're a man of integrity in both universes, Mr. Spock - er, I mean Mr. Groleau. (-:
What I find most interesting is how this tiny side issue is so far removed from the critical question: What should someone do if they are getting shocked from plumbing fixtures?
Instead, three words that I added as a parenthetical aside have become a target for Chet's relentless, withering criticism. Why? Because I didn't somehow manage to enumerated all the changes, exceptions and nuances to device grounding in the NEC in those three vague words. It's really just remarkable.
If that's all he's got, I feel vindicated. Chet readily admits that the OP didn't have the smarts to even understand the rather simple process of mapping all wire connections to the water pipes. Yet in the next post he goes down into the ground *beneath* the weeds talking about exceptions and grandfathered sections of the code in a desperate attempt to prove me wrong about *something.* What's that credit card ad say? "It's priceless."
I suppose ignoring the original problem to fight over some minor tangent is a grand old Usenet tradition as well. )-:
Despite his contumacious tendencies, I would still value Chet's advice on the first go-round of a "murder board" trying to analyze a problem and uncover the essential facts. Sadly I would almost always have to exclude him from the detailed problem solving phase because of his tendency to flog a dead horse into pony pate. Once he gets a missile lock, true or false, that's all that he sees from that point forward and the conversation rapidly devolves to just being argumentative quagmire. It's really a shame to let one's ire cancel out one's insight. It is comforting, though, to read that other people understood what I was trying to say. .
Ha! I have very little faith in the "goodness" (nor the intelligence) of humanity in general. But I do have a lot more respect than most for the principle of "beyond all reasonable doubt."
That's the standard for a criminal conviction -- beyond a reasonable doubt.
The standard in a civil litigation matter is a preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt.
But, this is neither a criminal case nor a civil litigation matter.
My personal opinion, based on all that the OP posted, is that it appears to me that the OP made the whole thing up for whatever reasons. Your personal opinion appears to be that there is no "proof" either way that this was or was not a made up story posted by the OP.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Yes, it's true that my personal opinion is that the whole thing was a made-up story posted by the OP. And, yes, it's true that there is no "proof" (and certainly not "beyond a reasonable doubt") that that the OP made the whole thing up.
As Tom R noted, this is not a trial, just an analysis. With folks flat-out admitting to trolling for their own amusement, I have to call them the way I see them and this sure sounds like a Halloween prank to me. Some other current threads seem just as prankish. I suppose they're at least on-topic. (-: I suspect the troller gave us the "all clear, all OK" signal because he knows that leaving us hanging also left him open to being discovered. All someone had to do was approach his ISP with a request for more information so that if he was lying dying in a pool of his own whiz someone could dispatch the local EMS.
Some good came out of this - I got a nifty new Sperry VD 6505 non-contact voltage meter (thanks again, Nate for the referral). I can say with certainty if a newbie's life depends on reading this sucker correctly the first time out, he's going to die. Depending on where the dial is set you can get voltage from a stone. After a while I am getting the hang of it but it's pretty tricky and is wildly effected by RF emanations. Dimmers, TV's, CFLs and other devices really have an effect on the readings.
Still, glad to have it and after I play with it a while I would actually trust it to indicate that my water pipes were carrying current.
What I want to do, and what's making my wife nervous, it to cobble together an isolated pipe setup to test various energization scenarios, particular a pipe-clamp grounded device gone bad on a segment of copper pipe no longer well-connected to the ground. Then I could also use a digital voltmeter to try to figure out what levels of current are leaking, etc.
Might do it with a Variac just to keep the V levels to less than lethal. That should still give me some idea of what the readings would look like if I encountered a similar situation in the wild.
Quite true. It's somewhere between a kangaroo court and that crazy judge program, "An Eye for and Eye" which you really have to see to believe:
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"Judge" Extreme Akim dispensed Biblical justice - if someone had broken into a car, the victim was given a hammer and allowed to smash up the perp's car as "payback." Worth watching at least once. My local university shows it weekly for some odd reason.
The "Happy Halloween" was IMHO a dead giveaway that this was a "Devil's Night" sort of prank.
Actually, if someone really wanted to make a case, there's always a way to get to the bottom of a troll post because the newshost keeps IP records. There are a number of other ways to determine who's running a sock puppet - they're usually not as smart at covering their tracks as they think they are. It's not worth the trouble to figure out beyond a shadow of a doubt what at least a few people strongly suspect. How likely is it that someone makes their first and last post on Usenet in this one thread? Not very, IMHO.
That's what I was referring to in one of my posts when I said a similar tool is not for the untrained. (Didn't use that word, but I'm too lazy to go back and find it.)
I remember that someone said that but I, too was too lazy to go back to look. (-: Now we know.
Still, it is the right tool for the job with a dash of OJT. I had an unadjustable unit before I picked up the Sperry and that one *really* sucked. This one's a whole lot better although the adjustment dial feels a little flimsy. Not sure it's going to hold up but I also doubt I will be using it every day.
I took out the Variac to see if I could feed some low-voltage AC into the bathroom plumbing but a very worried look from SWMBO put the kibosh on that experiment. Agree that it's more likely to find phantom AC than it is to miss real current flow.
That's probably true, although it's advice for the electrically savvy. The thing I had a hard time researching was how many fault cycles a breaker is good for. The answers I saw read from "replace it after four trips" (too conservative, IMO) to "it's good for 100,000 trips." (I think somewhere in between those two estimates is correct - but where?)
Clearly the latest breaker designs are far more resilient than breakers of
50 years ago, and I only found one instance of a person claiming a breaker had failed closed. The nuke sub breakers that my dad worked with that failed often were circa 1963 and were very special-purpose units. Made to precise government specs, too, and built by the lowest bidder. (-:
I defer to your experience but wonder why it's so common? Apparently the instructions for such devices call out the need for a ground shunt of some sort and you'd think water company personnel would be trained to deal with it after the first dozen times someone got shocked to death .
I still contend that there's a problem if grounding alone cures it. There shouldn't be any current leakage in a properly designed and functioning system, should there? I, too, have been zapped just touching the CATV line and something metallic at the same time. Considering the skill of the last two cable jockeys that Comcrap er Comcast sent out, it wouldn't surprise me if they did something wrong enough to energize the CATV cable with enough juice to be dangerous.
What types of equipment would do that?
Ouch. In the X-10 world, people unfamiliar with electricity would often modify their RR501 transceiver modules to try to improve reception by adding a longer aerial. Unfortunately the design of the unit used capacitive coupling to attach the antenna - a small copper pad on the inside of the case that coupled through the plastic to a small copper pad on the outside that attached to the antenna. People would simply attach a wire to the inner pad not realizing that it was live at 110VAC. This was a two-pin device, too. A surprising number of people zapped themselves trying to extend the (pitiful, generally) range of those devices with an antenna mod.
I burned up an HP Laserjet's control board using an unpolarized three-wire adapter. I saw a quite respectable spark when I plugged in the printer cable between the properly connected PC and the improperly connected Laserjet. No magic smoke escaped, so it was probably an IC or something relatively smoke-free. (-: Just a dead Laserjet at a time when they cost
*real* money - $2K+ for the LJII with accessories, IIRC.
From what I've been reading, many "tingle" situations are due to internal defects or failures in items that are connected to ground through means other than the grounding pin of a grounded receptacle. Strapping pipes with materials that can corrode from exposure to moisture or cause a galvanic reaction was an idea whose time has come and mostly gone, and for a number of disparate reasons.
I think I will take my own advice and review and perhaps rewire any remaining pipe clamp grounding equipment in the house. They may be grandfathered into the code, but both my grandfathers are dead and I don't want to join them. (-:
I'd have to dig up the front yard. I have *never* seen a water meter inside any home in the US in my 60 plus years, although I am sure they exist. Is that a Canadian thing because of the colder temps?
I already had a leak coming from galvanic action from a plain old pipe strap so I don't doubt it's probably a good idea to check stuff like that yearly or so. Turns out they were copper plated steel straps and mechanical wear took out the coating and Galvani's discovery did the rest.
My friend added one more:
$100 per hour $125 per hour if you watch $150 per hour if you tried to fix it yourself $200 per hour if you tell us how to fix it (!!!)
Can you imagine a time where there was no electricity anywhere? It's kind of neat that so many terms we use are actually created from the names of great inventors:
Scientists whose names are used as SI units
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Base units a.. Andr-Marie Ampre b.. William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin Derived units a.. Henri Becquerel b.. Anders Celsius c.. Charles-Augustin de Coulomb d.. Michael Faraday e.. Louis Harold Gray f.. Joseph Henry g.. Heinrich Hertz h.. James Prescott Joule i.. Isaac Newton j.. Georg Ohm k.. Blaise Pascal l.. Werner von Siemens m.. Rolf Maximilian Sievert n.. Nikola Tesla o.. Alessandro Volta p.. James Watt q.. Wilhelm Eduard Weber
A length of cable, diconnected at both ends and the right length, orriented the right direction, can pick up quite an inductive charge, and large capacitors must ALWAYS be stored with a chorting strip or bleed resistor to prevent them prom picking up a charge.
Canadian and quite a few northern US locations. The meter is inside with a remote readout strapped to the outside of the house.
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