Shocked!

We all make mistakes. (-:

originate from a neighbor.

That's an interesting idea and a way to determine if there's a fault external to the home wiring.

The problem is that with digital meters, you can read a phantom voltage and reach the wrong conclusions.

I think the best advice is still to shut the main breaker and call an electrician AND the power company.

Two guys speculate it might be a troll, and then the OP says "Happy Halloween" on Halloween Day, and that proves the speculation was correct?

Happy Veterans Day!

OK, now I know it's a troll! :-)

Dave Mason says "Leave it alone."

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

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. .

Sadly there's a lot more information that led TomR to be the first to (quite correctly, IMHO) speculate that this was a troll.

"Fred" has never posted here in AHR before, has no last name - not even an initial, provided no email address ("Fred"

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:

"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.)

GENERALLY it is more likely to read a voltage that does not exist than miss one that does if you follow the instructions.

Better safe than sorry.

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.

- Bobby G.

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

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

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

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.

And $250 per hour if it comes in a box.

Some equipment will have some low value capacitors going from the AC wiring to the chassie. This creats a low value of leakage curent. If the equipment has the proper 3 wire plug , there is no problem. Without the ground wire, you could feel a tingle if you got between the device and ground.