Darwin Award

Mar 17, 2017 89 Replies

Yes, you'd have to be very unlucky for a mains-to-5V PSU to fail in such a way that it fed 240V to the 5V end and for water to then conduct that to the skin. But having the mains end of the PSU on your wet chest is asking for trouble - it only takes a bit of water to run down into the live pin and then onto your body, and you have a 240V shock in the making, especially as the bathwater is probably earthed via the plughole or via a metal bath (maybe with a bit of enamel missing so the water is touching the metal) and the water pipes.

The difficult is that sometimes you need to use a mains-powered device in a bathroom - eg mains-powered clippers when my wife is trimming my hair. I make sure the (fibreglass, not enamelled metal) bath is completely dry, and sit well away from bath taps, shower hose (metal) and anything else that could be earthed.

Are you in the bath when she's doing that? If so, why?

Sitting on the side, legs into the (empty!) bath - so there is a convenient place for all the hair clippings to go. The alternative is to put a groundsheet or something on the carpet in one of the other rooms, and let that catch all the hair.

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

We were wiring up some labs for ethernet a few years ago. They dealt with some pretty nasty chemicals. There was an emergency high-pressure shower with a large metal-grate type hinged footpedal outside one of the labs. All you had to do to activate it was stand on the grid. One of the lads I was working with kept stepping on it accidentally and getting drenched which pissed him off and caused him to stamp around, resulting in another drenching.

We got him a T-shirt with the "dangerous when wet" symbol.

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You may notice that he doesn't get a schock from the teaspoon so something else must happen to get a shock even if he does drop the extension into the bath. We have no way to know from the reports so far. I suspect there was some leakage from the charger into the phone and that made a return path that allowed enough current through to cause death or paralysis and then the burns were caused over a long period.

En el artículo , ARW escribió:

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2:30 onwards.

  1. Take a chair outdoors.
  2. Go to a barber's.

SWMBO does mine in the kitchen. Hard sweepable floor, minimal work.

That's what we do. And a hairdresser's cape-thing, which catches a fair amount of stuff.

He didn't get a shock from the spoon because there was no path, he made clear that he was insulated from ground or earth.

It is simple, he rested the 240v mains extension, complete with wall wart, on his chest. It needs no stretch of the imagination to assume his chest was wet and likewise the above items. Even a none metallic bath will have several paths to ground, via taps and drains.

Will it necessarily with increased use of plastic piping? Most people don't fill the bath right up to the taps either.

I am not sure about the drains bit. It may be possible for the other parts to be at earth voltage

It happens that Scott formulated :

Yes, almost certainly there will be a path to ground from any water in a bath, irrespective of the bath being plastic or plastic pipe being used.

Am 17.03.2017 um 22:45 schrieb Tim Watts:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5460032,-1.436605,3a,15.8y,5.6h,68.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5ZgCw6lPPrfSCn3qREDOUQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Doesn't look like beer cans. Aluminium foil?

It would be very unlikely to find a drain to be dry and clear of any water absorbing debris. Most plugs have some leakage past the plug seal anyway.

I've seen a lot of stacked adapters and frayed cables in barber's shops over the years.

Ther is a businees the other side of the road called the Al-Murad superstore which appears to be a decorating centre. So I reckon the rolls are lining or wall paper.

G.Harman

Mine doesn't. Plastic bath, plastic drains, plastic plumbing.

So we still don't know what return path there was which is the point, unless you know it then you have to assume the coroner thinks it was via the charger.

Clive's demonstration shows that you are unlikely to get a shock from just having live and neutral in the bath. You need something else.

I have practical experience of what happens when you drop mains in water that you are in from when I was about 8 and I dropped a mains lead in a fish tank I had my hands in. I didn't really get a shock but I couldn't pick the mains up when I tried too. It was a few seconds before I realised what I was doing.

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