Electrical Safe Tea

Cursitor Doom · 2017-10-01T11:27:51+00:00

Gentlemen, I've just come up with a very simple idea to massively improve safe- working in high voltage cabinets where testing has to be done live. In fact it's so simple there must surely be some flaw in it that I've overlooked (or there's already some obscure product that covers it). Tell me what you think. Firstly, when I say "high voltage cabinets" I'm not necessarily referring to mains consumer units and whatnot (although this idea is equally valid for those) I find it easier to visualise (for the sake of getting the concept across) working on an old analogue TV for example, where you have all sorts of voltages present, including some highly lethal ones in excess of 10kV. The main thing we need to avoid is suffering a shock where the current passes through or nearby the heart. This is *most* shocks when you're fiddling about inside such environments with both hands. The standard advice has been "well, keep one hand inside your back pocket, then" but this means of course you only have one hand to prod around with which is constricting. I'm proposing to short-out both wrists using a metallic bracelet on each, tied to one another via a couple of feet of light, flexible cable. So for example if you're prodding around with your right hand whilst somehow touching the chassis with your left and you touch something live, the current will only flow through your hands and wrists rather than up your arms and across your chest. And that's all there is to it. Now, where have I gone wrong? (I must have done somewhere!)

Electrical Safe Tea

Oct 01, 2017 23 Replies

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Brian Gaff 8 years ago

Hmm, well, it might restrict the movement a bit I suppose, but I'm sure I've seen something like it before. The whole issue of course is can you actually definitely guarantee that the current will all flow where you expect it to.

Brian

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whisky-dave 8 years ago

I thought of an administrator working hard drinking tea and talk bollocks about something they know nothing about and hence getting put in charge of it a bit like being in charge of glading on buildings.

I can't help but think that linking your wrists together with metak is more like some sort of remote handcuff fetish and more likely to cause accidents by gettign tangled in the cable.

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Cursitor Doom 8 years ago

You were maybe thinking of one of these, which performs a somewhat different function:

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whisky-dave 8 years ago

or perhaps this.

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