Lots of stuff out there can hold a charge when disconnected, because of capacitors. I wouldn't think that the little fan motor would have a start capacitor or anything, but who knows.

Most motors use a starting capacitor

15,000 BTU window air conditioner. Unplugged, out of the window. Was going to replace a burned wire. Big zap. Maybe from the running capacitors on the compressor.

Oh well partied on. Replaced the wire and good to go.

For anyone working on electric stoves. Off is not good enough for 220.

And for Seeburg jukeboxes , where the head travels back and forth. Stay away from the big capacitor on those. They will knock you out.

LTG : )

I worked at an aquarium store in college. I friggen HATE electric catfish. A curse on anyone who orders those bastards.

When I was in college I wanted to change the light fixture above the table in the kitchen in my apartment. Turned the switch off and started removing the cover, wire nuts and then 'bzzzt' got bit pretty hard. It wasn't until doing some checking that the switch was on the neutral wire. I would have turned the breaker off but the panel was in the apartment upstairs.

I have always wondered….

Do people who drive electric cars listen to..

AC/DC or something current?

I got hit with 480 once, but it was because I left the panel energized.
I tried to tell them I was a salesman not electrician but they seemed to think since I stayed at a holiday Inn express the night before...

Reminds when I worked in a huge restaurant at 16. Owner hired me to do electrical work ballasts etc. I started getting comfortable doing repairs with just shutting switch off assuming it was ok. I had a light about 1 story up replacing on a ladder with switch off. took light off and started disconnecting wires. took off a large wirenut off of 3-4 white wires. They seperated and a good 1/3rd of the lights went out in the seating area. scared the crap out of me. Thankfully I know now that turning the switch off is not enough especially with lots of connections present.

I don't touch a wire without one of these. Confirm that it's working with a known live wire first.

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And that's how lockout tagout was born

Why did you change the original topic?

Happened to my stepfather many years ago when he worked at a printing company.

The company he worked for had 220v lights fixed to a very high ceiling. He had to change one fixture. Got the ladder in place. Went and turned the breaker off. Hung a sign on it, " Do Not Touch or Turn on".

Went back up the ladder. Lowered the fixture. As a precaution touched one wire to the other to be sure. BANG. Everything went out and a fireball chased him backwards down the ladder as he hit the floor.

He checked, someone moved the sign and turned the breaker on.

He went into the offices and screamed who the fuck turned that breaker on ? The head that popped up and looked at him, he grabbed that guy and was dragging him outside to kick the sh*t out of him. A foreman stopped him half way and begged him to stop.

You can't be too careful.

LTG : )

I have replaced ballasts in hundreds of fixtures.Biggest problem was people over a period of years not labeling or relabeling the breakers.
When I was green We were changing the ballast in an outside light Bollard.We thought well its on a light sensor to power on at sunset,no problem.A set of clouds rolled in and that sucker popped on.scared the crap out of us.Always turn off the breaker.

your best friend

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I'll turn off the switch to change a light, but i still check wires. I've seen too many switches that have the neutral switched instead of the hot. So, the fixture is always hot.

Was it a 20A twist lock?
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220 is scary. 120 will zap you. 220 grabs you. 480 throws you.

All of the maintenance guys that I worked with said the same thing. They'd rather work on 480 than 220. It'll hurt, but at least it won't hold you there until you die.

I saw a woman getting electrocuted once. She was working on an oxygen concentrator for the european market. She had forgotten to unplug the unit and zapped herself. The unit was on wheels, on a bench. She couldn't let go and ended up pulling the unit down onto the floor next to her. I don't know if it was intentional, or from her body going limp. She was out of work for a bit, but survived.

No idea. He was an office worker. My stepfather was a grunt worker in the factory.

LTG : )

A few years back a worker was on a scissor lift and raised himself into power lines.Someone had video of this and the local news played it over and over.They broadcast this while the man literally cooked and died in front of the Fire Dept and many onlookers.This will never leave my memory.I guess no one could lower the lift because its made of metal.What a horrific event.

There is nothing special about 220 VAC that would make it grab onto you more than 120 or 480 VAC.

You might be confusing 220 VDC with 480 VAC. DC definitely grabs you. DC locks your muscles as opposed to AC pulsating them.

However, never be complacent around electricity because it's AC, DC, or below a certain voltage. It only takes ~20 mA to kill a human. If voltage, resistance, and other conditions are such that ≥0.020 amps can flow through the heart, you're dead.

At a fixed skin/flesh resistance, twice the voltage will feed twice the current => twice as lethal.

(I was the manager of a crew of 40 industrial maintenance electricians for over a decade and as such I was responsible for their safety. In addition to factory automation, we dealt with AC up to 13.8 kV, DC and AC Motors and Generators up to 25,000 HP, and transformers up to 2,000 kVA.)

Since we changed the topic title, I'll weigh in a little more.

I am willing to bet I have been shocked more than any of you in here... and at that aquarium store in college.

We had about 200 fish tanks at the store I worked at. Each and every single one of those fish tanks had its own pump, light, and electric heater. The electric heaters of the time were all glass, with a coiled metal wire inside a glass tube that went inside the fish tank. The heaters were between 50 watts and 300 watts depending on the size of the tank. Throughout the day, we would open up the tanks, catch fish, bang a net around inside, and close the tanks. There was maybe a 1 in 1000 chance that you'd break the glass heater or that it would already be broken, but the end result is someone would shock the crap out of themselves at least once a week. I woke up on the floor after being up on a metal ladder and doing that once. It wasn't just occasionally, it was at least once a month per employee... sometimes twice a day if you were unlucky. I was a young dumb college student just happy to have a cool job so I put up with it.

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I'll add this story - When I was in the Navy working on circuit boards, a woman was having a problem troubleshooting a power supply board. I came over to help, and while feeling the board for hot spots, I got shocked. By coincidence, the power to the building went out at the exact same time. It was instantly black in the shop, and the woman started screaming. I remember thinking, shit, this is it, I just killed myself! A few seconds later, I realized that I wasn't dead when I heard folks cussing about the power outage and I was moving, and someone telling the woman to shut up, the power will be back on soon. She kept on screaming, and after power came back on, she explained that she was afraid of the dark.

You can't make this stuff up!

As opposed to gas powered catfish?

As a longtime electrician, I agree.

Anyway, without typing out long stories, I will just say that out of all the times I've been nailed over the years, 277 V sucks very badly every time.

Double post

When I was a teenager, I was once buying a set of 2 12" subs from a classmate. I had to disconnect them from her car. Well, when removing them, I got shocked pretty good. I've always been a bit more careful when working with anything electrical since, so I chalk it up as a life lesson.
I remember tucking my hand into my sweater sleeve so that my hand wasn't touching the wire itself, like that was going to protect it much haha. I remember the sweater having two burn holes in it after that, where the current went through.

I was doing some home remodeling and had to move some wiring. There were two runs of wires, one was still live and one was dead. I went to cut the dead one, l'm glad that wire cutter had rubber handles. Needed new wire cutters after that, the blades were melted.

I was doing some remodeling in Chicago area, where their local building codes mandate house wiring in EMT (thin-wall metal tubing/pipe) conduit. I took down some old paneling to find a length of conduit that just stopped and wasn't connected to anything on the one end. I couldn't see any wires at the end, so assumed the pipe was empty and cut it off with the sawsall. It actually contained live wires that were also cut off deep inside, but in 50+ years, somehow the bare cut ends never touched the inside of the metal pipe. Needless to say, the saw blade was melted and the breaker popped open. Safety-wise, not a big deal since the tool itself is made of plastic and the path to ground was confined through the blade and back into the pipe.

At some point years ago, somebody left the pipe open/hanging; took the time to open the next junction box and pull the excess wire back several inches, but yet could have just as easily disconnected the live wires at the junction box and pulled them entirely out of the pipe.

When I was a kid I had my own workbench in the basement. I took apart a radio and noticed that the reception improved if I hooked an antenna to the power cord. Then I noticed the water pipe next to my workbench. That's a big antenna, I thought. Boom! I can still hear my dad... What the fuck are you doing down there! This was an old house with a total of four 15 amp fuses. That was the fastest fuse change I ever made.

Also when I was a kid, I helped my grandfather with remodeling. His philosophy: Turning off the power is for pussies. I quickly learned what not to touch.

Do NOT use an inductive tester (see pic below) as the only means of testing for voltage. Not to say that a non-contact tester does not have its place in a toolbox, but it should not be the sole means of testing for power.

Use a real DMM (digital multimeter) to test for voltage before working on any potentially energized circuits. It only takes once to get dead forever.

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Yes. "Check and verify."

And...............to get back on topic..............I did not lock out a circuit once. And people like throwing big switches. It makes a very satisfying sound when you throw a big switch. So...............unknown person walks past big switch that is usually on so he turns big switch on. I was on the other end of that big switch way out of sight from this person. Luckily, I was not grounded that well and only got half the sense knocked out of me when that line reenergized.

I couldn't even be mad at the person who threw the switch on. It was my fault (ha no pun intended) and luckily I did not get dead from my mistake.

No lockout holes for your lock?

It was a lockable disconnect. I just simply forgot to lock it out. Shit happens.

I was using a Wiha 1000V insulated screwdriver to remove one of the elements under the glass top of a smooth-top cooktop at our farm. I did not shut off the breaker, I am ultra well versed in all this and had the right tool for the job. Says every asshole who gets the shit shocked out of himself. This is a 240V cooktop. I accidentally rested my wrist on something that was live and it lit me up like a Christmas tree....knocked me over backwards and I missed grabbing ahold of the metal fridge at the same time (which would have likely resulted in my death) by about 3 inches....hit the floor like a sack of dirt. Was conscious but not able to move for about 10 seconds...whole thing caught on a "nanny cam" we used to keep track of our hospice dogs at the time when we were gone. Really epic, if I can find the video I'll post it.

Working in a theme park. Fix the monkey, they told me, so I started tinkering about with it. "Here's your present!" said the monkey in his merry way and then he delivered electrons via my right arm. For a good hour afterwards, I could hear colors.

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Ac in the garage at the farm wasn't working today. No errors on board, inside worked fine, exterior fan spun but wasn't kicking all the way on...ok, let's see what we have here.....Oh, nice. Vibration rubbed wire through (I assume) and it arc to and through steel exterior, was actively shorting while I was checking things out but I never felt anything. Never popped a breaker or a fuse, burnt a board, a cap, NOTHING. Rewired it, works like new. LOL

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I was helping my now ex son in-law install an electric fence hot wire around his horse pen. He grabbed ahold of the hot wire and commented on how disappointed he was that he only felt a mild tingle. Said the feed store salesman lied to him. Told him to remove his (tennis) shoes and socks and grab the wire again and see if that makes any difference! Thought he had enough sense not to do it but 10 minutes later, I heard a lot of hollering, cussing and he's jumping around like a jack rabbit! I laughed my ass off for the next 10 minutes!! He said his arm hurt for a week!

Karl