Jake,

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 00:34:17 +1100, Jake Anderson wrote:

> this is simmilar in many respects to faraday flying the kite in the thunderstorm and no i dont mean
electrically

Funny, I thought about that too!  :-)  I forget: did the OP mention if they were standing on something
insulated?

I was astounded to see how they connect a new house to the electrical mains when I was working on a building
site as a student.  We dug a trench down through the path to expose the cable - it was armoured, about 40mm in
diameter and about 500mm under the surface.  Then the specialist turned up, placed a rubber mat in the bottom
of the trench, and stood on it, wearing rubber boots.  He cut and unwrapped the outer insulation and armour,
seperated out the conductors, chose the ones he wanted (one line and neutral) and unwrapped them one at a time
(still live) and made the connection by wrapping and soldering the tail cable, then re-insulating, then
re-made and waterproofed the bundle.  During this there were times when he was wrapping the bare conductors
together by hand, and I reckon the current capability of that cable would have been in the thousands of amps.
If someone had tapped him on the shoulder at the wrong moment, they would both have had it!  There's no way
I'd do that job...

Using a safety device such as an RCCD (as they're called here) as your only protection from potential death
(!) is *really* dangerous - it's fail-unsafe and a bit like propping a fire-check door open with a
fire-extinguisher, and justifying it by saying that if there is a fire someone will pick up the extinguisher
to put it out the fire, so the door will close...

I have a plug-in RCCD here that fails to trip when you press the "test" button (no, I never use it, I'm going
to dismantle it one day for interest) and I'm sure these things aren't all that reliable that you would be
allowed to have them as the only safety device (in lieu of insulation, for example).  They are designed as an
*added* safety feature, and probably do save some lives each year but alone they just aren't good enough.  I
personally knew someone who died from a mains shock, and I know of others who have done so.

Somewhere I saw a statistic for the number of people who die per year in the USA by checking 9V batteries on
their tongue - it's not zero, which I would have predicted!

Please be careful, people!

Cheers,

Howard Winter
St.Albans, England

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