Luckily I have not encountered any severe arc faults, though I have done unsafe work situations in the past that I now would not repeat. In my apprenticeship, short circuits at a standard outlet were demonstrated (230V 16A with a few hundred amps short circuit current) that was the most I saw live.
The funny thing is that all the 6 or 7 shocks I ever got were at home, none at work.
The by far most stupid was when, at age 20 or so, I thought I was good enough to change a broken 230V outlet live. Of course it happened that I got shocked, from left hand to right hand, and tripped the 30mA GFCI (with of course more than 30mA going through my heart until the GFCI mechanics acted; just fyi: GFCIs are in the panel in Europe, not in the outlet).
As someone above wrote, the 50Hz vibration in your muscles is a feeling you never forget.
The most odd was that I tripped a 230V GFCI with my nose as a teenager. It hurt. In Germany, the ground contacts of an outlet can be touched when no plug is inserted. My parents had a burning smell in the house (which later clarified to be from outside) and asked me to see what was going on. The store room where it smelt had one never used outlet in the corner and upon my close smell test on that, my nose touched the ground pin that was unknown miswired to 230V hot.
Btw, here in Germany, nowadays you get tought that a 120/230V or above shock ALWAYS requires seeing a doctor and getting an ECG. Compare that to the old electritians handbook that tells you how to find live wires by touching!
How is that in your countries? Every domestic voltage shock sent to the doctor?
And here's a bit related wake up call that tought me for my work as a machinery control-cabinet engineer: Sometimes, if pneumatics are required on a machine, they are put in a sheet metal cabinet like the controls. In the situation at a large company I worked at, they had an electric control cabinet about the size of a room door, and a flanged-on cabinet same size with pneumatic valves and hoses in it. The area where the two cabinets met was cut through for wiring. Somehow, at night the 20 bar (300 psi) feed hose broke off from the main stopcock in the pneumatics cabinet and started flying around in the whole cabinet. Destroying the electric gear like a hammer, getting 230V on the 24V side and everything electric in the control cabinet went up in flames, fed by the air rushing in. Some people were working night shift and cut off the power, I don't remember if the cabinets door was knocked open from the hose though. That tought me to use separate cabinets and stable separators, when pneumatics are involved.
Last edited by andey; 01/10/18 09:27 AM.
