ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Electrical Theory and Applications How does hot wire tester works?

If time could back flow 200 years,you should have been another Ohm.Thank you pauluk and your kitchen jumping!

But things have not yet ended!
1)From pauluk's experiment results,the neon tester is good stuff for astronaut,because astronaut is floating!!Is that right??!!!!

2)The capacitance effect I mentioned is different from what you are thinking about.It is too complicated to explain here.It involve the electric current speed in the leads.

Anyway thank all you guys,thank you pauluk!




[This message has been edited by peterpang (edited 01-18-2005).]

The pocket tester I have will work just stuck in the socket without anyone holding it. Wonder how the circuit gets completed?

I am a data cabling tech and I have one of these pen testers to see if an outlet is live when I am connecting equiptment and I have noticed in my down time when playing with this tester that when I rub the tip of this tester quickly on my jeans the lamp lights, I am not in any contact with any source of electricity and this thing lights up. Can anyone explain that? It has puzzled me for some time now.

Maybe sufficient capacitive coupling to ground? Presumably this is a 120V tester, so the series resistor would be a much lower value than for a 240V type.

I would guess the friction is building up a charge, very much like the Van de Graaf generator you probably had in your school's physics lab.

I'm no expert on electrostatics, but I would think you could build up enough of a charge that way to excite the neon gas in the bulb.