Originally posted by mickky:
Originally posted by electure:
[b]Mickky,
This is a great site! Just the kind of mad science wierdo stuff I love!
Bordew,
I got knocked nearly out of the boom truck once changing out a ballast in a parking lot pole that had 300KV lines above. The circuit was shut off, but the ballast secondaries still read 98V. (OK, guys. Burn me for not taking out the tester first, yes I was an idiot) There's a health hazard
My first reaction was amused,(because of the High tension line non-issue of a few years back)but saddened-these poor people were at the mercy of what, to me, appears to be inadequate ground, or lifted neutral(?)Did they do the work themselves? I can't tell.
[/B]Thats exactly my point, we wind up with more regulations, and not all are bad, but for example, the '99 code change where it instructs us to remark a white wire if it is a switch leg. As long as I can remember in this field and thats about 29 years that whit wire in a switch box has always been hot and you return to the switch on the black. Evidently a DIYer was confused about this and got shocked, purely a case of not knowing what you are doing, so what happens they make a code change, beccause of this.
I have never heard of a ballast holding a charge that long, because the time constant is not that significant, but there always that possibility.
When I think of stray voltage, I think of farms, they are the biggest abusers of this. They have a " Maypole " in the middle of the yard where they distribute to all there buildings with three conducctors, and of course they pick up or better yet generate a lot of stray voltage, ground-to-neutral, because of a lot of process piping in the ground, explain why this is happening and they look at you like you are nutz. So they call the power company and the PoCo tries to cover their own butt and install a Neutral blocker at the pole, which of course does nothing to elimate the problem. Milking parlors are notorious for stray voltage.