Thinking of this thread for a while, and was prompted by the "path of least resistance" thread.

So, let us all know about those harrowing milliseconds when you have had something like this happen. IMO it hurts worse than getting a jolt from a straight voltage....

• Working in a box with other circuits - thinking you have them off - you find that some joker "picked-up" a neutral from that one you are working on - YEOW!!!!
• Testing a Hi-Lo voltage problem you accidently touch the ground or neutral bar which is no longer the same as anything else. You become the parralel path.... YEOWCH!
• Relamping a 4' T-12 wrap around fixture. You open the difusser and out drops the ballast cover - and THE BALLAST! Someone used the fixture as a wire-way for some other lighting, the wieght of the ballast pulls the neutral apart and the load side one comes down and smacks you right in the face while you reach for something to grab before falling off the ladder. Grrrr...
• Working in a crawl space a plumber says he got shocked. You ask how, says he got shocked by a conduit, and he uses his tape measure as a pointer as he reaches across you with his hand on your shoulder as you hold on to some nearby pipe, the one he was working on - you both get nailed... Later you find that some dope used a water line as a neutral.

Just some of the dumb ways to get shocked that I have compiled over the years. The last one was a week or so ago.

I went to an old house once that someone had repaired the broken neutral on K&T by wrapping it around a gas line in the basement

Since we're on the topic of neutral conductors.

Does cuurent flow from negative to positive because the grounded conductor adds current on it's return trip?

I've actually had an incandecent lamp glow when I got my finger in a neutral path on accident.

The human dimmer!

How many watts was the lamp?

Don't recall, might have been a 60 or 100. It just glowed a little bit as I got hit. It kind of added to the excitement, like an ! to the pain. Now I know what resistors go through.

Which is exactly what I was getting at.

I was once shocked by the return path of 277v circuit. I was young, hungover from the night before, and mounting an exit sign to a suspended ceiling. The design of the sign called for mounting the canopy first, then wiring it, then finally attaching the body of the sign to the canopy. The stripped back THHN wire made contact with my elbow and knocked me off the ladder. I'll never forget it.

Here's one of my dad's stories on this topic:

Coworker gets called out to a MH Park for a "No Cable" Call. Goes to the DMARC on the side of the house, opens it up, and the cable was "blacker than black" (as in burned.) He looks at the porch light, and notices it's going on and off, on and off, on and off. He realizes what's wrong, and runs to the door and tries knocking. BAM! He get blasted into the yard. More concerned for the people and their house burning down, he does it again, with same result. My dad pulls up, and calls the people in the house, telling them to flip their main breaker off.

What was happening? The neutral was lost in the UG service, and it found a new way to the ground. Onto the aluminum siding, and through the cable. Funny part? The people didn't care, or notice their lights were flickering, they called when the cable went out! POCO was there the next day, with a backhoe. They were back there the next day, with shovels.

Ian A.

I had one where I still can't figure out how it happened.
I was at anindoor flea market, plugging in an old portable record player. It didn't do anything, so I touched the small connector where the cord went into the player (similar to the well-known figure 8 connector) and immediately got bit! Even though I was standing on a wood floor with rubber soles on my shoes it hurt pretty bad.
Yet when I thoroughly tested that cord later I never managed to find a fault.

I remember like it was yesterday, back in 98' I was working at Ft Benning Ga. Installing new ballasts in 277v fixtures, I disconnected the hot..capped it off, then same with the Neutral, but before I capped it with a wire nut, I let my left finger slip down on to the copper..my other 'paw' was resting on the backside of the ballast cover. OUCH!

Maybe a question for you engineers:

Is there any truth to the claim that a neutral shock can be worse than a shock from a phase wire?

If the current is passing through a motor or a ballast is there an inductive kick, or do people just "not expect" to get hit from a neutral so it's that much more of a surprise?

-John

I have taken to checking neutral wires with my Fluke non contact tester as soon as I open them up. If there is current, it will light up the tester as soon as you interrupt the path.

My dad has said (and I'm not sure if he's joking) that sparks must not be depressed very often, what with the random, low-grade, electroshock therapy the receive. As therapeutic as it might be, I still don't think it's a good thing...

Well, lets look at that neutral current for a moment....

For a simple two-wire circuit, the only way the neutral can be "hot" is if the current has passed through a load. If the load is a simple resistance (like a light bulb), then you're going to feel reduced voltage, at 60 hz.
If it's a load that has capacitors in it (like a fluo ballast), those caps are going to give you an extra "kick." Sort of a "mini-stun gun."

For multiwire circuits, the current on the shared neutral will be combined. As I see it, the voltages will both add to each other, and merge .... meaning that the voltage will approach 208, and the current waveform will begin to look more like a "DC" line than a sine wave. This means a bigger contraction in your muscles- and a greater chance of not being able to let go.

The 'advantage' here to a shared neutral is that the loads are also exposed to the higher voltage ... so they might fry before you do! I wouldn't count on it, though.

My two "Neutral" stories... both took place before I officially entered the trade.

I was a H.O. who was using stuff his Dad taught him to re-wire his house from the old linen covered, rubber insulated stuff (not even sure of the Code designation, since it got kiboshed about the time they stopped allowing knob & tube for new installs) with brand new THHN/THWN.

It was entering early evening, and Doug, working by fading sun and a trouble light, had just finished re-pulling a run of #12 into a box in the basement mounted on the floor joists above.

In the process of marrying the new wire to the old. I had turned the breaker for the circuit off, and had just tied in the hot, and was stripping the neutral, when the tip of my Kliens touched the back of the junction box.

POP! A bright blue flash overhead, and there goes the night vision.

Upon examination, my #12 strippers were now #10 strippers.

I walked over to the panel and killed the main to do the last three hookups.

Later in the same adventure, I had finished re-running new wire in the upstairs bedrooms, and had walked downstairs to re-power the circuit.

As I came back upstairs, I rounded the corner of the stairs to the second floor and I saw this unearthly glow coming from the bedroom closet I had just been working in. It appeared that there was a fire in the closet.

As I rushed into the bedroom, I realized that the glow was coming from the bulb.

Apparantly, the "hot" feed to the bedroom hadn't been tightened enough, and had popped loose, leaving the last lamp in the circuit as the one in the bedroom. It was being backed somehow, and had just enough voltage going through it from the lamps in the other rooms to illuminate.

Scared the hell outta me.


[This message has been edited by DougW (edited 12-09-2006).]