When I did residential wiring we had a rash of cabinet guys who liked to use 3" screws , they would run them in at an angle and hit wires on the side of the stud or slide past the nail plate and stab the wire. We were wiring 60 houses a month , so by the time we figured out what was going on we had 15 houses with ruined gfci circuits in the kitchens and baths.....
Amazing length of time walking after a 2300V arc flash
- Thread starter Jennifer
- Start date
Nobodybusiness
Collecting the leftovers of the Great Sky Reactor.
This happened not to far from me some years ago.
This was very unfortunate.
Most of us will never work on Voltage that high but it always pays to be careful.
Good thing they were GFCI!
ericfx1984
Solar Enthusiast
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2021
- Messages
- 741
I have experienced an arc flash at about 2,300 volts as well... Luckily at an incredibly low amperage it was a very very bright light and I honestly thought I had just died... It was a small transformer 120 volts to 2300... I remember I couldn't see anything for what seemed like ages... It was really probably less than a second... After that I started using much more controlled scenarios for my tests and experiments
In fact now if I need to test the output voltage of a transformer one of the methods that I prefer especially if I have reason to believe that it's relatively high voltage is to simply feed the transformer on the input side with an extremely low voltage and then read what comes out and that gives me a reasonable idea of what the output voltage will be when attached to the correct input voltage
Of course I've since spot better equipment that would allow me to safely attach to 2300 volts live when I say safely I mean that in a relative sense
In fact I did an experiment and may still have the video of it... I had built a 4,500 volt DC power supply with a transformer that was nearly twice the size of my head... I powered it up remotely as it had a contactor system... It was fed with 220 volt and had old metal type navy capacitors... Amazingly enough despite these capacitors being from like the 40s or '50s they still worked just fine
For giggles I attached a 600 volt rated multimeter... Again I fired this thing up with the contactor remotely... I have a video where you can actually see the multimeter initially catch a voltage The screen go blank Then you can see an internal arc happen and an arc jump 3 ft across the room onto the floor... To this day the shop still has a burn mark
In fact now if I need to test the output voltage of a transformer one of the methods that I prefer especially if I have reason to believe that it's relatively high voltage is to simply feed the transformer on the input side with an extremely low voltage and then read what comes out and that gives me a reasonable idea of what the output voltage will be when attached to the correct input voltage
Of course I've since spot better equipment that would allow me to safely attach to 2300 volts live when I say safely I mean that in a relative sense
In fact I did an experiment and may still have the video of it... I had built a 4,500 volt DC power supply with a transformer that was nearly twice the size of my head... I powered it up remotely as it had a contactor system... It was fed with 220 volt and had old metal type navy capacitors... Amazingly enough despite these capacitors being from like the 40s or '50s they still worked just fine
For giggles I attached a 600 volt rated multimeter... Again I fired this thing up with the contactor remotely... I have a video where you can actually see the multimeter initially catch a voltage The screen go blank Then you can see an internal arc happen and an arc jump 3 ft across the room onto the floor... To this day the shop still has a burn mark
