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Close call of the day.

highland145

highland145

Lifer
My bro is a plumber. He's gutting/re-doing a bathroom in an old office a couple of doors down. He puts on latex gloves before touching the toilet but decides to take loose some other pipes first including cutting out a 4" cast iron vent. Plugs in the sawzaw and starts on the pipe.....KA-POW. Some electrician has used the pipes in the building as a ground and there's a short. 110V running through the pipe. Melts the teeth of the saw blade. If he had not had the gloves on while taking the other pipes out, it could have been real bad.

On a lighter note, at least the toilet was still in place when he got the crap scared out of him.
 
rudeguy said:
so you are saying the thin latex gloves saved him?

meh....
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I don't know but I'll/he'll take whatever helped.

The sawzaw housing is plastic so he should be good there. But wrenching the other pipes before he did the 4" is where he thinks he could have gotten zapped.
 
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Sounds like shitty construction/QC to me. Why would the sparky be using ductile pipe for a ground? Doubt the latex did anything for him, probably the ground wire on the tool.

Lucky bro. Every day here we preach that construction is a constantly shifting beast and what was safe yesterday may not be safe today.
 
roguerower said:
Sounds like shitty construction/QC to me. Why would the sparky be using ductile pipe for a ground? Doubt the latex did anything for him, probably the ground wire on the tool.

Lucky bro. Every day here we preach that construction is a constantly shifting beast and what was safe yesterday may not be safe today.
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Our building was built in 1947.😱
 
110V can melt the teeth of a saw blade? At just a touch? are you sure thats not a big embellishment?

I've seen 220V go through some pretty flimsy wires and nothing is melting.
 
It would be normal for a steel pipe in any house to be at ground potential. The likely explanation for your brother's trouble is that there was NO ground wire on his saw, ie the third prong is not there or disconnected AND the AC outlet he used was wired backward.
 
That sux, glad he is ok. It must have scare the shit out of him, especially not expecting it.

Damn, 110 is enough to melt a saw blade? This is why I don't work on anything live. A lot of people I know work live, and say it's not enough to do serious harm to you, but if it can melt a saw blade....I think I'll take the time to find the breaker and turn it off.
 
Train said:
110V can melt the teeth of a saw blade? At just a touch? are you sure thats not a big embellishment?

I've seen 220V go through some pretty flimsy wires and nothing is melting.
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The circuit breaker would be a 15 A so for the brief moment before it trips, YES it would cause sparks and melt some steel.
 
Wyndru said:
That sux, glad he is ok. It must have scare the shit out of him, especially not expecting it.

Damn, 110 is enough to melt a saw blade? This is why I don't work on anything live. A lot of people I know work live, and say it's not enough to do serious harm to you, but if it can melt a saw blade....I think I'll take the time to find the breaker and turn it off.
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It;s not only a question of voltage but also of the resistance the body presents to the voltage. The lower the resistance like steel, the more current, the higher the resistance, like a human body the lower the current. This is why people don't normally get killed when they touch 110 V
 
Number1 said:
It;s not only a question of voltage but also of the resistance the body presents to the voltage. The lower the resistance like steel, the more current, the higher the resistance, like a human body the lower the current. This is why people don't normally get killed when they touch 110 V
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Humans aren't a particularly good insulator.
 
Working on anything live is just plain stupid. On the job I was on for a short time before this one, our concrete sub's foreman went home and his AC unit wasn't working right so he went to fix it w/o shutting off the breaker. As he was working on it he hit a live wire and like that *snap of a finger* he was dead. Died in front of his wife and parents. All because he didn't take the 1 minute to kill the unit.
 
i once ran speaker wires un-isolated out from the inside of a TV to connect to my computer sound card input. Connector touched the back of the sound card ZAAAAAAP, spot welded a mark on the steel. I ended up rethinking my setup after that.
 
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