electrical deaths

Google "Sutro Tower"

Most everybody is on cable now, with a few dishes. Sutro is mostly AM and a personal navagational aid now.

Driving through the Twin Peaks neighborhood, the radio on my old Ford Fiesta would buzz even when it was off.

Our little local public library has lots of cool DVDs... and lots of bad ones. Diamond Street between Chenery and Bosworth.

It's the place where the Silk Road guy was busted. They used some other library in the movie, probably near Hollywood.

Since his (long) pants were wet I guess he waded in. No idea why he didn't don swim trunks of at least shorts.

Polarization can save the day with toasters and similar appliances. Then you can make sure that neutral comes in at the top end of the meanders. In the US, 99+ percent of cases will not have line and neutral reversed.

I will have to see if they sell here. The transmission protocols are different.

Argh, a fax today...

I think that the 99+ percent is quite optimistic, especially on older buildings. Back when I was an apartment-dweller, ran into all manner of trouble, to the point that one of the first things I did in a new apartment, was to turn the power off and opened all electric boxes, and straighten out the "carpenter wiring", much of this being dangerous.

War Story One: In the 1970s in Washington, DC, my boss was having considerable problems with the lights in his newish house in the suburbs. For instance, when he turned one light on, an unrelated light would go off. I said it sounded like some kind of grounding problem. Eventually he invited me to dinner in his house, and bring your voltmeter. Which I did. It turned out that the solid copper wires at every electrical device (wall switch, outlet, light, et al) were loose - the electrician (or his assistant had forgotten to tighten all the terminal screws down. (Stranded wire was not used then.) So boss called the builder to have all those neglected terminal screws tightened properly. He was lucky that there wasn't a fire.

War Story Two. Ten years later, in Baltimore, MD, some friends complained that their kitchen light (in the center of the ceiling) flickered, and mentioned that when they used the sink in the washroom off the kitchen, sparks fell from underneath that sink. I didn't believe them at first, but they persisted. It turned out that the building (which was quite old) still had some old knob-and-tube wiring. The plumbers had recently replaced the drain pipe from the bathroom above the washroom with a new copper pipe, and had barged through the existing knob-and-tube wiring, breaking the return path, but accidentally making the drain pipe live. The current made it from the copper drain pipe to the existing cast iron drain through the hardware on the washroom sink. Stopgap was to firmly ground the drain pipe. I assume the owner of the building had words with the plumber, and got an electrician. Anyway, nobody was hurt, and nothing burnt down.

I have many such stories, but this will do for now.

And I bet that Europe also has its heart-stopping stories.

Joe Gwinn

PS: I do prefer the Euro-style closed terminals that work for stranded and solid wire. They are allowed in the US, but not all that common outside of industrial sites. One big advantage is that they take far less volume than wire-nuts and the like.

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Not too optimistic, I think. The home inspector we used was a seasoned guy and he said outlets where line and neutral are reversed were very rare. He made it a habit of testing them all.

That's a serious blunder by a contractor. In Germany we had mandatory road-worthiness checks for cars every two years. I think they still do. The inspector came up from underneath my dad's car with a pale face. "Sir, come down here, you've got to see this". The four connector bolts of a universal joint in the steering column were in there alright but the mechanic had forgotten to put any of the nuts on them, let alone tighten anything. They were just rattling around in their holes without nuts. My dad was one of the guys who floored it on autobahns, 120mph and more. That could have resulted in a horrific accident.

Over there it's often willful neglect. I sat at a pcinic table of a campground in Italy, having some wine with the owner. The lights flickered and a loud phzzzzt was heard, sparks flew. The overhead cable to the freezer at the (very far away) end of that line was arcing. "I think we should turn this off and run an extension cord" ... "Nah, happens a lot, it'll hang on for a while. I'll fix this tomorrow. Or the day after".

Yes but unfortunately most of them contain just a screw and not a pressure plate. You are supposed to use ferrules on stranded wire but hardly anyone does.

Not a dangerous one.

The lights in the garden in my father beach place were connected, the neutral to one current limiter, the live to another one. The result was weird: the residual-current device (RCD or RCCB or GFCI) of the house (here the entire house must be protected by one) triggered at half past six in the morning, every morning.

The electrician was baffled. He found out that the station switched the transformer one notch at that hour, but why would that cause the GFCI to trigger nobody could imagine. Finally he found the crossover, and the thing stopped happening.

On that same place, a cable entered a certain tube with one colour and exited a different colour.

Turned out that the installation had been done by three different electricians, each not knowing what the previous one intended or did.

Oh! I had seen the article time ago, I had forgotten.

Crossover?

So there was an inline splice, which is forbidden here. All splices must be accessible for repair.

There was a You-Tube couple in Kiev, Ukraine that made a good income showing their home-improvement and boat-building stories and methods, up until when the Russians invaded in 2022. Anyway, the guy did his own electrical work, and happily made connections buried in walls, his trick being that he arc welded the copper wires being connected - this connection was not going to fail at any current level that didn't melt the wires as well, so what difference could it make? I see his point, but the US electrical safety authorities probably would not.

Yeah. That kind of problem is at the root cause of many bad accidents.

I don't miss those days.

I have many Baltimore and Washington, DC, stories, where there are lots of transient tenants and skinflint to rapacious landlords.

And a few good landlords. One of may many apartments had a new landlord with a building that was overrun with cockroaches. We complained to no avail. One day I caught an immense cockroach (50mm long) and brought it to the landlord (a lawyer), who was working on something nearby. His eyes widened - he had never seen one *that* big

- and stammered that I had certainly brought the evidence. He said that he had an exterminator on contract. I pointed out that there is no way that critter could have gotten so big if the exterminator was doing his job, even sporadically. He allowed that this was true. Next week, the apartment building smelled like a refinery, and there were paper signs the exterminator had been busy. The landlord was being cheated by the exterminator.

Joe Gwinn

It certainly was, but if the house had burned down, good luck figuring out why from inspection of the ashes.

There is an electrical inspector whose approval is required before the house can be occupied, but they do not generally test that the screws are tight.

What probably happened is that the electrician had an apprentice, and so the electrician does the hooking up and the apprentice checks that it's correct (and thus learns) and does the final tightening. They somehow got distracted, and the last step never happened.

Good lord. That would have killed many people.

Yes, very often exactly that. I have similar stories.

I don't either, because the approved euro terminal strips don't provide plates for the smaller wire sizes. I also use the euro terminal strips inside appliances, and if I'm connecting finely stranded wire, I tin the wire with 63-37 solder to consolidate it, and clamp that.

Joe Gwinn

Electrical codes contain a lot of non-obvious and very expensive wisdom.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Absolutely. I tell the young that the National Electrical Code is written in blood. Punctuated by blood-curdling accidents.

Joe Gwinn

I don't know how to call it. He found that the live was coming from one circuit breaker, and the neutral from another. Of course, everything worked, the lamps were connected to the neutral and the live, continuity tests say "right", but... two breakers. And the GFCI reacted, somehow.

It is forbidden here too!

Not only that, but the same cable was one colour on one end, and a different colour on the other end, so impossible to trace the cables from junction to junction box. The electrician that found this out was astonished. I guess he wasted days figuring out what was going on.

If the guy had used cables of the same colour, nobody would have noticed.

The house I am living at, has some cables directly embedded in the mortar. This is forbidden, but wasn't at the time. The correct procedure now is to place plastic tubing inside the walls and the mortar, and then drive the cables inside the tubing. The cables can be replaced when needed.

Ah...

I've asked a few electricians if they have read the building codes. None have.

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DON'T! The tin will flow slowly under pressure, and loose the connection. It was a common habit in the Netherlands until forbidden. With a reason.

Unless of course you mean you have a clamp with a spring that will adjust?

Arie

I worked in a relatively modern building that had been wired to a good standard and checked regularly. One Monday morning someone ran into my workshop and said the fluorescent light fitting in their room had just exploded. I investigated and found a black blast mark across the ceiling and the remains of a vapourised wire in the fitting. Wire of that size would have taken well over 100 amps to vapourise it, so obviously something had gone seriously wrong.

I switched off the entire supply to that wing of the building and rang the electrician to come and investigate what had happened. He arrived, screamed abuse at me and switched on again without even listening to what I told him.

Some time later I heard from his 'mate' that over the weekend he had taken out the neutral-earth links in the sub-station to allow some tests to take place. He had forgotten to replace them and the whole neutral current of the building was flowing through the neutral wire of that fitting where it had become pinched against the earthed metal conduit.

Yes, I agree that a ready made box is better; I just have not found a good enough box. I have one somewhere, but it is much worse than my old Gigaset. It appears that good makers have abandoned this market in Europe.

Or perhaps actually solder the brass connector, and then screw the connector.

Yep.

Also things like computers do have a constant small leak. Or mains filters.

Here too, of course.

Likely true, but they very much will know the NEC, and the state local variant of that. For one thing, one must pass a test to be licensed as an electrician.

Joe Gwinn