Tell me the Dumbest thing you have ever done with Electricity (and lived to tell about it)

I work on dental equipment for a living and on a install of some many years ago, I found myself above a ceiling installing a track mounted light. In the process of wiring up said light i had to squeeze my arms in between the drop ceiling and the backing. Unbeknownst to me was nameless electrician had wired up a nice neutral reverse for me. No meter 10 ft. in the air so i do my usual hot to ground to get a spark trick, partner verifies to breakers are off, and I proceed. As I start feeding the bundle through the hole the neutral bit me and held on, grounding my arms to the drop ceiling. Screamed like a banshee and my partner kicked the latter out from under me, I fell, taking the drop ceiling with me. Needless to say 2nd degree burns and a small trip to the emergency room, which luckily was just across the street, and no nerve damage! Extremely lucky.

Side note...

When the office opened the next week. The doc went to drill on his first patient in his new ops, and low and behold, the electrician strikes again! This time he had ground the dental chair plug to the chair itself the neutral reversed the lighting in the handpiece from the unit. Lets just say his patient was less the pleased to have 24 V DC running through their jaw. And as far as I know that electrician is still working.

In a big hurry once I had to remove a ceiling fan from my moms house. I was in such a stupid hurry that I didn't feel like taking the time to go in the basement to hit the breaker and got it in my head that I could do it carefully with the juice on. Because the thought of doing it live was in my head I didn't think to just use the wall switch to cut the power. Because this is a stupidest thing you have ever done thread, you know how that turned out. No injuries when I touched the wrong things together but a few of my wife's opinions were confirmed that night. Many times in my life I have said thanks that I live in a 110V country.

Got my hands across a 600VDC tube RF power amplifier in an old two-way radio that a customer wouldn't replace with a new set.

Never forgot it!

Rich

I was somewhere between 12-15 and my friend and i found a 250,000V neon sign transformer in his dads garage. That thing had to weigh 20+ pounds... (he worked for a sign company at one point)

We decided to turn this into a jacob's ladder with some really thick copper wire we had also found. Long story short, we made it and it worked, then we started lighting things on fire with it. All of this is pretty stupid. At some point he bumped it or something and it fell over on him and starting electrocuting him. I ran over and kicked the electrodes off of him and he got to live :)

Im guessing GE or Motorola.

LOL! Breaker? Switch? What’s that? I have a nasty habit of doing most fixture, outlet, and switch replacements with the juice live. Been bit a lot but heck, that’s the challenge, no?

Worse I've received was as a teenager working on theatre lighting for the local amateur theatre. I was connecting some huge spotlights and one of them had a bad plug. 400+ volts knocked me back a few feet on my ass.

As a drywall finisher for many years, I've worked on more than a few homes where the electrician decided to let the electric be live even though nothing was connected to the wiring. Switch receptacles are always right along the joint path and when pushing the wiring into the box to get a smooth finish on the joint I've been bit plenty of times and had wires melt in my hand.

I ended working on the elevator industry, did you also do the same? Haha.

H) I worked in an industrial environment for most of my life. We had machines that had cages which could slide aside, to work on the equipment. I was watching a worker who was inside the open cage working on an issue. I put one hand on the cage frame and one hand on the cage itself. WAHM! 240v ran from one side thru the other, using my body as a conductor. I could not move and the current made my hands grip the cage and frame. The other guy saw me looking strange and he figured it out quickly. He did a kung foo kick on me and it blew me to the ground. I was in the hospital for three days.... After I woke up...

The machine manufacturer had relied on using the cage's sliding track for a ground when the cage was open. The cage contained a 240v 3 phase motor and the track was the ground to the machine. They said it was not possible to get electrocuted in the manner I did. Famous last words... :exmark:

One of the plants I worked in had an electrician die. Good friend of many, we all knew him. He got pulled into 480 3 phase and got fried. There had been a lockout on the machine, but the lockout proceedure was wrong. Only one lock for 5 guys working. He was on the back side of the machine and one other guy took off the lockout and powered it up.

I will never forget the smell when I arrived at the scene...

I used to work in the Engineering Test lab of a company that manufactures heavy earth moving equipment. We were running tests on a ~400HP DC motor hooked up on a test stand in our lab. We were monitoring the voltage with Fluke meters connected directly to the bus bar. Part-way through the test, the low-battery warning on one of the Flukes came on; rather than disconnect the leads from the power, I simply unplugged them from the Fluke and changed the batteries. When I went to plug the leads back in, I accidentally shorted them together on the back of my hand, with the motor running at full load. Needless to say, there was a very loud 'bang' at that point. Unfortunately, the short killed the speed sensor on the test stand resulting in the motor beginning to accelerate rapidly to unsafe speeds. I was able to hit the E-stop switch while I still wasn't sure exactly what had happened. When I looked at my hand, it was entirely black, apparently from the oxidized metal from the leads. When my boss saw it, he wouldn't touch it. I later found out that he thought it had been badly burned from the arc and was a solid third-degree burn. Fortunately, it all washed off in water. My other co-workers had been hiding in the break room when they heard the motor run away. They were worried the motor would overspeed and start slinging shrapnel from the coils. As it turns out, I only ended up with second degree burns on the back of my fingers and blisters under my fingernails. And a valuable lesson on being careful with electricity... Cool

In a former lifetime as a commercial photographer, I was attempting repair on a set of portable strobes that had been subjected to water intrusion from a rainstorm on-set.

The pack that provides power to the head units (4) contained four capacitors that, when energized, provided the energy to fire the flashtube in each head.

One of those capacitors still had a charge. When it discharged from shorting with a screwdriver, the electric shock in my arm was so violent that I elbowed myself in the ribs hard enough to bruise them severely. They turned an amazing shade of purple-green.

I should have known better, having made rather effective stun-guns out of disposed single-use cameras' flashes as an early teen. Nope.

I also explored the mains plug as a wee lad, but rather than with a set of keys or a twist-tie, I used the tiny tweezers from a Swiss Army knife. POP-BURN-BLISTER-PAIN. Lesson learned.

I have a weird story for you .

I have a potted ficus tree on my back patio that I habitually put christmas lights on every year . One year I was watering said tree while decorated and didn't realize that the extention cord was sitting on top of the soil in the pot , or that the circuit was hot .

I was shocked by electricity coming up the stream of water !

Maybe none of us should be modding flashlights. ;)

Great stories! I'm waiting to hear more!

Arc drawing and other experiments with mains connected MOT's when I was younger, bad idea. Never did have any mishaps, but it is still a really bad idea and one of the dumbest things I've done with electricity due to "500mA @ 2kV".

I just bought bread.... and 8 hours later I walk into the kitchen and there's the bag of bread wide open ...(Idiot ).

So the next day...same thing .... I did it again ...

How does this relate to electricity you ask ?

The lights are on ....There just ain't nobody home .:P

I lived in an old farm house when I was 15. You know fencing wire instead of fuse wire in the fuses. I decided to pull apart a lamp. I checked it was not plugged in. Well I knew the power point was on the other side of the room so it couldn't be plugged in. I got in stripped down to the bare socket. Grabbed hold and was severely electrocuted. I somehow managed to release my grip on it after about 5 seconds and I was lucky not to die. It was plugged into an extension cord. I have had the odd zap but nothing like that. I will never forget it.

No, I chose the other side of the road, I am a programmer. When I was young, I was so "in love" with the "machines" that it was a possibility for me to be in the elevators industry today... Also in love with electronics... The only thing that changed my path was when I started programming my first computer

Well, I didn’t do anything stupid only because I had no way of knowing that our 220 V electric stove had a short. I was cleaning up (rare for me as I was a kid at the time) after eating and I had a wet rag in one hand and the other hand on the faucet in the kitchen sink.



When I touched the stove with the hand with the rag to wipe down the stove top I got a jolt of 220 V and I guess it didn’t help that my other hand was on the water pipe.



Luckily I was so stretched out that the jolt threw me back from both the stove and the water pipe. I had been momentarily shocked with 110 V wall sockets before. Those just scare you or make you mad in comparison to this jolt.



This felt as though someone quickly pulled on one arm and removed it and pulled my other arm through my body as well! I can see that if someone fell on a 220 V source where gravity wouldn’t pull them away from it they would be history very shortly!



Now I always trip the circuit breakers and test for a live wire before I do any minor electrical work around the house.

A few years when I was about 14, I was hooking up some small toy car DC motors to a lamp socket. I have no idea why I was doing that, but I accidentally touched both the positive and negative ends of the wires I stuck in the lamp socket so I could hook motors up to it while I had a motor running. I had a 240v shock sent through my thumb and index finger. My thumb stung and hurt on touch for a week after that. The little DC motor was fine though, surprised they didn't blow up because they usually run off 2 AAs. I was intrigued when they ran much faster on the 240v lamp socket so that's why I was messing around with it.

LOL!