well I for one would not discourage your added information. Its tid bits like your post on these forums that allow us to learn pertinent things that otherwise may not have been known. I think anyone working around high voltages should be doing so carefully and with respect for the dangers present, and I appreciate the food for thought.
thank you for your contribution to educate.

btw: IF you have a four legged friend around that can give you some TLC should you get zapped, maybe a forhead smooch or the like, then Ive heard you can pull through....beer and cursing may help alleviate symptoms to.

 

Not really. In the case you have Googled, that patient had severe hypokalema secondary to aggressive diuresis, and was not changing her spark plugs.

 

ok..i will buy in...we recently had a bit of a discussion on another vehicle forum about weird ways to die via electricity..I dont think spark plug jolts was covered

Dave, would you mind outlining whether in fact it is potentially lethal to get a spark plug or coil jolt ?

( I am suspecting that it could be in certain circumstances)

I was almost going to say you cant call yourself even a backyard mechanic unless you have had one !

 

I guess the best answer is when I get back from holiday I'll drag out the Hantek and check the current in a couple places.

Again, we want to stay away from >0.1 amperes:



I would offer that barring a pacemaker or underlying cardiac arrhythmia, ignition voltage jolts are not lethal, but let's think about what we're saying here:

"You probably won't die from a secondary ignition jolt."

And we would want to prove/disprove this because...

 

Well, I am home back at the hotel off from work. I just could not wait to get back and put in another reply to this thread. I will be totally and completely going off of topic now too. I think it will be okay? Although, I do apologize about it.

I decided not to read any of your new responses just yet (because I knew that you would..). Instead, I wanted to be able to throw down an unbiased representation of how I feel on the matter, and not to be influenced by whatever you decided to write back to me since the last correspondence earlier in the day.

I believe you said your professional experiences were invasive cardiology, right? My experiences were in The Pit working emergencies. Depending on how extensive your experiences are on the matters specific to the heart.. you could very well be able to wipe the walls clean with me if we were to begin discussions related to all things cardiac. I do not have a specialists knowledge on any of the different subjects of medicine. Instead, I know enough about a little of everything, in order to be treating the emergencies. A jack of all trades is what we are required to be when working down in The Pit.

It has been a few years since the last code I was in .A little over three now.. However, I still like to think of the stuff as my bread and butter. It was something that I was very passionate about doing the whole time I was in there doing it! I like to think I know what I am talking about when it comes to this stuff too. But, dang it man! Why did you have to go and do that? I did not even have to look anything up to know. Shortly after my last post I thought for a minute.. and I said to myself, why did I go and pick an obscure dysrthm to mention in the first post like I did - vs - simply stating VF? The second thing I thought of was about how sure of myself I was.. that I just knew I was right about it?

I understand now that I was wrong about it. Torsades is not going to be a rythm resulting from anybody receiving an accidental electrical shock. Or, any kind of electric shock for that matter. I like to be providing people with accurate information whenever I do.. irregardless of the subject matter. I also do not particularly like to be wrong either. I ussually strive to do my research when giving advice for those two reasons.

I especially do not like being wrong about something like this.. Something I feel I was very good at, and was very passionate about doing for basically all of my adult life. It is not a very fun thing..

I was still looking forward to being off from work and being able to come back to the thread and respond. A decent dose of humility being served right my way today. Even though I don't like it.. It won't do me in, and I can take it. I can learn from it is what I can do with it. Thank you. I think for some reason I may have needed it?

Now, to go see how hard you were on me? Hopefully, it is not too bad? Because if I know a healthcare worker who knows their stuff...

 

This is all you had for me?

 

I think you guys have scared the OP off.

 

He might be off 'googling' - severe hypokalema secondary to aggressive diuresis.. before he even thinks about touching those spark plugs now?

 

However, Post symptomatically, after forehead smooches your 4 legged friend may then explode or combust.....


op hasn't missed anything until he gets us more info.

mechanical stethoscope or better video, preferably both.

 

Oh right, my bad.

Merry Christmas!

 

Thanks and.. a Happy New Year to each and every one!

 

I figured I would end my off topic divergence with this;

Because I think it is interesting this is what you wrote. I have seen many injuries and burns related to accidental electrocution in my time. Horrible is a word that puts it mildly. I was responding to something out in the field yesterday. You can definitely die or be otherwise severely injured by touching incoming secondary lines like the Father Son did. The feeder coming from a transformer is the secondary line going to your house. Each wire to ground is 120 volts and the two feeders without a ground is 120 x 2 = 240 volts. Now, granted of course, these should be insulated lines and all. You still never know what may happen should you accidentally touch one of them though, until the power company opens the circuit and shuts it down. Even then, the best practice is still to treat the line as hot.


Do you see the splice coming from this two phase transformer bank up there on this pole leading into a secondary duplex line?


Do you see where the secondary duplex line leads to?


This shadow is me.

I was out there dealing with this for a portion of my day yesterday. Again.. an insulated downed line. Very soon after this picture was taken we had the circuit switched from normally closed to open, and all but eliminated the risk of having an accidental electrocution from occuring to someone that way. I was still not going to be touching it, or have anyone else working on this without having all of the other mandatory precautions being maintained.

I hope the man and his son having the ladder incident they recovered okay? We would ussually always continue to follow up.. by calling the floor or the burn center where they went for those victims of electrocution and burn injuries, to see how well they fared in these cases.

 

Well I can't find a single instance of an ignition system-related death anywhere, peer-reviewed or not.

That said, IMO if one has a pacemaker or underlying arrhytmia, one shouldn't temp fate.

JFTFOT, I started looking at stun guns. They got a ton of voltage but little amperage (like 3-4 mA). Indeed, the ones that will really clobber someone are about 5 mA. This is in keeping with our chart up above.

So looking at this backwards, if you get an ignition jolt but are still standing, it's probably only about 1 mA (but who cares how many volts).

 

Yeah lot of one and done posters. Maybe because of holiday.

 

Despite resuscitation efforts, with incoming amperage probably at about 20A, the outcome was determined within about a millisecond after contact.