Never mess with electricity,

[Cockney]

I did my apprenticeship with post office telephones/BT. When working in exchanges, if we'd had a night out we would climb up into the cable runs to sleep it off. A few feet from the Bus bars. Only 50 volt but 400 amps. To make matters worse the cables we were laying on were cotton covered and coated with arsenic to stop the rats eating them . I'm 68 now. How I ever got past 20 I will never know.

 

[Box Brownie]

I once knew a guy who repaired CRT monitors/TVs. He used to build a wall of cardboard boxes along the back wall of his workshop, so when an HT circuit bit him, he'd have something soft to land in after he flew across the room.
View attachment 267004

Wot, no fun with a graphite pencil pulling arcs off of the 22kv EHT circuit...... creating mini woodworm like holes in wood of the pencil. NB we were shown how to do this by our workshop tutor where we ,at school, were repairing TV's for charity sales

 

[MatBin]

No problem.

FWIW, one of my golf buddies is a retired plumber and spent a lot of his working life doing roofing work on the local hospitals. Being an old fashioned plumber, he was a dab hand with lead work.

That wasn't unusual then, my Dad tells us the same thing happened when he was a lad.

 

[wyx087]

Yes, don't mess with it if you don't understand how it works and only work on it if you can be sure it's not live.

But DIY home electricity is safer than dealing with gas, less troublesome than water, cleaner than sewage.

It's the only kind of DIY I actually enjoy planning and doing.

 

[stevewestern]

A few years ago we lived in Spain, in an old cortijo.
We had just had it totally rewired and oddly, with the main fuse switched off we still had a light that worked. Turned out that the previous owner had run a 2 core cable underground (no trunking or conduit, just a 15 year old cable) 70 metres from the neighbours house. We then had to explain to the neighbours, who had since fallen out with our previous owners that they had unknowingly been paying for light in our house for years..

 

[Norkie]

When I was an apprentice in a vehicle workshop, one of the 'qualified' mechanics used to hold the live end of the spark plug test machine and turn it on, hold the live end, and then touch you as you walked past, or he would touch the metal bench if you are sat on it eating lunch!