If you’ve been working with mains power for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly gotten a shock or two. It probably scared more than hurt, and it also probably sobered you up concerning care handling wires at mains potential.
In the US, our 110-130V mains isn’t as scary as the UK and other places with about twice that potential, and I have even known electricians who routinely tested for hot circuits by touch, which they feel safe in doing because they hadn’t yet encountered conditions that would lead to a very unhappy outcome from that really foolish practice.
US, UK, or wherever, it is important to be very clear: mains voltages have the potential to kill you. (No pun intended but if you like it then, sure, I intended it.) This is a really important idea because there will be only a small number of cases where you could be killed or seriously injured by the mains but they really do exist. Even if 999 times out of a thousand no extreme adverse outcomes will happen, it’s the one time that matters.
Seatbelts are a good analogy. It is very likely you will drive for your entire life and never need seatbelts to save you. But, when they are needed, they very well may be the only thing that stands between you and dying. So, when you calculate the risk-benefit of wearing seatbelts you have the inconvenience and improbability on one side and death on the other. Death wins, the outcome is too negative to put the cost against.
Similarly, doing what is necessary to protect against electrocution from the mains may be an inconvenience, and you may never actually need it, and, you may have experience of not dying many, many times even when getting shocked. But the fact that you could die from it needs to remain in your mind, and you really need to do what is needed to reduce that risk to near zero, which, in the end actually costs very little.
There are two reasons that people ignore mains safety issues: ignorance and complacency. The ignorance may be from a lack of experience, as in a new person who has never been zapped, or it may be because someone has actually been shocked so they think they survived the worst.
Then we get complacent as our safety measures work, and we don’t get even shocked—until that screwdriver shorts out an exposed terminal block with a big flash, and we see the burns and pits in it, and then we renew our vigor.
But we really need to build into our thinking, “this is dangerous stuff, and must be handled safely”, and inculcate it into those we have the privilege to teach. Electrical safety, chemical safety, firearms safety, shop safety—when things have the power to maim or kill us, we need to respect that, and “build a fence” of safe practices around them. Violating our rules only when it can’t be avoided and we’ve got alternative procedures for those cases.
We should never knowingly allow an ignorant person to set up a situation which is dangerous to them or others, and we should always keep our attention on safety first—scaled to the danger of what we are working with.
This is just my view, and certainly some will disagree, but I’ve thought about it a lot and I believe it is, for me, an ethical imperative.
In the US, our 110-130V mains isn’t as scary as the UK and other places with about twice that potential, and I have even known electricians who routinely tested for hot circuits by touch, which they feel safe in doing because they hadn’t yet encountered conditions that would lead to a very unhappy outcome from that really foolish practice.
US, UK, or wherever, it is important to be very clear: mains voltages have the potential to kill you. (No pun intended but if you like it then, sure, I intended it.) This is a really important idea because there will be only a small number of cases where you could be killed or seriously injured by the mains but they really do exist. Even if 999 times out of a thousand no extreme adverse outcomes will happen, it’s the one time that matters.
Seatbelts are a good analogy. It is very likely you will drive for your entire life and never need seatbelts to save you. But, when they are needed, they very well may be the only thing that stands between you and dying. So, when you calculate the risk-benefit of wearing seatbelts you have the inconvenience and improbability on one side and death on the other. Death wins, the outcome is too negative to put the cost against.
Similarly, doing what is necessary to protect against electrocution from the mains may be an inconvenience, and you may never actually need it, and, you may have experience of not dying many, many times even when getting shocked. But the fact that you could die from it needs to remain in your mind, and you really need to do what is needed to reduce that risk to near zero, which, in the end actually costs very little.
There are two reasons that people ignore mains safety issues: ignorance and complacency. The ignorance may be from a lack of experience, as in a new person who has never been zapped, or it may be because someone has actually been shocked so they think they survived the worst.
Then we get complacent as our safety measures work, and we don’t get even shocked—until that screwdriver shorts out an exposed terminal block with a big flash, and we see the burns and pits in it, and then we renew our vigor.
But we really need to build into our thinking, “this is dangerous stuff, and must be handled safely”, and inculcate it into those we have the privilege to teach. Electrical safety, chemical safety, firearms safety, shop safety—when things have the power to maim or kill us, we need to respect that, and “build a fence” of safe practices around them. Violating our rules only when it can’t be avoided and we’ve got alternative procedures for those cases.
We should never knowingly allow an ignorant person to set up a situation which is dangerous to them or others, and we should always keep our attention on safety first—scaled to the danger of what we are working with.
This is just my view, and certainly some will disagree, but I’ve thought about it a lot and I believe it is, for me, an ethical imperative.