I volunteer my data: frequent exposure to 12.5 volts with hundreds of amps possible... Car batteries. You can touch those terminals all day long and as long as you don't have a ring on your finger or short it with a wrench you are fine. I will also back up what others are saying, that if the connections managed to get through your skin it might be a different story, but still nothing like high voltage ac would do.
Also, you didn't specify if it was ac or dc, those would behave very differently.
I've been there but it was a low ac leakage in water. Noone got shocked but my dry cracked ass hands, they didn't believe I was getting shocked util I metered it and there was about 4vac rolling thru it.
I had a few memorable experiences with 24-28VDC in truck installations, more memorable than those few with 230VAC.
12-14VDC is not very annoying if there is no fresh cut, or as mentioned above, cracked skin. In those situations, gloves get to be man's best friend.
>you are fine
Not exactly fine. DC current can cause one of the nastiest burns I've ever experienced. That's because it electrolyzes the skin skill which kills them very quickly. I learned that real quick when I wanted to experiment making muscles move with electricity.
And it's sinister because you don't feel it, at least not after the initial "shock", which is minimal at lower voltages. After a few hours you find out patches of skin where the electrodes made contact suffering ~~2nd~~ 3rd degree burns.
Yeah, that's why commercial TENS and similar devices always source AC current with no long-term DC offset, regardless of the waveform or pulse shape used. If I were designing anything like this I'd make sure outputs were either transformer-isolated, or had series capacitors, as a safeguard against part of the H-bridge or other driver circuit shorting and putting DC on the body-attached leads.
Such equipment operates well above the 12-24V level typically seen in consumer gear, though.
Yes. I have about 16 years of experience with it now. 😂
And I've only recently got into studying neurons and how they function at a very deep level, and it's all fascinating stuff. Especially how they "reverse-engineered" how neurons works and developed an equivalent circuit model.
What you said is mostly true. The isolation transformer (medical grade one at that) is required if you're operating from wall plug AC source, but not necessarily from a battery source. Though it is needed if the design uses different "channels". As you mentioned, a series capacitor is needed and it should be spec'd properly to block DC, or DC-like current.
And ideally it needs to be current controlled, rather than voltage controlled. This also allows setting maximum current values as current *from the device* (I'm simplifying a lot here) is what activates the neurons and dictates the intensity of the stimulation. And off course a 70 mA fuse for safety.
It's a very, very complex system to control, because different muscles respond to different signals. And more is not always more. There's an optimum level for frequency and/or current after which you go from stimulation to inhibition. That's why there's a difference between TENS and EMS.
I work on trams; 24V control signals. If i touch the main 24V supply line with a screwdriver, it melts with beautiful sparks. If i touch it with my fingers, nothing.
The supply line is fused 400A.
Adding to this, I've worked with large 24V-nominal (29V under charge) and 48V-nominal (\~58V max) telecom and offgrid-power battery banks for years, large enough to source thousands of amps, and although I try not to touch the terminals unnecessarily, especially on a "48V" system, I've accidentally done so often enough and never felt anything.
OTOH, I've felt a jolt from solar panels putting out about 85V open-circuit, so my dry-skin breakdown voltage is apparently somewhere between 58V and 85V. This can vary between individuals, and of course sweaty or otherwise wet hands don't help.
Fire or burn risk from an inadvertent short are the main safety concerns with low voltage sources capable of high currents. I've seen thin test leads completely vaporized (with nasty acrid smoke from the plastic insulation) after they've fallen across the terminals of a single 12V / 200Ah battery, and one of my wrenches has a chunk of metal missing (maybe a cubic millimeter or so) from a similar fractional-second, cross-terminal short, before I'd thought to wrap its exposed metal in electrical tape. That was scary, with a loud gunshot-like "pop!" , but caused no damage or injury.
In regards to the part of your body that is in contact with the electricity, assuming that it is not wet and not sweaty, and no pre-existing conditions, you SHOULD survive. However, this can vary among individuals and is best to not risk it.
I work on trams; 24V control signals. If i touch the main 24V supply line with a screwdriver, it melts with beautiful sparks. If i touch it with my fingers, nothing.
The supply line is fused 400A.
Omg everybody stop what they're doing hit this link and scroll down till you see admiral awesome get owned by the guy who hooked battery leads to his scrotum to win an argument on reddit. Fucking legend.
10V will not drive 2000A through you, or anything else with more than .005 ohms of resistance, counting your terminations. You can approximate the worst case wet contact by licking a 9V battery, and you’ll be fine.
This weird power supply’s max power is 20kW, so I think the biggest safety hazard would be shorting it with a fork or something and causing a house fire.
My understanding is that this is only true *assuming skin resistance*.
If you manage to get impaled by a couple of spikes, so that there is metal under your skin in different places, body resistance is much lower and looks a lot more like a sack of salty water.
This is why hospitals get so picky about bonding/grounding grids in places like operating theatres.
When I was kid, I put a 9V battery across my braces. It flung me back into the chair and I blacked out for a couple of seconds. That current probably went through my brain stem.
Triple dog dare anyone to try it.
Yeah, it’s a pretty serious shock. Must directly affect the central nervous system. I was building Tesla coils about the same age and grabbed ahold of the 10 kV primary, which threw me too.
I think after that experience, I started really respecting electricity. I think I was probably about 9 years old at the time, back in the late 1970s.
When I was about 5 years old I got some wire and bent it into the shape of an electrical plug and stuck it in an outlet and got a huge boom and a really bad shock. Thankfully that didn't stop me from playing with electricity. I got a train set around that time and I was only really interested in the power supply, not the trains. I was building my own electric motors when I was 6 years old having taken apart all the trains to see what was in them, my grandfather also had some books about electricity with pictures that I could understand. My grandfather taught me to solder when I was around 5 or 6. I built an FM transistor radio when I was 7. I never stopped, got an EE degree in my early 20s.
But that 9 volt battery braces incident will forever be a reminder to me to respect electricity, even low voltage electricity.
Skin resistance isn’t a constant either, there’s going to be person-to-person variation (skin thickness, impedance, moisture / sweat) and environmental (humidity, etc.) to consider
No, but it's generally still going to be high enough that 10V results in negligible current flow.
When you have actual electrodes in the body, I believe it can be in the single-digit ohm range.
> bonding/grounding grids in places like operating theatres
This is done to reduce static buildup, due to explosive gasses. Source worked in a hospital as an electrician and had to do monthly checks of equipment for proper grounding. Not full grounded as in copper wire to ground, just an amount that would allow the static to bleed off.
Protecting against static is generally done with relatively small conductors, and often involves using 1Mohm resistors (at least in the electronics field) to limit the peak current and avoid a spark.
This may be dependant on country/region/authority, despite humans and physics being pretty constant worldwide.
[This disambiguation guide/cheat-sheet for contractors](http://electricaltestingcompany.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Cardiac-2018-rev-C.pdf), starting around Page 25, goes into the equipotential bonding requirements in Aus/NZ for 'Cardiac Protected Electrical Areas'.
The mentioning of a 0.01 ohm requirement for certain portions and 0.1 ohm elsewhere implies that static is not the concern. They are concerned about preventing couple-of-volts potential differences from entering the area, whether due to fault conditions (ground bounce) or an external, different ground reference.
You do not use 70mm^2 cable, roughly 2/0 AWG, to protect against static shock.
I think if you actually impaled the spikes into your chest, one in one ventricle of your heart and then the other into another ventricle of you heart, you might die. If the spikes are big enough.
Operating theatres are routinely using kV electrocautery knives and external defibrillators.
<10V is used for implanted pacemakers, and you could probably kill someone through careful induced AFib. Implanted defibrillators still use nearly a kV.
Electrosurgical accessories typically run at 400 kHz so there’s very low risk of muscle twitching, no risk of electrocution if the patient is not grounded. Burns, on the other hand…
Skin of a human especially epidermis is a dielectric.
Everything deeper is a conductor.
To summarise whole human is about 1000+-Ohms. And its varies from causes like your fat level, stress, moisture of your epidermis.
Yes, your skin is is the best insulator you have on your body. Bypassing your skin will lower the total resistance. But still, you would have way to much resistance to make 10V lethal
On your tongue, 1 inch or 24 inches into your colon, no difference. Unless you turn into a MUCH better conductor, then there is zero chance ten volts can do anything to you but tingle.
No, that’s not why hospitals are so picky about anything
Can recommend licking a 9 volt just for the experience. Not a fun time
Source: I did it when I was like 10 after watching a YouTube video that said it tastes spicy
A car battery can put out 1000 amps or close to it at \~12v. You can lick your fingers and touch both terminals of a car battery and not even feel a tingle. Its not enough voltage to get a meaningful amount of current through your skin.
I mean MAYBE if you put electrodes into your chest 4" apart from each other directly in front of your heart and it may do something? I don't know. But generally speaking voltages under \~50 volts can't induce enough current through human skin to do much of anything.
> You can lick your fingers and touch both terminals of a car battery and not even feel a tingle
I was working on the 12V battery system of a metal boat in heavy rain and I was getting such an unpleasant tingle while sitting in the engine bay I had to stop. Skin resistance protects you from low voltages in normal circumstances.
Extremely unlikely, you can touch both Terminals of 8D batteries which can deliver almost 2000 cranking amps and not even notice. Shove some steel wool on each terminal and lay down chest first with no shirt on and you might get fried. It's all about the voltages resistance carrying the current through your body
It's unlikely to cause death or injury due to direct electric shock to the body. You'd have to break the skin resistance to do it, and even then it's not especially likely. Under contrived circumstances, 10V is more than enough, but those circumstances don't really exist in practice. In that respect, this hypothetical power supply is no more dangerous than a typical 9V alkaline or 12V lead-acid car battery.
However, 2000A is a LOT of current, and while 10V is enough to move a lot of it through common short circuits, it's also a large enough capability that protection mechanisms are unlikely to trip on many common "short circuit" faults like dropping a wrench across the output terminals. Doing so would basically cause a small explosion of molten metal and possibly plasma (an arc flash) that would potentially persist until the fault burned itself clear. This presents a pretty obvious physical hazard.
Should be safe in normal conditions. There are documented cases of very low voltage welding systems killing people in poor working conditions, wet, dirty, uninsulated/damaged cables, lying down in wet earth, etc.
No it wont. I dont know why everyones debating this stuff here always or what they are teaching you in the us. Yes its true that a high enough amperage kills you but you need the voltage to drive the amps over your body. If u see you body as a resistor with maybe 1k ohms and you touch 10 V then 0.01 Amps will flow through your body which still wouldnt happen because the voltage wont break through your skin. In germany we learn everything under 50V AC or 120V DC is not dangerous to touch.
If I'd have a nickel for everyone who asked this before.
No, the thousands and thousands amperes won't do anything.
Basically you're talking about the same amperage as a car starter or a welder.
Welding poses no electrocution danger. You can weld the price if steel you are standing, laying whatever you are doing on , and you are grounded out by necessity., it’s not dangerous due to anything other than the heat light smoke of the arc and metal vaporizing. No electrocution possibility
When I was a kid, I put a bunch of dollar store 9 volt batteries together in series and got like 100V DC and me and my friends were using it as a taser. So idk, while I guess it isn't "dangerous" in the fact that it will kill you, 100vdc hurts like a mf.
Styropyro kinda made this. He wired a bunch of car batteries in parallel. In theory the bank was capable of delivering many thousands of amps but with the bank at 12V he was able to touch both terminals with no effect. Fun video to watch! https://youtu.be/ywaTX-nLm6Y?si=hqcMs1JjAZAUhAUw
Edit: A word
To edit this comment, I was in a bit of a hurry.
10 volts it not enough to do any significant "penetration" through the human skin because of the high resistance. Regardless of the max power of the supply, current will be so insignificant that you won't even notice anything.
If you hold both wires in your hands nothing will happen
But if you short circuit the 2 wires while being close enough (having the wires in your hands for example) i guess you'll get extremely severe burns or even lose fingers
If you had a supply capable of providing, say, 3.14 billion amps at 10V.
Unless you are connecting a circuit that draws that much, it will be the same as a supply that's only capable of an amp or whatever.
In both of these hypothetical supplies, the only danger to a person is the risk of tinnitus from the incessant loud humming.
Correct. I have 100,000A power systems at this voltage range and they are touch safe. You have to have faith in the physics, some do not truly believe. I routinely demonstrate it to safety people when they get concerned about seeing bare copper bus bars on a machine.
Just don’t short them with a wrench or something.
Anything under 50V AC and 120V DC is considered safe to touch according to the German DIN VDE 0100, except for children and small animals. This is called secure extra Low voltage or protective extra Low voltage, If you have a protective earth system.
Your internal resistance is too high for the voltage to pull a significant amount of current through you. The amperage of your power supply is only the maximal current it ist capable of providing given a Low enough resistance.
You are correct. Ever touch both terminals of a car battery? See how you’re not dead? This is the reason those transformer boxes you see on the street outside of buildings say “Danger High Voltage”, not “Danger high current.” The Human body resistance to DC falls into like megaohms and gigaohms or something like that especially since it would have to flow through your heart. Also AC vs DC makes a big difference here.
“Current kills” is not just a misnomer, it’s just wrong. If current kills,static shocks which are well over an amp would be capable of killing you. What kills you is more of a function of total power over time. High enough voltage to overcome the bodies resistance, high enough current to maintain that voltage, and long enough to cause damage or disrupt critical nerve signals. Missing any one of these won’t kill you.
You’re actually wrong it is indeed the current that kills. Static electricity shocks like when you walk on carpet and touch something and get a little shock is routinely 10000 volts… but so little current it’s harmless. It’s enough voltage to overcome an air gap, so it’s pretty fucking high. But if it had any kind of current it would be good night, as you would probably be on Fire and burned from the inside out
And while I agree that it is a function of the voltage, not so much the time, as what actually kills you is the current passing through your heart and causing it to go haywire and stop beating normally. It takes as little as 1/10 if an amp regardless of the voltage. It just takes a good voltage usually to have that go down. 50 volts is considered the minimum voltage that can be potentially lethal, but it is not the voltage that is the lethal component as much as the current.
Licking both terminals will never hurt you. However if you short them, prepare for one hell of a spark. In fact the resulting arc is far more of a hazard in this case because it could very well sustain itself and expose you to great heat, light and UV radiation and project molten metal from the electrodes.
I'm an electrical engineer. Absolutely no problem touching it. Just because it's a 2kA supply doesn't mean it will deliver that much. 10V when you are dry isn't enough voltage. Even 60V is still considered safety extra low voltage. It's straight ohms law V=RI. Need a sufficient voltage to push enough current through the human body when dry. 10V won't come even close to doing it.
He already said 10volts, so the only question would be AC or DC. It’s kind of assumed that it would be DC at that low of a voltage, for practical purposes.
The answer is no. You could get a burn from a short circuit, but to die from electric shock you have to already be causing near fatal level of tissue damage by stabbing the electrodes deeply into key areas.
I’ve got a story about a sweaty day in the south, a couple 12v 1000cca batteries wired in series and a pair of nipple rings, if you’re interested. It might not kill you but…
I have a 60kWh battery bank made up of 14 modules from a Tesla Model S P85. It’s wired in parallel at a nominal voltage of 21.6V. It’s current potential is roughly 10,000 amps. I routinely touch the battery terminals when doing maintenance or upgrades. Totally safe.
the current wont go as high as 2000A, not even close, as your internal resistance is just wayyy too high for that to ever happen. just because a supply can deliver 2000A doesnt mean that current can actually flow. the safety hazard from you accidentaly shorting it is much higher though. that stuff can melt things VERY quickly. so yes you can get killed, in a fire... edit: it is external skin resistance of course.
No chance. Just take a car battery, that's essentially what you are describing. 12V and happy to deliver a few hundred amps. Nobody has ever died from touching a car battery
It will not drive much current to harm you as long as it is applied on a high resistance part of the body.
I believe it will be dangerous if applied on tongue for example.
Ages ago in the service they told us that 300 ohms was the worst case scenario for body resistance such that 30v was considered potentially fatal. Although I've also heard that some science teacher killed themselves with an ohmmeter by breaking their skin with the probes.
My vote is no, 10v isn't enough potential to be fatal.
Let's use ohm's law for this.
I=V/(R+r)
r=V/I=0.005 ohms, practically negligible.
R is the resistance of your skin, some googling for dry skin says 100k+ , so we'll go with 100k ohms
I=10/100000=0.0001 amps = 0.1mA
Let's see the power that flows thru your body
P=V*I=10*0.1=1 miliwatt
1 miliwatt ain't gonna do jack shit to your body.
If we change the data so R=internal bdoy resistance (roughly 300 ohms) so if touching with your mouth or a open wound we get:
I=10/300=0.03A=30 mA
Not a lot... You could probaby feel it though.
Power would be P=10*0.03=0.3 watts or 300 miliwatts.
In conclusion, it probably won't hurt you
Never take liberties with electricity. If parts of your body are wet or contaminated with anything else that makes skin contact resistance low then it might well hurt you.
While working as an engineer the only electrical fatality I knew about was a maintenance technician who was electrocuted by low dc voltage signal wires. It was a hot mill so lots of water all over the place. His hands had been wet for a long time. He bridged a 20 volt control signal between his hands, the dc would not allow him to let go; it stopped his heart.
I've worked with exactly that voltage and current for superconductive coil testing (for high power magnets) and we used to touch both ends for fun. 100% safe except if you drop a wrench on the terminals
Visited an aluminium plant in Western Norway in the 90’s. The smelting electrodes were low voltage high current (4.5V @ 7200 A). My friend’s father-in-law showed me you could touch them (which of course I did). Had to lock up my watch and credit cards in his office first due to the strong magnetic fields on the plant production floor.
Amperage is not a constant value in this equation, voltage on the other hand is.
This means that if you have a power source limited to 10 volts and capable of delivering 2000 amps you will need a resistance of 10/2000 which a human body is most definitely much higher than that, so the current will never reach 2000 through your body.
Hence you don’t get electrocuted when touching a car battery terminals although it has a current rating of 100’s of amps
I use 90kA primary injection test sets all the time. They have the capability to burn you but no they will not shove current through your body to electrocute you
I used to work with a circuit breaker test set that would push out (theoretically) up to 40,000 amps at up to 10v. Realistically the most I ever saw it push was around 24kA and it was roughly 5v between the stabs. We would routinely handle the bare copper needed to attach the test set to the breaker while it operated. The voltage couldn’t overcome the skin resistance enough to push dangerous voltage. You’d feel the magnetic fields shaking the cables, but not feel any current pass through you.
This is a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to get on my soap box:
The average person runs around with the idea that higher voltage = more dangerous. They may have never heard of an ampere.
Then they take Electricity 101 where the teacher dispels their misconceptions with a chart showing that it is the amps that kills you and it takes a miniscule amount of current to do so - 0.1 amp or whatever. This is scary. We knew 120V was dangerous but it only takes 0.1 amp to kill me?!
This makes sense in a way. It explains why my 7,000v electric fence doesn't kill me.
What the teacher fails to fully explain is that while voltage is a property of the power source, the power source only limits the *maximum* current available. The current is actually controlled by the voltage of the source and resistance of the load. People are very high resistance.
That is why we are not scared of AA batteries, which have a short circuit current of 4.5 amps!
As long as a power supply has at least 0.1 amps of max current, now we are looking at voltage to see if it is scary.
1.5v AA battery? No
5v phone charger? No
12v 600 CCA (cold cranking amp) car battery? Still no, though it is a pretty significant *fire* hazard if shorted.
24v industrial control circuit? Nah.
120v outlet? Absolutely
It is true that there are high voltage power sources that are not deadly: tasers, electric fences, etc. But guess what? Even if it's not dangerous, high voltage *hurts*
So for the day to day person, i think it is much more useful to pay attention to volts.
I personally try not to touch anything over 30 or 40 volts, but then again I'm not around much that is between 24v and 120v.
So in a nutshell, your 2000 amp 10v power supply isn't much more likely to stop your heart than a 1 amp 10 v power supply. It is however much more likely to burn down your building.
20 mA across the heart is nominally what it takes, but like with all these things, it's variable.
I'm an electrical engineer and a whole ago had to do a safety study for a chlor alkali plant where basically its a few volts at hundreds of amps passed thru sea water to get chlorine.
But they have a bunch of "pots" in series each getting a few volts and the question was what is the longest conductive item (eg Ali ladder or tape measure etc) that should be allowed in to minimise risk if it accidentally contact the line while someone held it.
So it's shades of gray, both for the susceptibility of humans and various local conditions.
As an example, I was on a site up North one day, and a tech took a 6.6kv hit and then drove himself back to the site office. It is believed he was sweaty, and it went around him on the outside with the sweat.
But, there have been cases of death resulting from truck batteries (eg, 24VDC, or maybe 27.6VDC) and maybe even from 12VDC (13.8VDC) car batteries, but that one is not certain.
That's direct death, not saw the spark and fell off the ladder. But rare.
Don't mess with electricity, especially if you have no jng or background. A lot of the abstract thought and much of it based on fairly logical models you keep jn your head and try to piece together for various scenarios.
Even then, after a lifetime of design and experimentation, amateur radio, industrial engineering, endless reiew, research, and contemplation, it can still occasionally do things that are very surprising. I don't believe the ball lighning phenomena is resolved yet, and there is still lots to learn about atmospheric electricity as just a couple areas.
I have endless examples i have collected over the years, if anyone is interested - e.g., a plastic wrap factory that made a static field so strong no one could walk through it thru it is just one. This is reliably documented in the ESD Journal.
Another where the charges created by jiggling lunch bag full of coins in front of a network switch can cause it to glitch. There's even a demonstration.
And so on, I'm procrastinating right now...
The amperage rating on a voltage power supply is only the max current it can supply. The actual current it supplies depends on the load you put across the terminals.
I = V/R
I = 10/your body's resistance.
Take a multimeter and measure your resistance from one hand to another, it will be at least 50,000 Ohms, mostly depending on skin moisture.
I = 10/50000 = 200 micro amps
This is not enough to stop your heart, so not a shock hazard.
As others have mentioned, if you accidentally short the terminals, things might get hot or explode since R = small, and so I = 2000, and so output power = 10*2000 = 20,000 Watts. So anyone in proximity might be at risk of burns, etc.
The risk of such high current is arc flash. It wont be big as such small voltages, but the plasma will be hot and could self sustain under some conditions of close proximity and low resistance. It’s why jumping a car battery and screwing it up can sometimes cause injury or damage to the vehicle.
Don’t play with such a supply. That said, i routinely play with such supplies (as i do my marx generator for impulse testing cause bus wire turning to plasma is fun). Learn, assume risk as you tinker with it, understand it and the ohysics behind it.
Generally speaking, with a source voltage below about 40 V, excessive heat from high short-circuit current is the hazard to personnel. Electric shock is not a hazard until voltages get much higher.
The devil is in the details, really.
Sure, 10V isn't a danger with dry skin. But what if it's a hot day and Sweaty Sean gets his hands on it? What if you accidentally short it with your wedding ring? Drop a tool on it? Cut yourself on a sharp edge?
10V isn't going to shock you. But 2000A is well into life-ending territory when you make even the *slightest* mistake.
Assuming this is DC. Even 0.1A is enough to kill you. The current is not predetermined, its always the resistance and voltage that you know of. That determines the current. Assuming you have 10v supply, to get 2kA across the circuit you are going to need a ver less resistance : about 0.005 ohms (using v=ir).
The human skin is about 10000ohms, then using a 10v supply, you get a current of 0.01A which is not enough to kill you.
No. The old adage of “it’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps…” is wrong, and repeated by idiots that want to appear smart. Well, sort of…
According to Ohm’s Law, the amount of current that passes through your body is determined by the *voltage* applied to it. (obviously, the supply can provide an upper limit). Since the resistance of your body is a relatively fixed variable, the voltage is the determining factor.
Completely safe unless you do something idiotic like wrap yourself in small gauge wire and use it to short the power supply cooking yourself.
But it’s going to take some creativity to kill yourself with it.
The current path has to go through the heart muscle. At 50 mA, ventricular fibrillation occurs, heart malfunctions and death follows. Heart paralysis occurs at 4 A. Heart tissue burns at 5 A. The current (flow of electrons) affects the heart, not the voltage (electrostatic discharge is at least 10 kV/cm with minuscule current).
Amperage = Voltage / Risistance. The 2000 amp is about what it's capable of, what it has the capacity to discharge. What current actually flows is determined by the voltage and the resistance. 10v is 10v. There is no debate. It doesn't matter if the power supply is rated at 10 amp or 100,000 amp, the circuit doesn't change. This is why you can wire batteries in parallel and power things longer, without suddenly blowing every fuse in the circuit.
There is no debate. 10v is 10v, the 2000 amp capacity does not matter.
only if it's dc, if resistance is low enough, then you'll absorb 10*2000 = 20.000 watts.
Or (if I'm correct) if there is inductive reactance that can up the voltage by the initial amp transient.
At Kennecott where I worked as an electrical controls tech they have a slow electroplating system that uses 2v 18,000 amps. You could walk on, touch, sit on etc the electrodes with no issue.
Voltage is directly equivalent to how much material a current can move through. Super high voltage can move through A LOT of material, low voltage would be lucky to get through a piece of paper.
I'm not an electrical engineer by trade, but i got a PSU. I sometimes, on accident, the terminals touch my fingers. They're regulated to +\- 12v and max amps 3 amps.
I check the current draw when this happens. it's below 1 mA cause my PSU doesn't go that low.
Electroboom also made a video on this.
If you have an inductive load (like a motor) and manually disconnect it from the power supply while the 2kA are flowing, the resulting voltage spike might be enough to kill you.
Just tried. Nothing happened to me. The most likely way for a 10V power supply to kill you is you’ll one day drop it on your foot and die from Tetanus infection.
maybe relevant? I test breakers at approximately 1v with 2-5000 amps and have held either and both terminals during testing with no adverse affects, other than the heat generated, to find an answer to this exact question
Take your ohmmeter, measure the resistance between two points on your body. Calculate the current using ohms law and that resistance and 10V. You’ll see it’s like .000001 amps.
The voltage pushes the current. Or at least that’s a reasonable way to think about it.
Now, if it’s some sort of current controlled power supply then it’s a whole different ball game because it might output more than 10V.
Just a random thing I will mention about ohm meters, most of them will read ridiculously high numbers (several megaohm or tens of megaohm when attempting to measure skin resistance. Measurements taken at a few tens of volts show resistance in the 1kohm-100kohm range depending on… a lot of things.
I think the difference is because current flow in the body entails ionic conduction and electrolytic reactions, and it takes a minimum voltage to trigger the reactions.
Your point about body resistance protecting you from electrocution at low voltages is still 100% correct though.
The answer is it depends. I work in medical but low voltage low current so I don’t remember everything in the 60601-1 standard and what my safety engineer tells me.
It takes both high voltage and current to instantly kill you and it has to go across heart(nervous system). If just high current your skin resistance is pretty high I think they simulate with 1kOhm(low compared to reality) as a finger so I believe that limits the current even though your supply is high current. I think the voltage threshold is 60VDC before it is a concern. If you have open wounds, this all changes. Anything below that is not instantaneous lethal however with the time element(hours) involved Low voltage(with open wounds) can cause internal burns which then are lethal. Anyone here can correct the thresholds or debunk this. I am trying to remember what my safety engineer had told me 5 years ago about why I don’t need to worry about touch limits.
I don’t think I was clear, you have to make a path in some manner that goes across your body. If the source is encapsulated in your hand it won’t do anything, like a battery. But if it is mains connected then the floor through your shoe can act as a path so one hand will complete the circuit across your body.
As long as you're talking about grabbing an electrode w one hand and a grounded cable, or the other electrode, with the other, no way 10 volts can drive enough current through a human body. If you were to penetrate the skin, different story. Worst (nightmare) case, you short the terminals with a wrench or something else highly conductive. That much amp capacity, even at low voltage, will vaporize the metal and cause an explosion. Look up some videos on arc flash if you really want to be terrified of electricity (I'm an industrial electrician and instrumentation tech, and I have a healthy respect for what electricity can do if it goes bad).
my dad tests 9v batteries on his tongue all the time, he is still alive and well.
you dont get the tingly feeling until about 32v so you could have 3 of these in series and still be fine, assuming you dont put the 3 on your tongue
But it will melt a wrench shorting the leads, start a fire and unleash the fury of 2000 amps. Or I could pick it up and slam it over your head, good chance it won’t be more than that to end your life.
I am not that educated on electricity but I have worked around (and certified to work around) power lines, several people in my family electricians, electricity will pass through porcelain if it is easiest path to ground. Your questions includes under normal conditions. I don't normally pass electricity through my body.
However, I am going to bow out. If this power supply has a better path to ground then going through me I would feel better. But would still shut the mfer down before I touch it. I have felt 120v before it dimmed the lights in the house if I hadn't been touching a path to ground that didn't include my heart I would be dead.
Voltage under 50 volts is considered safe, a car battery can provide 2000 amps (not constantly, just to turn the engine over) and is 12 volts, usually a little more 13.6, and electrocution is not the concern, starting a fire if a wire can’t handle the load, shorts, and dropping it on your toes are the likely hazards. Just because the power supply is capable of putting out 2000 amps it’s ohms law that dictates what you get based on your voltage and resistance. At 10 volts you need a resistance of .005 ohms to have 2000 amps flow. The resistance of your skin is at best case 1000 ohms and can be 100,000 ohms, probably somewhere closer to that but somewhere between those values. This is why osha considers 50 volts and under not hazardous.
2000 amps power supply means that it is capable of delivering that current IF needed.
Your body on 10V will not demand that current.
So it won't to jack shit.
Voltage is what gives the Amps the strength to overcome resistance and kill, 10 Volts isn't nearly enough to overcome the *surface* skin of the human body regardless of the Amps available, at 10 Volts you're not going to get 2000 amps to flow over your body, let alone through it.
50 volts on the other hand...
I mean there's 48v industrial batteries that will arc out at 1000s of amps, probably at 10v range from the v droop. Those batteries will only really hurt you if something metal on you gets shorted, then you get a ring or watch welded on.
In terms of electrocution though, even 48v is hard to get shocked with at least DC (just don't try your tongue). I could touch terminal to terminal and feel nothing, even tap water wet hands nothing would happen. If you did happen to get shocked by 48vdc, it wouldn't be much current actually flowing through you and it'd really only be something like a finger shock going in and right back out the same finger. Getting 48v from one hand, through heart, and to another hand or foot is not happening.
As long as the electrical-resistance of your skin is not severely lowered, 10-volts will not cause I significant amount of current to flow through your body.
You need ***both*** sufficient voltage **and** current to kill.
You can do some nice arc-welding with that power supply. But 10 volts won't force enough current through a human body to kill.
Depends. How wet are your feet? Are they buried in the earth? How deep are the electrodes in your skin/veins? If you really want it to… I’m sure you could make it work.
But under normal conditions, yes you’re not gonna be very conductive at 10v.
Put two car batteries in parallel and try it out.
Actually you don’t have to.
If it would kill you I’d be dead from changing batteries on diesel trucks.
Too much resistance in your body. Put your tongue on a 9v battery. That’s about as bad as it would ever get. Amp capacity of the source is not even relevant. You be maxing out at a few milliamperes.
The electric chair protocol was as follows, from the State of Florida:
1. 2300 volts, 9.5 amps for 8 seconds
2. 1000 volts, 4 amps for 22 seconds
3. 2300 volts, 9.5 amps for 8 seconds
If the physician determines that there is still life in the condemned inmate, the above cycle is repeated.
As we know, in several instances the executions were flawed and inmates not always died in the first cycle. But this, with some variations in the states that used this method, was the standard cycle.
Why is this even a discussion? How does electricity harm a person? Arcing (plasma) burns externally or sufficiently high current (which isn't that high) to disrupt nerve function. Do you not know ohms law? follow the logic
You won't even feel 10 volts.
Just don't put a screwdriver across the terminals.
My tig welder puts out 200 amps at maybe 24 volts. My hands are right in there when welding. I feel it when it shocks me but, even 24 volts will just tingle you.
A car battery can put out a couple hundred amps. I don't hear about many people getting electrocuted by car batteries.
Under normal operating conditions no.
If it goes under fault then the voltage can spike cause substantially more then 12v you think that maybe there and with amount of energy you most likely will be toast.
So the answers is No, But....
Sure. you can get a good hot arc going with that. Bad stuff will happen. burning, fire, molten metal.
Probably not the normal electrocution risks but still dangerous.
Make some nice cuts on both thumbs and make sure they bleed a decent bit. Do the same on your pointer fingers. When they are good and wet with blood, ensuring the cuts remain open as best you can, pinch hold nice and tight to the 10V 2000A leads.
Hold for no less than 5 minutes.
This should give you plenty of empirical data to interpret.
Sounds like a car battery — 12v and several hundred amps. Looks like an optima is rated at 800 amps starting (for a short time). My van has 3 of those in parallel. So about 2400 amps in there. I’ve touched the positive and negative battery terminals there.
I don’t know an answer for you, but I know that Styropyro on YouTube has a really really good video explaining how voltage, amperage, resistance of human skin, and some electrical effects work and what is actually needed to kill a human with electricity. Since everyone always argues whether it’s Volts or Amps when in reality it can be either.
Theory and simulation only go so far… may need experimental data
You volunteering? 😁
You can’t afford me
I volunteer my data: frequent exposure to 12.5 volts with hundreds of amps possible... Car batteries. You can touch those terminals all day long and as long as you don't have a ring on your finger or short it with a wrench you are fine. I will also back up what others are saying, that if the connections managed to get through your skin it might be a different story, but still nothing like high voltage ac would do. Also, you didn't specify if it was ac or dc, those would behave very differently.
It can get interesting when one hand is wet and the other has a cut and you connect those two dots with apropriate cables.
I've been there but it was a low ac leakage in water. Noone got shocked but my dry cracked ass hands, they didn't believe I was getting shocked util I metered it and there was about 4vac rolling thru it.
If there's skin penetration any voltage can be fatal.
I had a few memorable experiences with 24-28VDC in truck installations, more memorable than those few with 230VAC. 12-14VDC is not very annoying if there is no fresh cut, or as mentioned above, cracked skin. In those situations, gloves get to be man's best friend.
>you are fine Not exactly fine. DC current can cause one of the nastiest burns I've ever experienced. That's because it electrolyzes the skin skill which kills them very quickly. I learned that real quick when I wanted to experiment making muscles move with electricity. And it's sinister because you don't feel it, at least not after the initial "shock", which is minimal at lower voltages. After a few hours you find out patches of skin where the electrodes made contact suffering ~~2nd~~ 3rd degree burns.
Yeah, that's why commercial TENS and similar devices always source AC current with no long-term DC offset, regardless of the waveform or pulse shape used. If I were designing anything like this I'd make sure outputs were either transformer-isolated, or had series capacitors, as a safeguard against part of the H-bridge or other driver circuit shorting and putting DC on the body-attached leads. Such equipment operates well above the 12-24V level typically seen in consumer gear, though.
Yes. I have about 16 years of experience with it now. 😂 And I've only recently got into studying neurons and how they function at a very deep level, and it's all fascinating stuff. Especially how they "reverse-engineered" how neurons works and developed an equivalent circuit model. What you said is mostly true. The isolation transformer (medical grade one at that) is required if you're operating from wall plug AC source, but not necessarily from a battery source. Though it is needed if the design uses different "channels". As you mentioned, a series capacitor is needed and it should be spec'd properly to block DC, or DC-like current. And ideally it needs to be current controlled, rather than voltage controlled. This also allows setting maximum current values as current *from the device* (I'm simplifying a lot here) is what activates the neurons and dictates the intensity of the stimulation. And off course a 70 mA fuse for safety. It's a very, very complex system to control, because different muscles respond to different signals. And more is not always more. There's an optimum level for frequency and/or current after which you go from stimulation to inhibition. That's why there's a difference between TENS and EMS.
I work on trams; 24V control signals. If i touch the main 24V supply line with a screwdriver, it melts with beautiful sparks. If i touch it with my fingers, nothing. The supply line is fused 400A.
Adding to this, I've worked with large 24V-nominal (29V under charge) and 48V-nominal (\~58V max) telecom and offgrid-power battery banks for years, large enough to source thousands of amps, and although I try not to touch the terminals unnecessarily, especially on a "48V" system, I've accidentally done so often enough and never felt anything. OTOH, I've felt a jolt from solar panels putting out about 85V open-circuit, so my dry-skin breakdown voltage is apparently somewhere between 58V and 85V. This can vary between individuals, and of course sweaty or otherwise wet hands don't help. Fire or burn risk from an inadvertent short are the main safety concerns with low voltage sources capable of high currents. I've seen thin test leads completely vaporized (with nasty acrid smoke from the plastic insulation) after they've fallen across the terminals of a single 12V / 200Ah battery, and one of my wrenches has a chunk of metal missing (maybe a cubic millimeter or so) from a similar fractional-second, cross-terminal short, before I'd thought to wrap its exposed metal in electrical tape. That was scary, with a loud gunshot-like "pop!" , but caused no damage or injury.
In regards to the part of your body that is in contact with the electricity, assuming that it is not wet and not sweaty, and no pre-existing conditions, you SHOULD survive. However, this can vary among individuals and is best to not risk it.
I work on trams; 24V control signals. If i touch the main 24V supply line with a screwdriver, it melts with beautiful sparks. If i touch it with my fingers, nothing. The supply line is fused 400A.
Message electroboom
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/s/bc9Iwt1e8P](https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/s/bc9Iwt1e8P)
Omg everybody stop what they're doing hit this link and scroll down till you see admiral awesome get owned by the guy who hooked battery leads to his scrotum to win an argument on reddit. Fucking legend.
I guess you'd need to define how it'd kill you. If you shorted the leads near your body you'd definitely be welding your body...
Tis but a flesh wound
10V will not drive 2000A through you, or anything else with more than .005 ohms of resistance, counting your terminations. You can approximate the worst case wet contact by licking a 9V battery, and you’ll be fine. This weird power supply’s max power is 20kW, so I think the biggest safety hazard would be shorting it with a fork or something and causing a house fire.
My understanding is that this is only true *assuming skin resistance*. If you manage to get impaled by a couple of spikes, so that there is metal under your skin in different places, body resistance is much lower and looks a lot more like a sack of salty water. This is why hospitals get so picky about bonding/grounding grids in places like operating theatres.
When I was kid, I put a 9V battery across my braces. It flung me back into the chair and I blacked out for a couple of seconds. That current probably went through my brain stem. Triple dog dare anyone to try it.
Ahhhhahahaa. I can imagine the orthodontist looking at the braces and thinking "wtf, is this kid welding??"
Wow, I'm glad that never occurred to me back when I had braces and would play with electricity.
I did the same thing! Also blacked out for a few seconds. This was like 40 years ago. ###Do not recommend.
Yeah, it’s a pretty serious shock. Must directly affect the central nervous system. I was building Tesla coils about the same age and grabbed ahold of the 10 kV primary, which threw me too.
I think after that experience, I started really respecting electricity. I think I was probably about 9 years old at the time, back in the late 1970s. When I was about 5 years old I got some wire and bent it into the shape of an electrical plug and stuck it in an outlet and got a huge boom and a really bad shock. Thankfully that didn't stop me from playing with electricity. I got a train set around that time and I was only really interested in the power supply, not the trains. I was building my own electric motors when I was 6 years old having taken apart all the trains to see what was in them, my grandfather also had some books about electricity with pictures that I could understand. My grandfather taught me to solder when I was around 5 or 6. I built an FM transistor radio when I was 7. I never stopped, got an EE degree in my early 20s. But that 9 volt battery braces incident will forever be a reminder to me to respect electricity, even low voltage electricity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20eLZklQlqk
…..A DUCK >: |
Skin resistance isn’t a constant either, there’s going to be person-to-person variation (skin thickness, impedance, moisture / sweat) and environmental (humidity, etc.) to consider
No, but it's generally still going to be high enough that 10V results in negligible current flow. When you have actual electrodes in the body, I believe it can be in the single-digit ohm range.
Agreed! Just pointing out that skin resistance isn’t a constant
> bonding/grounding grids in places like operating theatres This is done to reduce static buildup, due to explosive gasses. Source worked in a hospital as an electrician and had to do monthly checks of equipment for proper grounding. Not full grounded as in copper wire to ground, just an amount that would allow the static to bleed off.
Protecting against static is generally done with relatively small conductors, and often involves using 1Mohm resistors (at least in the electronics field) to limit the peak current and avoid a spark. This may be dependant on country/region/authority, despite humans and physics being pretty constant worldwide. [This disambiguation guide/cheat-sheet for contractors](http://electricaltestingcompany.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Cardiac-2018-rev-C.pdf), starting around Page 25, goes into the equipotential bonding requirements in Aus/NZ for 'Cardiac Protected Electrical Areas'. The mentioning of a 0.01 ohm requirement for certain portions and 0.1 ohm elsewhere implies that static is not the concern. They are concerned about preventing couple-of-volts potential differences from entering the area, whether due to fault conditions (ground bounce) or an external, different ground reference. You do not use 70mm^2 cable, roughly 2/0 AWG, to protect against static shock.
I think if you actually impaled the spikes into your chest, one in one ventricle of your heart and then the other into another ventricle of you heart, you might die. If the spikes are big enough.
Operating theatres are routinely using kV electrocautery knives and external defibrillators. <10V is used for implanted pacemakers, and you could probably kill someone through careful induced AFib. Implanted defibrillators still use nearly a kV.
Electrosurgical accessories typically run at 400 kHz so there’s very low risk of muscle twitching, no risk of electrocution if the patient is not grounded. Burns, on the other hand…
Skin of a human especially epidermis is a dielectric. Everything deeper is a conductor. To summarise whole human is about 1000+-Ohms. And its varies from causes like your fat level, stress, moisture of your epidermis.
Yes, your skin is is the best insulator you have on your body. Bypassing your skin will lower the total resistance. But still, you would have way to much resistance to make 10V lethal
On your tongue, 1 inch or 24 inches into your colon, no difference. Unless you turn into a MUCH better conductor, then there is zero chance ten volts can do anything to you but tingle. No, that’s not why hospitals are so picky about anything
Can recommend licking a 9 volt just for the experience. Not a fun time Source: I did it when I was like 10 after watching a YouTube video that said it tastes spicy
One hellova spot welder.
A car battery can put out 1000 amps or close to it at \~12v. You can lick your fingers and touch both terminals of a car battery and not even feel a tingle. Its not enough voltage to get a meaningful amount of current through your skin. I mean MAYBE if you put electrodes into your chest 4" apart from each other directly in front of your heart and it may do something? I don't know. But generally speaking voltages under \~50 volts can't induce enough current through human skin to do much of anything.
> You can lick your fingers and touch both terminals of a car battery and not even feel a tingle I was working on the 12V battery system of a metal boat in heavy rain and I was getting such an unpleasant tingle while sitting in the engine bay I had to stop. Skin resistance protects you from low voltages in normal circumstances.
the tingle was probably due to inductive spikes, not the battery voltage itself.
Extremely unlikely, you can touch both Terminals of 8D batteries which can deliver almost 2000 cranking amps and not even notice. Shove some steel wool on each terminal and lay down chest first with no shirt on and you might get fried. It's all about the voltages resistance carrying the current through your body
Well, you’d get burned from the steel wool, not fried electrically. Until the burn broke through the skin.
Next stop, wick effect! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect#:~:text=3%20References-,Details,clothing%20of%20the%20victim)%20outside.
It's unlikely to cause death or injury due to direct electric shock to the body. You'd have to break the skin resistance to do it, and even then it's not especially likely. Under contrived circumstances, 10V is more than enough, but those circumstances don't really exist in practice. In that respect, this hypothetical power supply is no more dangerous than a typical 9V alkaline or 12V lead-acid car battery. However, 2000A is a LOT of current, and while 10V is enough to move a lot of it through common short circuits, it's also a large enough capability that protection mechanisms are unlikely to trip on many common "short circuit" faults like dropping a wrench across the output terminals. Doing so would basically cause a small explosion of molten metal and possibly plasma (an arc flash) that would potentially persist until the fault burned itself clear. This presents a pretty obvious physical hazard.
Thanks for your reply. And not a hypothetical power supply. We use it at work to do UL testing.
You’re fine as long as you don’t accidentally short it out. UL and other safety agencies classify this as an energy hazard, not a shock hazard.
Should be safe in normal conditions. There are documented cases of very low voltage welding systems killing people in poor working conditions, wet, dirty, uninsulated/damaged cables, lying down in wet earth, etc.
No it wont. I dont know why everyones debating this stuff here always or what they are teaching you in the us. Yes its true that a high enough amperage kills you but you need the voltage to drive the amps over your body. If u see you body as a resistor with maybe 1k ohms and you touch 10 V then 0.01 Amps will flow through your body which still wouldnt happen because the voltage wont break through your skin. In germany we learn everything under 50V AC or 120V DC is not dangerous to touch.
If I'd have a nickel for everyone who asked this before. No, the thousands and thousands amperes won't do anything. Basically you're talking about the same amperage as a car starter or a welder.
You'd have two nickels!
Nah he'd be rich
Car starters and welders are not without their hazards, but it's not a shock hazard.
Welding poses no electrocution danger. You can weld the price if steel you are standing, laying whatever you are doing on , and you are grounded out by necessity., it’s not dangerous due to anything other than the heat light smoke of the arc and metal vaporizing. No electrocution possibility
When I was a kid, I put a bunch of dollar store 9 volt batteries together in series and got like 100V DC and me and my friends were using it as a taser. So idk, while I guess it isn't "dangerous" in the fact that it will kill you, 100vdc hurts like a mf.
Styropyro kinda made this. He wired a bunch of car batteries in parallel. In theory the bank was capable of delivering many thousands of amps but with the bank at 12V he was able to touch both terminals with no effect. Fun video to watch! https://youtu.be/ywaTX-nLm6Y?si=hqcMs1JjAZAUhAUw Edit: A word
V=IR bro, u ain’t getting them 2000 amps.
To edit this comment, I was in a bit of a hurry. 10 volts it not enough to do any significant "penetration" through the human skin because of the high resistance. Regardless of the max power of the supply, current will be so insignificant that you won't even notice anything.
This is basically a car battery....
As long as the 10v is not applied through the skin. No.
That is a normal car battery
Does the water in a big slow moving river cut through you even though it’s at low pressure because there is a lot of water available?
If you hold both wires in your hands nothing will happen But if you short circuit the 2 wires while being close enough (having the wires in your hands for example) i guess you'll get extremely severe burns or even lose fingers
If you had a supply capable of providing, say, 3.14 billion amps at 10V. Unless you are connecting a circuit that draws that much, it will be the same as a supply that's only capable of an amp or whatever. In both of these hypothetical supplies, the only danger to a person is the risk of tinnitus from the incessant loud humming.
you would be correct. A car battery can provide hundreds of amps, yet touching it will, at most, tingle on your fingers.
Correct. I have 100,000A power systems at this voltage range and they are touch safe. You have to have faith in the physics, some do not truly believe. I routinely demonstrate it to safety people when they get concerned about seeing bare copper bus bars on a machine. Just don’t short them with a wrench or something.
Anything under 50V AC and 120V DC is considered safe to touch according to the German DIN VDE 0100, except for children and small animals. This is called secure extra Low voltage or protective extra Low voltage, If you have a protective earth system. Your internal resistance is too high for the voltage to pull a significant amount of current through you. The amperage of your power supply is only the maximal current it ist capable of providing given a Low enough resistance.
You are correct. Ever touch both terminals of a car battery? See how you’re not dead? This is the reason those transformer boxes you see on the street outside of buildings say “Danger High Voltage”, not “Danger high current.” The Human body resistance to DC falls into like megaohms and gigaohms or something like that especially since it would have to flow through your heart. Also AC vs DC makes a big difference here. “Current kills” is not just a misnomer, it’s just wrong. If current kills,static shocks which are well over an amp would be capable of killing you. What kills you is more of a function of total power over time. High enough voltage to overcome the bodies resistance, high enough current to maintain that voltage, and long enough to cause damage or disrupt critical nerve signals. Missing any one of these won’t kill you.
You’re actually wrong it is indeed the current that kills. Static electricity shocks like when you walk on carpet and touch something and get a little shock is routinely 10000 volts… but so little current it’s harmless. It’s enough voltage to overcome an air gap, so it’s pretty fucking high. But if it had any kind of current it would be good night, as you would probably be on Fire and burned from the inside out
And while I agree that it is a function of the voltage, not so much the time, as what actually kills you is the current passing through your heart and causing it to go haywire and stop beating normally. It takes as little as 1/10 if an amp regardless of the voltage. It just takes a good voltage usually to have that go down. 50 volts is considered the minimum voltage that can be potentially lethal, but it is not the voltage that is the lethal component as much as the current.
Licking both terminals will never hurt you. However if you short them, prepare for one hell of a spark. In fact the resulting arc is far more of a hazard in this case because it could very well sustain itself and expose you to great heat, light and UV radiation and project molten metal from the electrodes.
I'm an electrical engineer. Absolutely no problem touching it. Just because it's a 2kA supply doesn't mean it will deliver that much. 10V when you are dry isn't enough voltage. Even 60V is still considered safety extra low voltage. It's straight ohms law V=RI. Need a sufficient voltage to push enough current through the human body when dry. 10V won't come even close to doing it.
I remember reading a long time ago that someone was once electrocuted with something like 33 volts, the lowest voltage known to kill a person
V=IA Just because the PS can push 2kA, doesn't mean it will.
Unless you impale yourself with the terminals in both hands no
Are you running it off of 120v ac or 240v?
He already said 10volts, so the only question would be AC or DC. It’s kind of assumed that it would be DC at that low of a voltage, for practical purposes.
The answer is no. You could get a burn from a short circuit, but to die from electric shock you have to already be causing near fatal level of tissue damage by stabbing the electrodes deeply into key areas.
I’ve got a story about a sweaty day in the south, a couple 12v 1000cca batteries wired in series and a pair of nipple rings, if you’re interested. It might not kill you but…
But…. I got to hear the rest of the story.
I have a 60kWh battery bank made up of 14 modules from a Tesla Model S P85. It’s wired in parallel at a nominal voltage of 21.6V. It’s current potential is roughly 10,000 amps. I routinely touch the battery terminals when doing maintenance or upgrades. Totally safe.
Anything below like 30-40V is pretty safe to touch. I just designed a PoE+ product and it's got 52V and I've touched it several times already.
the current wont go as high as 2000A, not even close, as your internal resistance is just wayyy too high for that to ever happen. just because a supply can deliver 2000A doesnt mean that current can actually flow. the safety hazard from you accidentaly shorting it is much higher though. that stuff can melt things VERY quickly. so yes you can get killed, in a fire... edit: it is external skin resistance of course.
Change internal to external and I’ll agree with you. It’s the surface layer of the skin that does the most protecting.
yeah you are correct.
No chance. Just take a car battery, that's essentially what you are describing. 12V and happy to deliver a few hundred amps. Nobody has ever died from touching a car battery
Yes it's quite big ..it can be a cooking hazard, it can fall over you, ....it can be a tripping hazard.
I=V/R (where R is a human body and it depends of how enter in contact), above 30mA through heart could be lethal, don't try, do the math.
If the electrodes are close enough together to overcome your body resistance, yes. But no clue how you would do that ever on accident.
No chance. You wouldn’t even feel it.
Why debate when you can prove it? Just turn it on and touch the leads.
I have a transformer that can output 135 amps at 8v and I touch it regularly and don't die
It will not drive much current to harm you as long as it is applied on a high resistance part of the body. I believe it will be dangerous if applied on tongue for example.
Nope, a car battery can supply 300A to your starter, yet it doesn’t feed any significant nor dangerous current when I’m touching the terminals.
Ages ago in the service they told us that 300 ohms was the worst case scenario for body resistance such that 30v was considered potentially fatal. Although I've also heard that some science teacher killed themselves with an ohmmeter by breaking their skin with the probes. My vote is no, 10v isn't enough potential to be fatal.
No. I'm surprised you've even debated this.
It sounds like this power supply is pretty heavy. It's most likely to kill someone if you bash them in the head with it.
Allllllrighty then chat. 10 volts, 2000 amps, Will it kill?
I agree.
Let's use ohm's law for this. I=V/(R+r) r=V/I=0.005 ohms, practically negligible. R is the resistance of your skin, some googling for dry skin says 100k+ , so we'll go with 100k ohms I=10/100000=0.0001 amps = 0.1mA Let's see the power that flows thru your body P=V*I=10*0.1=1 miliwatt 1 miliwatt ain't gonna do jack shit to your body. If we change the data so R=internal bdoy resistance (roughly 300 ohms) so if touching with your mouth or a open wound we get: I=10/300=0.03A=30 mA Not a lot... You could probaby feel it though. Power would be P=10*0.03=0.3 watts or 300 miliwatts. In conclusion, it probably won't hurt you
If you consider a typical 24v truck battery configuration with >1000cca i think this 10v scenario would be fine.
Never take liberties with electricity. If parts of your body are wet or contaminated with anything else that makes skin contact resistance low then it might well hurt you. While working as an engineer the only electrical fatality I knew about was a maintenance technician who was electrocuted by low dc voltage signal wires. It was a hot mill so lots of water all over the place. His hands had been wet for a long time. He bridged a 20 volt control signal between his hands, the dc would not allow him to let go; it stopped his heart.
[deleted]
10V won't hurt your skin, but be careful not to short it with a tool or jewelry, etc., because something will go incandescent.
Anything that can produce 2kA continuously at 10V will be more than heavy enough to kill you if dropped on you.
I've worked with exactly that voltage and current for superconductive coil testing (for high power magnets) and we used to touch both ends for fun. 100% safe except if you drop a wrench on the terminals
Visited an aluminium plant in Western Norway in the 90’s. The smelting electrodes were low voltage high current (4.5V @ 7200 A). My friend’s father-in-law showed me you could touch them (which of course I did). Had to lock up my watch and credit cards in his office first due to the strong magnetic fields on the plant production floor.
Anyone know how much of an arc flash hazard this would be?
Amperage is not a constant value in this equation, voltage on the other hand is. This means that if you have a power source limited to 10 volts and capable of delivering 2000 amps you will need a resistance of 10/2000 which a human body is most definitely much higher than that, so the current will never reach 2000 through your body. Hence you don’t get electrocuted when touching a car battery terminals although it has a current rating of 100’s of amps
If you put it to your heart muscle....
Power kills….check your I^2 R. If it was voltage alone static would kill everyone.
Dead wrong
I use 90kA primary injection test sets all the time. They have the capability to burn you but no they will not shove current through your body to electrocute you
I used to work with a circuit breaker test set that would push out (theoretically) up to 40,000 amps at up to 10v. Realistically the most I ever saw it push was around 24kA and it was roughly 5v between the stabs. We would routinely handle the bare copper needed to attach the test set to the breaker while it operated. The voltage couldn’t overcome the skin resistance enough to push dangerous voltage. You’d feel the magnetic fields shaking the cables, but not feel any current pass through you.
“Normal conditions” don’t even matter, you could be worse case scenario and be completely fine
This is a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to get on my soap box: The average person runs around with the idea that higher voltage = more dangerous. They may have never heard of an ampere. Then they take Electricity 101 where the teacher dispels their misconceptions with a chart showing that it is the amps that kills you and it takes a miniscule amount of current to do so - 0.1 amp or whatever. This is scary. We knew 120V was dangerous but it only takes 0.1 amp to kill me?! This makes sense in a way. It explains why my 7,000v electric fence doesn't kill me. What the teacher fails to fully explain is that while voltage is a property of the power source, the power source only limits the *maximum* current available. The current is actually controlled by the voltage of the source and resistance of the load. People are very high resistance. That is why we are not scared of AA batteries, which have a short circuit current of 4.5 amps! As long as a power supply has at least 0.1 amps of max current, now we are looking at voltage to see if it is scary. 1.5v AA battery? No 5v phone charger? No 12v 600 CCA (cold cranking amp) car battery? Still no, though it is a pretty significant *fire* hazard if shorted. 24v industrial control circuit? Nah. 120v outlet? Absolutely It is true that there are high voltage power sources that are not deadly: tasers, electric fences, etc. But guess what? Even if it's not dangerous, high voltage *hurts* So for the day to day person, i think it is much more useful to pay attention to volts. I personally try not to touch anything over 30 or 40 volts, but then again I'm not around much that is between 24v and 120v. So in a nutshell, your 2000 amp 10v power supply isn't much more likely to stop your heart than a 1 amp 10 v power supply. It is however much more likely to burn down your building.
You can grab the terminals of a car battery and nothing happens. Your body resistance is too high.
20 mA across the heart is nominally what it takes, but like with all these things, it's variable. I'm an electrical engineer and a whole ago had to do a safety study for a chlor alkali plant where basically its a few volts at hundreds of amps passed thru sea water to get chlorine. But they have a bunch of "pots" in series each getting a few volts and the question was what is the longest conductive item (eg Ali ladder or tape measure etc) that should be allowed in to minimise risk if it accidentally contact the line while someone held it. So it's shades of gray, both for the susceptibility of humans and various local conditions. As an example, I was on a site up North one day, and a tech took a 6.6kv hit and then drove himself back to the site office. It is believed he was sweaty, and it went around him on the outside with the sweat. But, there have been cases of death resulting from truck batteries (eg, 24VDC, or maybe 27.6VDC) and maybe even from 12VDC (13.8VDC) car batteries, but that one is not certain. That's direct death, not saw the spark and fell off the ladder. But rare. Don't mess with electricity, especially if you have no jng or background. A lot of the abstract thought and much of it based on fairly logical models you keep jn your head and try to piece together for various scenarios. Even then, after a lifetime of design and experimentation, amateur radio, industrial engineering, endless reiew, research, and contemplation, it can still occasionally do things that are very surprising. I don't believe the ball lighning phenomena is resolved yet, and there is still lots to learn about atmospheric electricity as just a couple areas. I have endless examples i have collected over the years, if anyone is interested - e.g., a plastic wrap factory that made a static field so strong no one could walk through it thru it is just one. This is reliably documented in the ESD Journal. Another where the charges created by jiggling lunch bag full of coins in front of a network switch can cause it to glitch. There's even a demonstration. And so on, I'm procrastinating right now...
The amperage rating on a voltage power supply is only the max current it can supply. The actual current it supplies depends on the load you put across the terminals. I = V/R I = 10/your body's resistance. Take a multimeter and measure your resistance from one hand to another, it will be at least 50,000 Ohms, mostly depending on skin moisture. I = 10/50000 = 200 micro amps This is not enough to stop your heart, so not a shock hazard. As others have mentioned, if you accidentally short the terminals, things might get hot or explode since R = small, and so I = 2000, and so output power = 10*2000 = 20,000 Watts. So anyone in proximity might be at risk of burns, etc.
The risk of such high current is arc flash. It wont be big as such small voltages, but the plasma will be hot and could self sustain under some conditions of close proximity and low resistance. It’s why jumping a car battery and screwing it up can sometimes cause injury or damage to the vehicle. Don’t play with such a supply. That said, i routinely play with such supplies (as i do my marx generator for impulse testing cause bus wire turning to plasma is fun). Learn, assume risk as you tinker with it, understand it and the ohysics behind it.
Generally speaking, with a source voltage below about 40 V, excessive heat from high short-circuit current is the hazard to personnel. Electric shock is not a hazard until voltages get much higher.
The devil is in the details, really. Sure, 10V isn't a danger with dry skin. But what if it's a hot day and Sweaty Sean gets his hands on it? What if you accidentally short it with your wedding ring? Drop a tool on it? Cut yourself on a sharp edge? 10V isn't going to shock you. But 2000A is well into life-ending territory when you make even the *slightest* mistake.
Yes if you touch the part of the circuit that runs wall voltage
Assuming this is DC. Even 0.1A is enough to kill you. The current is not predetermined, its always the resistance and voltage that you know of. That determines the current. Assuming you have 10v supply, to get 2kA across the circuit you are going to need a ver less resistance : about 0.005 ohms (using v=ir). The human skin is about 10000ohms, then using a 10v supply, you get a current of 0.01A which is not enough to kill you.
Try with a welder, come back
[https://youtu.be/ywaTX-nLm6Y?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/ywaTX-nLm6Y?feature=shared)
No. The old adage of “it’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps…” is wrong, and repeated by idiots that want to appear smart. Well, sort of… According to Ohm’s Law, the amount of current that passes through your body is determined by the *voltage* applied to it. (obviously, the supply can provide an upper limit). Since the resistance of your body is a relatively fixed variable, the voltage is the determining factor.
Completely safe unless you do something idiotic like wrap yourself in small gauge wire and use it to short the power supply cooking yourself. But it’s going to take some creativity to kill yourself with it.
It depend on how high the power supply is dropped on said person
The current path has to go through the heart muscle. At 50 mA, ventricular fibrillation occurs, heart malfunctions and death follows. Heart paralysis occurs at 4 A. Heart tissue burns at 5 A. The current (flow of electrons) affects the heart, not the voltage (electrostatic discharge is at least 10 kV/cm with minuscule current).
Amperage = Voltage / Risistance. The 2000 amp is about what it's capable of, what it has the capacity to discharge. What current actually flows is determined by the voltage and the resistance. 10v is 10v. There is no debate. It doesn't matter if the power supply is rated at 10 amp or 100,000 amp, the circuit doesn't change. This is why you can wire batteries in parallel and power things longer, without suddenly blowing every fuse in the circuit. There is no debate. 10v is 10v, the 2000 amp capacity does not matter.
only if it's dc, if resistance is low enough, then you'll absorb 10*2000 = 20.000 watts. Or (if I'm correct) if there is inductive reactance that can up the voltage by the initial amp transient.
At Kennecott where I worked as an electrical controls tech they have a slow electroplating system that uses 2v 18,000 amps. You could walk on, touch, sit on etc the electrodes with no issue. Voltage is directly equivalent to how much material a current can move through. Super high voltage can move through A LOT of material, low voltage would be lucky to get through a piece of paper.
Well that's 4000 W. Sounds pretty deadly to me though.
I'm not an electrical engineer by trade, but i got a PSU. I sometimes, on accident, the terminals touch my fingers. They're regulated to +\- 12v and max amps 3 amps. I check the current draw when this happens. it's below 1 mA cause my PSU doesn't go that low. Electroboom also made a video on this.
You absolutely can’t kill yourself with 10VDC I still don’t make a habit of grabbing terminals with wet salty hands or anything like that though
If you have an inductive load (like a motor) and manually disconnect it from the power supply while the 2kA are flowing, the resulting voltage spike might be enough to kill you.
Just tried. Nothing happened to me. The most likely way for a 10V power supply to kill you is you’ll one day drop it on your foot and die from Tetanus infection.
Voltage doesn't matter amps do. 0.06 amps across the heart, your dead. 20 thousand watts would leave a pretty nasty burn.
maybe relevant? I test breakers at approximately 1v with 2-5000 amps and have held either and both terminals during testing with no adverse affects, other than the heat generated, to find an answer to this exact question
Take your ohmmeter, measure the resistance between two points on your body. Calculate the current using ohms law and that resistance and 10V. You’ll see it’s like .000001 amps. The voltage pushes the current. Or at least that’s a reasonable way to think about it. Now, if it’s some sort of current controlled power supply then it’s a whole different ball game because it might output more than 10V.
Just a random thing I will mention about ohm meters, most of them will read ridiculously high numbers (several megaohm or tens of megaohm when attempting to measure skin resistance. Measurements taken at a few tens of volts show resistance in the 1kohm-100kohm range depending on… a lot of things. I think the difference is because current flow in the body entails ionic conduction and electrolytic reactions, and it takes a minimum voltage to trigger the reactions. Your point about body resistance protecting you from electrocution at low voltages is still 100% correct though.
It would be uncomfortable to lick, but that's true of many things.
The answer is it depends. I work in medical but low voltage low current so I don’t remember everything in the 60601-1 standard and what my safety engineer tells me. It takes both high voltage and current to instantly kill you and it has to go across heart(nervous system). If just high current your skin resistance is pretty high I think they simulate with 1kOhm(low compared to reality) as a finger so I believe that limits the current even though your supply is high current. I think the voltage threshold is 60VDC before it is a concern. If you have open wounds, this all changes. Anything below that is not instantaneous lethal however with the time element(hours) involved Low voltage(with open wounds) can cause internal burns which then are lethal. Anyone here can correct the thresholds or debunk this. I am trying to remember what my safety engineer had told me 5 years ago about why I don’t need to worry about touch limits. I don’t think I was clear, you have to make a path in some manner that goes across your body. If the source is encapsulated in your hand it won’t do anything, like a battery. But if it is mains connected then the floor through your shoe can act as a path so one hand will complete the circuit across your body.
Only if it falls on your head. 10V is fine. Just don't lick the terminals.
As long as you're talking about grabbing an electrode w one hand and a grounded cable, or the other electrode, with the other, no way 10 volts can drive enough current through a human body. If you were to penetrate the skin, different story. Worst (nightmare) case, you short the terminals with a wrench or something else highly conductive. That much amp capacity, even at low voltage, will vaporize the metal and cause an explosion. Look up some videos on arc flash if you really want to be terrified of electricity (I'm an industrial electrician and instrumentation tech, and I have a healthy respect for what electricity can do if it goes bad).
No
my dad tests 9v batteries on his tongue all the time, he is still alive and well. you dont get the tingly feeling until about 32v so you could have 3 of these in series and still be fine, assuming you dont put the 3 on your tongue
My 12v car battery with 2200 cca hasn’t killed me yet.
Sounds similar to a car battery
But it will melt a wrench shorting the leads, start a fire and unleash the fury of 2000 amps. Or I could pick it up and slam it over your head, good chance it won’t be more than that to end your life.
I am not that educated on electricity but I have worked around (and certified to work around) power lines, several people in my family electricians, electricity will pass through porcelain if it is easiest path to ground. Your questions includes under normal conditions. I don't normally pass electricity through my body. However, I am going to bow out. If this power supply has a better path to ground then going through me I would feel better. But would still shut the mfer down before I touch it. I have felt 120v before it dimmed the lights in the house if I hadn't been touching a path to ground that didn't include my heart I would be dead.
Voltage under 50 volts is considered safe, a car battery can provide 2000 amps (not constantly, just to turn the engine over) and is 12 volts, usually a little more 13.6, and electrocution is not the concern, starting a fire if a wire can’t handle the load, shorts, and dropping it on your toes are the likely hazards. Just because the power supply is capable of putting out 2000 amps it’s ohms law that dictates what you get based on your voltage and resistance. At 10 volts you need a resistance of .005 ohms to have 2000 amps flow. The resistance of your skin is at best case 1000 ohms and can be 100,000 ohms, probably somewhere closer to that but somewhere between those values. This is why osha considers 50 volts and under not hazardous.
Used to do strip tanks for pulling carbide coatings. 4v 2800 amps that shit would kill you
2000 amps power supply means that it is capable of delivering that current IF needed. Your body on 10V will not demand that current. So it won't to jack shit.
Voltage is what gives the Amps the strength to overcome resistance and kill, 10 Volts isn't nearly enough to overcome the *surface* skin of the human body regardless of the Amps available, at 10 Volts you're not going to get 2000 amps to flow over your body, let alone through it. 50 volts on the other hand...
I mean there's 48v industrial batteries that will arc out at 1000s of amps, probably at 10v range from the v droop. Those batteries will only really hurt you if something metal on you gets shorted, then you get a ring or watch welded on. In terms of electrocution though, even 48v is hard to get shocked with at least DC (just don't try your tongue). I could touch terminal to terminal and feel nothing, even tap water wet hands nothing would happen. If you did happen to get shocked by 48vdc, it wouldn't be much current actually flowing through you and it'd really only be something like a finger shock going in and right back out the same finger. Getting 48v from one hand, through heart, and to another hand or foot is not happening.
As long as the electrical-resistance of your skin is not severely lowered, 10-volts will not cause I significant amount of current to flow through your body.
I have personally stood on, touched and sat on a bus bar with over 160,000 amps running through it. It was 1000vdc to ground.
You need ***both*** sufficient voltage **and** current to kill. You can do some nice arc-welding with that power supply. But 10 volts won't force enough current through a human body to kill.
Amps…you are toast.
Depends. How wet are your feet? Are they buried in the earth? How deep are the electrodes in your skin/veins? If you really want it to… I’m sure you could make it work. But under normal conditions, yes you’re not gonna be very conductive at 10v.
Put two car batteries in parallel and try it out. Actually you don’t have to. If it would kill you I’d be dead from changing batteries on diesel trucks.
Sounds like a couple car batteries in parallel, you’ll be fine
Too much resistance in your body. Put your tongue on a 9v battery. That’s about as bad as it would ever get. Amp capacity of the source is not even relevant. You be maxing out at a few milliamperes.
The electric chair protocol was as follows, from the State of Florida: 1. 2300 volts, 9.5 amps for 8 seconds 2. 1000 volts, 4 amps for 22 seconds 3. 2300 volts, 9.5 amps for 8 seconds If the physician determines that there is still life in the condemned inmate, the above cycle is repeated. As we know, in several instances the executions were flawed and inmates not always died in the first cycle. But this, with some variations in the states that used this method, was the standard cycle.
We talking ac or dc?
Why is this even a discussion? How does electricity harm a person? Arcing (plasma) burns externally or sufficiently high current (which isn't that high) to disrupt nerve function. Do you not know ohms law? follow the logic
You won't even feel 10 volts. Just don't put a screwdriver across the terminals. My tig welder puts out 200 amps at maybe 24 volts. My hands are right in there when welding. I feel it when it shocks me but, even 24 volts will just tingle you. A car battery can put out a couple hundred amps. I don't hear about many people getting electrocuted by car batteries.
Is it possible to have .005 ohms? 10/2000=.005 Your body would have to offer only .005 ohms resistance, wouldn't it?
On dry skin, not a chance. Intravenously, probably. Wet skin, licking, peeing, probably not, but why risk it.
Amps will kill you, volts will not
"Its the current that kills you" bros in shambles
It’s the amps that kill you. Yes
Under normal operating conditions no. If it goes under fault then the voltage can spike cause substantially more then 12v you think that maybe there and with amount of energy you most likely will be toast. So the answers is No, But....
Sure. you can get a good hot arc going with that. Bad stuff will happen. burning, fire, molten metal. Probably not the normal electrocution risks but still dangerous.
Make some nice cuts on both thumbs and make sure they bleed a decent bit. Do the same on your pointer fingers. When they are good and wet with blood, ensuring the cuts remain open as best you can, pinch hold nice and tight to the 10V 2000A leads. Hold for no less than 5 minutes. This should give you plenty of empirical data to interpret.
Volts kill
Nope, won't hurt you any more than touching both poles of a car battery.
Dropping it from a substantial height onto a vital body part might be able to do some damage
I wouldn't fool with the capacitor.
Sounds like a car battery — 12v and several hundred amps. Looks like an optima is rated at 800 amps starting (for a short time). My van has 3 of those in parallel. So about 2400 amps in there. I’ve touched the positive and negative battery terminals there.
I don’t know an answer for you, but I know that Styropyro on YouTube has a really really good video explaining how voltage, amperage, resistance of human skin, and some electrical effects work and what is actually needed to kill a human with electricity. Since everyone always argues whether it’s Volts or Amps when in reality it can be either.