Tips from Fluke on things we could not resist doing or forgetting when doing electricity works. Link here.
Anyone who makes their living by working with electricity quickly develops a healthy respect for anything with even a remote chance of being “live.” Yet the pressures of getting a job done on time or getting a mission-critical piece of equipment back on line can result in carelessness and uncharacteristic mistakes by even the most seasoned electrician.
I was just watching some linemen working on power lines near my house. One thing that complicates their lives at the moment is that we’re going through what’s called “Load Shedding” (scheduled blackouts of specific areas to allow the grid to cope with peak load – this is in South Africa).
The workers try to schedule work, in this case tightening some saggy lines that were touching in the wind, around the load shedding schedule to reduce the impact on the public. The problem is that when they arrive on site and deenergise the line locally, it’s actually already deenergised because a breaker higher up the system has been turned off the entire suburb. So they climb up their ladder and carefully check the lines. The line is obviously off… but is it off because his partner at the distribution room threw the correct breaker or because of load shedding?
Then to do the line tightening the worker has to get right up in between the lines with his torso in between the phases.
Load shedding can be suspended at any time by some guy at a national level sitting behind a computer. I’m not sure I could do that job.
Must remember my safety glasses and insulated gloves, next time I change the 9V battery in my smoke alarm.
Please don’t tell me you’re irresponsible enough to work on electric appliances without a full-face respirator / filter – remember, smoke kills! Hey, I never knew Fluke is that good at humor… (and remember, always buy original ink only for your printer!)
dude’s practically in a spacesuit to test a 120V line… thanks for the laugh Fluke!
Don’t forget to tag out the smoke detector first!
Arc flash Accident
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bBvmPRqfmo