Retired wow:er

When you put in a bigger fuse, the pipe is bigger and that lets a much bigger wave through with the same push, which is why it’s dangerous.

It’s all the same words that you used, just in a different order. I suppose that what with them all being one-over the other it makes very little difference in the end. The important message was crystal clear – always carry a wooden stick in case you need to beat your loved ones. (That’s right, isn’t it?)

I work as a Stagehand on the Las Vegas strip. Specifically, a stage electrician.

Theater shows have lots of lights, on lots of dimmable circuits (hereafter referred to as Dimmers) and we pull down a lot of power. The show I was working on when this story took place was powered by 13 400A 3 Phase 120/208V panels.

Every day before a show we run a light check to make sure we don’t have any burned out lamps. One of my techs was onstage with a controller, calling up groups of dimmers at a time. To this day I don’t know why, but he decided to type in the following command line:

1-1000 @ Full Enter

That’s Channels 1 through 1000 (each Channel could have multiple 20A Dimmers assigned to it) at 100% in 0 time.

Would it surprise you to know that one theater lamp, which normally draws around 5.5A at 120V, uses a whopping 80A when slammed to full. (I’ll leave it to Bear to explain Inrush Current)

7 of my 13 panels lost power. But here’s the thing, none of the 400A breakers tripped. Oh no, we tripped a massive breaker deep in the bowels of the hotel that fed all 7 sub-panels. It took us 20 minutes just to find it, and when we did it took authorization from the VP of Engineering to reset it.

Everyone except a couple of the Hotel guys were instructed to leave the room when they reset the breaker. From the other side of a cinder block wall, in a corridor that was literally buzzing with the sound of the voltage coming in and being distributed out to the property, resetting that breaker sounded like a shotgun blast.

We got everything back online just in time to let people in for the show. The tech in question, egg very much on his face, had nothing to say to me for about three days.

Now, anyone that knows what solder is like knows that yes, eventually, if a breaker gets tripped enough, it ain’t gonna be happy. Melting material loses some to vapor each cycle IF it tripped from overload.

Left without grounding, a piece of 42 inch pipe under a 300 kv line will build up about 3 amps in around 2 hours (that’s without touching any wires). In 24 hours, the pipe will build up as much as 22 amps. This depends a bit on humidity and other conditions, but that’s enough to actually blow off body parts.

The threshold for “feeling” an electrical current is only 0.001 amps. It takes 0.1 to 0.2 amps to kill a person depending on the circumstances.

It’s always “worth it” to take extra care when working around electrical components or current.

One time, working on a gripe on an EA-6B, Airman *censored* and I discovered the circuit breaker was bad. Read open (infinite ohms) in both positions. When we went to order one, the supervisor gave us grief about circuit breakers “don’t go bad”. I persisted, we replaced the circuit breaker and fixed the gripe. I set the bad circuit breaker in front of the supervisor with a meter and said “check it out”. He did, and said “holy sh*t, that’s the first time I’ve seen one go bad.”

On a side note both fuses and breakers do wear out. I know it’s odd but when you replace the fuse and watch the dang device work for an hour or 2, and you have checked for shorts what conclusion can one come to. Did have one breaker trip. Would not reset if one’s life depended on it. Pulled it from the panel and shook it. Made a nice noise from the inside.