r/WTF • u/HoneyRush • Sep 12 '26
Load testing
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u/sengirminion Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
Dude in the background has on safety sandals. I'm sure they're all following Osha guidelines
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u/_Neoshade_ Sep 13 '26
And standing in several inches of water
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u/OllieN94 Sep 12 '26
Can someone please explain this to me as an everyday person and not a professional sparky?
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u/stevecostello Sep 12 '26
They are conducting "load testing" on what sounds like a fairly large, 3-phase generator using water to simulate a load. Each phase has it's own conductor attached to those pieces of copper (I assume copper). Air makes an excellent insulator, so when the conductors are in the air, no current passes between them. Placing that device into the water allows current to pass between the three conductors as the water acts as a resistor, or a load. Probably a safe assumption that the water is actually salt water, as that conducts electricity more readily than fresh water (also boils at a higher temperature... not sure which one they were caring about more, probably both).
The yellow device he's holding is a clamp on ammeter, measuring the amperage in one of the conductors. Looks like it gets up to around 12 or 13 amps. Fair amount of amperage there. Enough that, even as a former industrial electrician, there is absolutely no fucking way you could pay me enough to do that.
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u/oddiz4u Sep 12 '26
So, how many men is 12/13 amps killing?
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u/TravlrAlexander Sep 12 '26
As many as the voltage lets it run through, I’d wager.
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u/foofighter000 Sep 13 '26
Sounds like some shit Joseph Mengele would’ve done to people.
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u/meatflavored Sep 13 '26
He would have checked how many children and twins it went through.
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u/owa00 Sep 13 '26
Men? You mean disposable company assets, right?
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u/ttoksie2 Sep 13 '26
Well india standard 3 phase is 415 volt so at 13 amps thats about a 5 kilowatt load (actually less than I thought it would be).
But thats still equivelent to about 5 toasters so enough for like 5 or 6 people i recon?
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u/musingsofapathy Sep 13 '26
As the fatal amperage is measured in milliamps and I assume the human body wouldn't cause much load before death, I would assume that it would kill anyone who touched that water. The maximum number of idiots killed would depend not on the total amperage, but the ability of idiots to learn from the misfortune of others.
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u/sonofeevil Sep 13 '26
Eh, sort of.
Milliamps CAN be fatal but most won't be.
It's like saying tripping and falling can kill you. It's true, but most people just graze their skin or maybe break something.
Domestic electricians would have a far higher fatality rate if that were the case. I live in a first world country with really strong work safety laws and most of the residential electricians I know have accidentally booted themselves with mains power at least once in their career. (240v 10amp is the standard outlet here)
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u/gixxer710 Sep 13 '26
This is correct. It takes 0.6 milliamps to throw a human heart beat off. Could that kill you? Yes. It can. WILL IT? Most likely not. But it could.
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u/sonofeevil Sep 13 '26
I don't have the data to back this up but I'd say you'd be at more risk by several orders of magnitude driving to work than by getting a momentary boot from 0.6 milliamps.
Considering Tens machines operate in the 1-120 milliamp range and these are a clinical tool.
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u/schplat Sep 13 '26
TENS machines usually have some very clear verbiage to not have the leads span the heart. Basically the point is to use the skin/muscle/nerves to transmit the current back to the TENS unit, and the electrical signal never passes through your heart or CNS.
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u/Smackety Sep 13 '26
True, but if you attached the tens to your heart you might have a different result.
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u/Edraqt Sep 13 '26
people just dont understand electricity, because you dont really need to understand it unless you work with it.
A lightning strike is like tens of thousands amps at millions of volts, but theres zero frequency and it only lasts for miliseconds so you have a high chance all of that just travels along your body and burns you a bit (or a lot)
you need the right (wrong) combination of amps, voltage, time and frequency to kys with electricity.
and even if none of those are zero, some of them being super high can also be safe. like if the frequency is huge to your bodies signals that mostly work on chemical gradients its the same as if it were zero.
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u/sonofeevil Sep 15 '26
Literally nobody understands that electricity.
There is a great veritasium video on this
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u/IsaacTheBound 27d ago
That's milliamps across the heart. The human body is a large resistor itself, but 415 volts will push through lethal amperage without much hassle.
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u/ttoksie2 Sep 13 '26
I dunno, I've booted myself with a 600amp welder at 80 volts open circuit current (operating current is about 40 volts) before and am not yet dead
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u/stevecostello Sep 13 '26
Yeah. I was a Navy electrician. I've take hits on everything from 28V (window wipers on the bridge) to when my hands were inside a 30A 440V 3-phase motor controller (that I trusted to be locked out/tagged out). AANnNnDdd I caAAmmEe oUut jUsssT finNneEE!
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u/sebassi Sep 13 '26
Depends if you put them in series or parralel. In paralel it's enough to kill about 400 men. In series it's all the men.
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u/Vector-storm Sep 13 '26
Hundredths of 1 amp can cause heart palpations and nervous system damage that can lead to death. At 480v common.
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u/Darthbella Sep 13 '26
The lethal level starts at 0.1 Amps so quite a lot of killing power not to mention the risk of arc flash
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u/tootom Sep 13 '26
I have seen heating water being used to simulate a load during (big - MW sized) generator testing before, in the UK. ( They had a bank of 14 metal containers, with about 1m3 of water in each, and big conductors in each.) Same principle but no one was allowed anywhere near them while the tests were taking place.
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u/musingsofapathy Sep 13 '26
I have seen people do this with 120v wall current to boil around 3 gallons of water. No salt added to the water but the minerals out of the tap made it plenty conductive.
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u/StupidWhiteBastard 24d ago
Probably a safe assumption that the water is actually salt water,
I wondered that too. I reckon though if it was salt water the chlorine produced would prevent anyone standing next to it. They'd be coughting their guts out.
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u/The_Ashamed_Boys Sep 13 '26
Don't know the voltage so not sure of hoe much power it actually is. Unless there's a good guess as to the voltage.
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u/Skittle-Dash Sep 12 '26
Know how an electric motor turns energy into spiny stuff? Well if you spin the electric motor it out puts electricity. Normally you spin it with a gas motor of some sort.
So a break down of what's happening:
There is an electric generator in background that is hooked up to a motor. most likely gasoline.
The gas engine is spinning the generator but without any electricity being used its easy to spin. The more electricity you use the harder it is to spin the generator and harder the gas engine has to work. (This why you can hear the engine in backgrounds pitch change as he dunks the wires into the water).
When the wires are in water they conduct electricity and the more in the water the more electricity that can flow putting more strain on the motor. This energy is being turned into heat (this is because its AC power and not DC (Alternating current vs Direct current)
There are three wires because im guessing this is 3 phase power (means the electricity has 3 separate hots, which is made by having 3 separate wire windings in the electric generator).
Multi phase power is a mini lesson in its own but way easier to understand from photos and videos than text.
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u/aetrix Sep 13 '26
There is a generator hooked to the wires. When they get dunked in the water, the electricity can flow through the water between the wires.
As the electricity is pushed through the water, a large amount of energy is transferred to the water, which is evident since the water gets heated enough to boil violently. This makes the spinning generator harder to turn, which increases the load on the engine turning the generator.
The whistling sound in the background sounds like a turbocharger spooling up when they dunk the wires, so I disagree with those saying it's a gasoline engine. Diesel generators are typically the norm and it sounds like that's what this is.
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u/r4nDoM_1Nt3Rn3t_Us3r Sep 13 '26
I recommend this video. He talks about it a bit while preparing and demonstrating it on a smaller scale: https://youtu.be/V5PZb6HtwIE
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u/FloridaVapes Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
Holy shit are three phases just shorting to ground in a pot of oil? BY HAND!? This might be the worst electrical safety video I’ve ever seen, and that includes arc flashes and accidental electrocutions. Can’t imagine this job position being “permanent” in any capacity!
Edit: assuming I’m seeing it correctly without processing the video, his ammeter read 12 amps on one phase!
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u/HoneyRush Sep 12 '26
Don't be ridiculous, it doesn't look like oil, it's probably just salty water
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u/lacerating_aura Sep 12 '26
Yup, salt water based dummy load.
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u/maison_deja_vu Sep 13 '26
Yeah probably load testing a generator or something. That’s why they’re measuring the current. The further in you dip the phases in the salt water, the more load is pulled from the generator
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u/douira Sep 13 '26
I guess it's just generating liters of chlorine and hydrogen gas?
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u/schplat Sep 13 '26
Nowhere near liters.. 1 amp-hour produces .4l (of Cl2 gas), so at 12 amps, that'd be 4.8l/hour. Over the 16 second video? Roughly 20ml would have been produced. This assumes sea water level of salt. IIRC, the amount of H2 gas should be roughly equivalent.
And it'll also leave behind some aqueous Sodium Hydroxide (lye).
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u/Viciuniversum Sep 12 '26
Fun fact: this is the method, albeit on a much smaller scale, by which Russian prisoners boil water in prison.
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u/thepaleindian Sep 12 '26
Also Canadian prison, and I reckon any prison where you have access to outlets.
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u/brokenmike Sep 12 '26
It's conducting phase to phase, not ground.
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u/rectal_warrior Sep 12 '26
Exactly, the water is the route of the short between the phases. They are held in place by an insulater, they aren't shorting when they're out of the water.
Funnily enough if they were using oil there would be no shorts at all, as oil is also an insulater.
Regardless it's perfectly safe, they're all wearing their safety sandles
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u/Rockglen Sep 12 '26
Pretty sure that's water. Oil would probably ignite if it was boiling and there was an arc.
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u/Inveramsay Sep 13 '26
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who works for a well known multinational manufacturing company with factories all over the world. He upgraded and repairs machinery in several countries including India. One trip they were installing a new industrial robot that needed to be bolted to the floor so they brought the big Hilti which needed a fair amount of juice. The local foreman found a long extension cable but unfortunately the male plug was missing so they were going to sort that out while my friend had some coffee. After a suspiciously short amount of time they said it was fixed. He wandered over to check how they had done it so quickly and found a small Indian man crouched holding the cables directly in to the outlet, no plug
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u/llamacornsarereal Sep 13 '26
Thats dumb as fuck when they could have taken the plug out and hard wired it like a normal person 🙄🙄
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u/Rhesusmonkeydave Sep 13 '26
Looks like the droids getting tortured in the back of Jabba’s palace
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u/woakula Sep 12 '26
I hope that's water. Otherwise... Mmmh cancer
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u/HoneyRush Sep 12 '26
They're probably making pure hydrogen and oxygen. With a bit of luck and some sparks this will work way faster than cancer
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u/smooth_criminal1990 Sep 13 '26
Waaaaait, so is this some crazy electrolysis making hydrogen and oxygen? Or chlorine if the water is salted??? 😷
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u/deephurting66 Sep 13 '26
What is that smoke? I would imagine it's not safe in any way to breathe in..
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u/ConspicuousPineapple Sep 12 '26
What am I looking at?
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u/stevecostello Sep 12 '26
They are conducting "load testing" on what sounds like a fairly large, 3-phase generator using water to simulate a load. Each phase has it's own conductor attached to those pieces of copper (I assume copper). Air makes an excellent insulator, so when the conductors are in the air, no current passes between them. Placing that device into the water allows current to pass between the three conductors as the water acts as a resistor, or a load. Probably a safe assumption that the water is actually salt water, as that conducts electricity more readily than fresh water (also boils at a higher temperature... not sure which one they were caring about more, probably both).
The yellow device he's holding is a clamp on ammeter, measuring the amperage in one of the conductors. Looks like it gets up to around 12 or 13 amps. Fair amount of amperage there. Enough that, even as a former industrial electrician, there is absolutely no fucking way you could pay me enough to do that.
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u/brokenmike Sep 12 '26
They're load testing a 3 phase generator by "shorting" phases in a drum of water.
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u/cactusmac54 Sep 12 '26
Jesus Harold Christ.
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u/supr2nr Sep 12 '26
Is that what the H stands for?
Huh, learn something new every day.
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u/cactusmac54 Sep 12 '26
Not for sure, but I saw a movie where Robert Downey Junior said it, so it must be true. Right? :)
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u/ChoplifterBill Sep 13 '26
I think the fumes coming off this would contain hydrogen and oxygen. At the very least, I would do this outside and have a fire extinguisher.
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u/p4x4boy Sep 12 '26
please can anybody give some context. im ucking lost here. but this is giving me ideas to heat up my hottub......
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u/Dan_H1281 Sep 13 '26
It's a generator they are shorting it straight ot ground to make it produce max load in an oil bath from what I can tell letting the phases jump in the oil bath so that the engine and generator can be proven to run at max rated amperage without failure
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u/Firestar222 Sep 13 '26
Ok yeah that is truly a WTF. At first my dumbass was all “why are they boiling a busbar?”
Then OOOHHHHH
OH SHIT
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u/jojo9092 Sep 12 '26
How much is that barrel rated for? 10,000 watts continuous? (as long as you refill)
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u/renotrash Sep 12 '26
Is that a homemade electric kettle?