r/WTF • • Sep 12 '26

Load testing

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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?

19

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.

27

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)

12

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.

7

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.

1

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.

0

u/sonofeevil Sep 13 '26

I'm aware.

But that wasnt my point.

-2

u/Smackety Sep 13 '26

True, but if you attached the tens to your heart you might have a different result.

0

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.

1

u/sonofeevil Sep 15 '26

Literally nobody understands that electricity.

There is a great veritasium video on this