Quote Originally Posted by Frank S View Post
I have been on the receiving end of nearly being electrocuted its no fun. Sweaty gloves aluminum ladder 16 feet off the ground ac welder and some how managed to break the insulation off the handle of the stinger which immediately managed to find a hole in one of my gloves luckily the setting on the welder was only for 90 amps.
when it caught hold of me all I could focus on was to make sure I tightened my grip on the ladder with my left hand and yell out shut it off shut it off several times. the jolting from the current passing from one hand through the other made my whole buddy jerk finally my jerking movements dislodged the stinger from my right hand and the pathway for the current was broken when I dropped the stinger I grabbed another ladder rung with my right hand and just hung on for a few moments then managed to climb down with out falling but it was several minutes before I could talk coherently just broken or clipped words and part sentences.
they always say its not the volts but the amps that get you well 90 amps at 27Volts AC hurts and could easily kill
Whilst being electrocuted one's thoughts do not always focus on ohm's law but it still applies. 27 V driving 90 A requires a resistance of no more than 27/90 = 0.3 ohms which is way to low for body resistance. Internal body resistance is in the order of a few 100s of ohms but unless you have broken skin at the contact points the skin resistance will be many times higher. For example dry skin will be up around 100 kohms. So taking a worst case open wound shock of 100 ohms the current from 27 V will only be 27/100 = 270 mA far removed from your 90 A, but way more than enough to do you very serious damage. Only very few mA is enough to be dangerous. Take the case of dry hands, there will be two skin contacts but lets just use one at 100,000 kohms the current from 27 V then will be 0.27 mA which is unlikely to be noticed.
It does not matter what current the power source is capable of supplying, what matters is what current the voltage can force through your body and those two things are very different.