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FIRST thing to check is the jumper over the water meter - make sure
the copper piping IS grounded. Once it is grounded there is a pretty
good chance a breaker will "pop", telling you where the problem is.
Just grab a booster cable to do the temporary ground - see if that
fixes it.

The idea of the OP, if he were a newbie, running around clamping
energized
pipes with a car booster cable gives me just a little pause, especially
if
it's likely to blow a breaker. I know it makes sense to check the meter
because more and more water meters do not provide electrical continuity
to
ground, but I like Nate's proposal to deactivate device by device and
circuit
by circuit until the voltage goes away. But that's advice for a person
who's capable of doing his own electrical work competently enough to pass
inspection. I'd say that's less than half the people I know that do
their
own work. (-:

I may be missing something, Clare, but what will you have learned if the
breaker pops that you didn't know before? It reveals that the ground is
energized, but we already know that from the shocks?

It will tell you which circuit is causing the problem without having
to shut off all the circuits and search for what could be a needle in
a hatstack. It will also eliminate an interupted ground at the meter
as the problem if it does not solve the voltage on the waterline
problem.

OK - that's fair enough. I'll admit I did not consider that when I replied.

I've just been taught not to trip breakers unless it's absolutely necessary
as they have a finite number of fault cycles before they fail. That means I
wouldn't have seized upon that method to diagnose a fault.

My experience is with the "grunt and crank" method of shutting off breakers
one by one (as Nate recommended) and comes from dealing with X10 equipment
issues where tripping a breaker deliberately usually doesn't gain anything.
X10 troubleshooting involves looking for sources of noise or signal
attenuation.

In this case, however, I will gladly concede that it would save time in
hunting down a likely source of the problem. Still, I think it's a very
long shot that the ground shunt on the meter was missing or had failed.
Therefore it would NOT have been the first place I looked, that's for sure.

And how would repairing ground continuity through the meter, if there was
none, make the voltage in the pipes go away? No properly functioning
device
should be dumping enough current into the ground to be detectable at
multiple faucets, AFAIK.

It will pull the water line to ground potential. It only takes
MILLIAMPS of leakage to give a tingle.

But even milliamps of current leakage is impermissible, AFAIK, and that's
why wet areas are now required (when doing new work) to be protected by
GFCIs in most cases. (Hope that's broad enough for the NDBF's.) You can be
electrocuted if you manage to get those milliamps running across your chest.
Even if you repaired an open ground shunt at the meter, wouldn't you agree
that something's still wrong with the wiring?

http://www.mikeholt.com/mojonewsarch...s~20020521.htm
says that "Death from an electric shock (ventricular fibrillation*) can
occur when the touch voltage is above 30V RMS resulting in as little as 30
milliamperes of current flowing though the body. This can occur when
improper neutral-to-case connections are made and the neutral is opened."

If I recall correctly from previous discussions a GFCI trips when there is
an imbalance of as little as 5 milliamperes. In any event had this been a
real post and not a troll, we have to consider that the OP was experiencing
not just a tingle, but a serious "zap" at several different points in the
house. That, indicates to me (and to a number of others here) that there's
a serious amount of electrical energy reaching the pipes. A perhaps lethal
amount.

While I think jumpering/checking same is a great idea *after* the fault
is
found, I don't think it would aid in diagnosing a problem like this.
Worse,
still, the jumper could cause a fairly serious spark. If the troll had
done
his own gas piping, and the gas meter was nearby he might be standing in
a
cloud of gas when he connects the test bypass cable and then he would
incinerate in a greasy trollish fireball. (-: You wouldn't want that on
your conscience? Now me, I wouldn't mind so much.

Now you are REALLY grasping for straws.

OMG. That was meant to be a joke, hence the (-: smiley face. But more
importantly, and more realistically, bridging the meter means there's a
chance that he'll touch both ends of the circuit accidentally and if there
is some sort of serious ground fault the current could pass from hand to
hand (and through his chest) - perhaps the most likely way to cause
electrocution.

While bridging the water meter with a car battery booster cable may be
useful advice to someone with excellent electrical skills, I just don't see
it being good advice for a tyro. In these sorts of potentially fatal cases,
it really is important to assume very low knowledge levels on the part of
the OP and high levels of lethality. Water and electricity are a bad
combination.

The other issue I have with that recommendation is that assumes that the
amount of current leaking is negligible. That's not supported by the OP's
original description of not just a tingle but a strong zap that appeared to
be spreading throughout the house.

If there was enough fault
current to cause a serious flash issue, it would have but the OP on
hnis ass, not just a tingle,

Can you say that with certainty? I think in such a situation it depends on
where he's standing when he experiences the tingle/zap, how much current is
flowing and how it is reaching the ground. A tingle at the basement sink
wearing thick rubber boots could easily turn into an electrocution death in
the shower with the metal supply pipes reaching the grounded drain pipes
through the OP's body.

I would be very reluctant to diagnose this as a small current leak just
because at one point in the house he felt only a tingle - especially when he
later reported a strong zap at a different location touching different
items.

and there is no reason to suspect a gas leak - the OP would have smelt
that. And see my
previous comment about finding the problem.

sigh I'll have to remember to use the humor alert tag next time. FWIW,
just for background info, my dad was a materials science engineer for the
nuke sub program and they spent a lot of time developing spark-free
beryllium copper hammers and sparkless flashlights because of the explosion
hazard. So I've grown up thinking that unnecessary spark generation is a
bad idea.

Old habits die hard and I am not inclined to generate sparking when there's
another way to solve the problem. And yes, for my hyped up NDBF detractors
out there (and you know who you are) I *do* assume the OP's not living in a
submarine - although with trolls you never know - but still, throwing
unnecessary sparks doesn't seem like good practice to me. YMMV.

Are you an electrician, or have you ever worked under one? I ended
up as a Mechanic after working with my dad as an electrician as a tean
- and electricity in a car behaves very similarly to electricity in a
house - and then I ended up as a computer/electronics technician.

So you're saying you're not a licensed electrician? (-: We have something
in common, then. Neither am I. But I know enough about electricity to know
that when you're getting ANY kind of shock from your plumbing, whether it's
a tingle or a zap, you have a serious problem that likely requires a
professional to diagnose. Any delay in obtaining one represents a
potentially fatal hazard to the occupants of the house and perhaps even the
neighbors if the problem is "at the pole" and external to the house wiring.

I know electricity - and I have a lot of respect for it. I try real
hard not to give dangerous advice.

Granted. But don't you think that with the level of technical expertise the
OP seemed to have provided (low) that the only real solution was to shut
down the power and get a professional in to diagnose the situation? Or even
the power company? Think of what might happened if, in the described
situation, someone else in the house decided to take a shower while the OP
was diddling around taking meter readings, jumpering water meters, etc. with
the system still live.

The tingling becoming a zapping and then appearing to worsen and spread
throughout the house was, IMHO, clearly a warning that implied great danger.
To that end, a fair number of other respondents recognized that danger
immediately. Once it was clear these were not static shocks, the power
should have been shut off and the power company informed and a professional
summoned. If the OP wanted to poke around the unenergized system with a
flashlight while waiting, that seems pretty unlikely to cause more problems.

From what I've researched about the problem the fault could be external to
the house wiring and affect more than the OP's residence. While he's
fooling around with meters that he may not know how to use properly or
jumpering devices that may have nothing to do with the problem, a neighbor
could be electrocuted because the OP delayed calling the proper authorities.
This is very much *unlike* a clogged dishwasher drain line where there's
little risk in trying to fix the problem other than breaking a pipe nipple
or banging up your hands. A current leak into the plumbing is serious
business.

If you smelled gas in your basement would you go around looking for the
source or call the gas company? Can the average homeowner really compete
with experts who are equipped with sophisticated gas sniffers to detect the
source of even the smallest amount of gas? I know what I would do (and have
done). Call the pros because such cases aren't just home repair issues,
they are potentially life and death ones.

Another point to note is *why* would a water meter ground suddenly fail and
be repairable by jumpering? It just doesn't seem to me to be the first
place to look in a situation like this because it just seems so unlikely
that the meter shunt would suddenly go bad. I would look to recent plumbing
repairs or devices hooked into ground via the water pipes that have failed
and are dumping current into the supply pipes.

That electrical system needed grounding -

Well, I do agree that in such a case it's likely there's a grounding
failure, but that could be in any number of places and from any number of
causes. If the OP wasn't a stinking troll, I would have next asked him what
has changed recently in the house? Was some device added that was grounded
to a water pipe located far from the panel area? Was a new water meter
installed? (It would have to have been by idiots if they failed to shunt the
ground). Was there a plumbing repair made with plastic pipe or fittings?
Did he see linemen working nearby or someone doing excavating?

My suggestion to him involved not touching anything electrical and merely
mapping out any potential points where electricity could be entering the
water supply piping. That was in addition to calling the electric company,
the water company and an electrician because of even the remote possibility
that it's a systemic problem that might be affecting the neighbors.

Mapping out the possible points where electricity is "leaking" might have
helped saved some time for the electrician if it turned out that a failed
device *was* injecting power into the water lines. More importantly, it was
a *completely* passive activity that could be performed by a person of even
low electrical skills. It could be done with the main breaker off and more
importantly without exposing the OP to any kind of shock trying to fix the
problem or diagnose it himself.

So I still strongly stand by that advice rather than recommending the OP
start jumpering water meters, take meter readings without knowing whether
he's working with a good ground, "feel" for tingles or do anything else that
might have had shock risks or complicated or altered the situation for the
professionals who would eventually have to diagnose it.

You must have heard/seen this joke rate card for electricians:

$100 per hour
$125 per hour if you watch

$150 per hour if you tried to fix it yourself

--

Bobby G.