On Friday, November 15, 2013 1:56:45 AM UTC-5, Robert Green wrote:
"Wes Groleau" wrote in message

...

On 11-13-2013, 09:05, Robert Green wrote:

I admire your faith in the goodness of your fellow man, Wes, but in this

instance I think it may be misplaced. If I am ever on trial for a

crime, I

want*you* on the jury. (-:



Ha! I have very little faith in the "goodness" (nor the intelligence)

of humanity in general. But I do have a lot more respect than most for

the principle of "beyond all reasonable doubt."



As Tom R noted, this is not a trial, just an analysis. With folks flat-out

admitting to trolling for their own amusement, I have to call them the way I

see them and this sure sounds like a Halloween prank to me. Some other

current threads seem just as prankish. I suppose they're at least on-topic.

(-: I suspect the troller gave us the "all clear, all OK" signal because he

knows that leaving us hanging also left him open to being discovered. All

someone had to do was approach his ISP with a request for more information

so that if he was lying dying in a pool of his own whiz someone could

dispatch the local EMS.



Some good came out of this - I got a nifty new Sperry VD 6505 non-contact

voltage meter (thanks again, Nate for the referral). I can say with

certainty if a newbie's life depends on reading this sucker correctly the

first time out, he's going to die. Depending on where the dial is set you

can get voltage from a stone. After a while I am getting the hang of it but

it's pretty tricky and is wildly effected by RF emanations. Dimmers, TV's,

CFLs and other devices really have an effect on the readings.



Still, glad to have it and after I play with it a while I would actually

trust it to indicate that my water pipes were carrying current.



What I want to do, and what's making my wife nervous, it to cobble together

an isolated pipe setup to test various energization scenarios, particular a

pipe-clamp grounded device gone bad on a segment of copper pipe no longer

well-connected to the ground. Then I could also use a digital voltmeter to

try to figure out what levels of current are leaking, etc.



Might do it with a Variac just to keep the V levels to less than lethal.

That should still give me some idea of what the readings would look like if

I encountered a similar situation in the wild.



--

Bobby G.

Why don't you do it with 240V and use your pecker as a probe?