Ron Hardin wrote:
Toller wrote:

What kind of short was it that didn't trip the breaker?
If you pipes were grounded why would you get a shock off them? Your
resistance has to be thousands of times higher than the water pipes, so if
there was some wierd short that only allowed a couple amps, 99.99% of it
would go through the pipes when you touched them.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Can anyone explain it?


Plastic pipes? The current would then be through the water, not the pipe.

You'd notice a shock when you were grounded yourself, say on a basement floor,
and touched metal in contact with the water.

Continuing current would discharge through the water to grounded devices in
contact with the water, running up the electric bill. It reduces the heating
requirement in the same amount, though. But it needn't be a breaker-blowing
current.

Frankly, I don't think that would happen unless the water heater shell
was also ungrounded. And remember guys, the OP said he "touched copper
pipes" around the heater, which lessens the possibility that plastic
piping was involved, huh?

And how about those laundry machines? Unless they were both unplugged
from their outlets they should have been grounded too, so something had
to be seriously wrong with the grounding of the electrical system in
that building.

I vote for broken main grounds to both the main electrical panel and the
plumbing, probably at a point where just one conductor was doing both
jobs. That would let all the electric wiring grounds and neutrals and
the entire plumbing system were free to be driven off ground by a faulty
element in the wather heater, or some other device with a slight amount
of internal electrical leakage.

If the heater tank was properly grounded, I'm hard pressed to believe
that the electric field strength at the piping ports would be large
enough to put enough voltage on the water in plastic pipes to be felt,
were plastic piping used.

Comments?

Jeff

--
Jeff Wisnia (W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying."