On 19 Jan 2004 23:27:56 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
Witchy writes:

In the end I did the disconnection/reconnection live, with rubber
gloves on, one hand behind my back, hair well out of the way and
standing on wooden boards whilst wearing rubber soled boots. Just
looking at the apparatus surrounding the street fuse gave me The Fear,
so I preferred to work with the Henley block (or Lucy block in this
case) instead.

The risk is not only that of electric shock but also that
of explosion and serious burns from accidently shorting the
meter tails and forming a flash arc spraying molten and
vaporised copper over you. The precautions should include
eye protection (preferably full face protection), clothing
which covers the rest of your skin (leather is good for
this;-) and removal/covering of all earthed metelwork in
the area, as well as having someone on hand (but not too
close) who is familiar with CPR. Of course, this is all
just such a ridiculas level of risk and pulling the fuse
so much safer that you shouldn't even be considering working
on live tails.

I know that now One of the other reasons I concentrated on the
henley block was that the tails were obviously fed into 2 seperate
blocks several inches apart so the chances of an accidental short were
vastly reduced. I'd also read (on here I think) that you can also
reduce or remove the chance of an arc by making sure the new CU was
completely off so there was no load on the other end.....

--
cheers,

witchy/binarydinosaurs