Deathtrap Dishwasher!

[bcylau]

i know some of you do this for a living, but for people that don't know, some of this shit will kill you

dry skin resistance is about 100k to 1M ohms while wet skin resistance drops to about internal resistance of 300 to 1000ohms.

Your electrical resistance with wet hands(ie washing dishes) will drop 100times at least compared to dry skin. Its much more likely to encounter water when you are dealing with a dishwasher than other appliances. So yeah, 110v is more than enough to kill you.

[rx7_turbo2]

Originally posted by bcylau
i know some of you do this for a living, but for people that don't know, some of this shit will kill you

dry skin resistance is about 100k to 1M ohms while wet skin resistance drops to about internal resistance of 300 to 1000ohms.

Your electrical resistance with wet hands(ie washing dishes) will drop 100times at least compared to dry skin. Its much more likely to encounter water when you are dealing with a dishwasher than other appliances. So yeah, 110v is more than enough to kill you.

Those are roughly the numbers I have always been taught as well. Calculating the resistance of the human body is difficult because of the number of variables involved.

It's one of those things that is there 100% chance of death or property damage in this example? No, but there's enough of a risk to not take it lightly.

My issue was with the idea of "meh, worst case scenario the breaker would trip" and "It's just 120v no biggie". I'm not saying anyone said that specifically, however that's an extremely dangerous sentiment when electricity is involved.

[Tik-Tok]

I've shocked myself good before on household A/C and no breakers tripped, and if you don't have a GFCI, you don't even know if it's functional or not.

[bcylau]

Calculating the exact resistance is difficult mainly to the different composition at cross sections of the body. But the range is easy to calculate. Your body is mostly water full of electrolytes, fat is not really that conductive, and skin is basically an insulator. So, your finger is likely to have the highest resistance while your torso has to lowest. This mean, at any given voltage, your torso will experience higher current that your finger. At the basic level, you are looking at megaohms for dry resistance vs kiloohms for wet resistance, which is more than significant.

For biomedical designs, electrical systems are normally designed to be 30volts or below, as this is probably the first "safe" voltage for a human to experience. Most US navy ships have instrument panels that operate at 28v

Also, you are far more likely to die from asphyxiation because of muscle spasms at lower voltages at 110v than cardiac arrest, in the cases of lighting or power lines.