You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: A Day With a Lineman #21 Not Again!!!
I really enjoyed the "inside" look at the substation. Thanks for the detailed photos and the time it took to put the story together. That HV stuff can be a real mess when current goes somewhere it was not intended to be!
You are very welcome 👍🏻 Many underestimate the true “power” of electrical current. 1/1000 of an amp of current can put a persons heart into defibrillation or death. A typical vacuum draws 5 amps 😳😳
When in high school a group of students visited Clemson University orientation and they showed us a big Tesla coil and demonstrated it with a suspended florescent tube. Impressive noise and discharge spark, too! They asked for a volunteer to hold the three foot tube and I did, based on my past interest in Tesla and the coil. It was a memorable moment to have ten megavolts creating a halo around me and having volunteered increased my creds considerably with my buds in the group. Fortunately, the current was about a microvolt and it stayed on the surface. 14KV at 60 cps? TOAST! I have a lot of respect for you guys who work with the real stuff.
I’ve been wanting really bad to start making a small Tesla coil but I just have never gotten around to it.
A fluorescent lightbulb will also light up when you get about 20 feet away from a 230,000 volt power line. One of our instructors at the lineman college showed us. Crazy!!
BTW, current was a microamp, not volt. Duhh. I was stationed at an Air Force station in Alaska where we had long range search radar inside a geodesic radome. The rotating antennas put out 12 megawatt pulsed at 10 microseconds. During Christmas, we put fluorescent tubes in the inside of the radome in the form of a giant cross and every time the sweep passed the lights they glowed VERY brightly and could be seen from the airstrip bout 8 miles away. It was a good reminder that the energy would do the same thing to your brain if you forgot the safety regs! The HV stuff is not a toy to play with, for certain.