tipex

haha

Nutek

tipex

wow better you than me.

Markie

I REALLY hope that was a GFCI-protected circuit! Or just a staged photo. Otherwise, a couple people could be winning the Darwin Award

Nutek

I'm assuming it's fake, but it makes me laugh either way.

Markie

Indeed! I trust GFCI's more than the UK government does (yay for not being able to use a hairdryer in the bathroom ), but not quite enough to try THAT.

steveq

They wouldn't be in any danger. Clean Water is pretty insulating. If they got out there might be enough conductance to be a hazard...

steveq

You CAN use a conventional socket in a bathroom. It just needs to be a bathroom rather bigger than the convention in the UK.

mwdake

It is not the water that conducts electricity but the stuff in it like salts etc or the salts on your skin.

I used to live in a city that if you took regular tap water and hooked up battery and lamp and placed the leads in the water it would not conduct and light the lamp.

Markie

Correct, but salt water makes a great conductor, and we are talking a backyard pool with sweat, etc.

Regardless, NO ONE would call this a bright idea, so let's all just get a laugh from it and move on

As for a conventional socket in a UK bathroom - how? Every one I've ever seen is transformer-isolated low current. Which strikes me as stupid, to be honest - it's no safer than a GFCI yet is very limiting in usefulness. But UK electrical code is very strict - you can't even have a light switch in a bathroom. It has to either be in the ceiling on a pull cord or outside the bathroom where your little cousins turn it on and off while you're in the shower (okay, that probably just happens to me).

Steerpike

But look at the important features you get - you should not run a power cable without all these features

1. Solid Perfect Surface Copper Plus conductors
   Reduce strand interaction distortion for clear signal transfer.
2. Noise dissipation system
   Helps reduce the amount of RF and EMI noise on the shield.
3. 72V DBS
   Minimizes insulation material interaction for reduced distortion

Unbelievable!

lizzyq

....by being more than three metres from the safety protection zones around the sink, shower and tub. Like I said though, how many UK bathrooms are big enough?

It's safer, because it isolates you from earth, so it's better than a gfci which would still pass many mA for a few milliseconds in the event of a fault.

There are arguments that the IEE has overegged the regs, particularly with pex plumbing rather changing the arguments.

Markie

1. I didn't know that, I've sure never seen one. Never seen one in the US though either. A bathroom with any point three metres from the sink and shower/tub? Never seen one that big anywhere in my life.

2. Well, I think you mean it isolates you from the power source, isolation from the earth isn't exactly what's needed. But yeah, that's the argument. Reality is - GFCI's are very very safe and and transformer isolated sockets are very very safe. To get caught up in "well, is transformer isolation a wee bit safer?" The answer is - it may be, a tiny bit. But at the expense of massive inconvenience. No electricity at all would be far safer, but we pay the price for the convenience electricity brings us.

steveq

Isolation from earth means that since the source floats, you can't get a shock from it to ground. You can still get a shock rail to rail, even with an isolating transformer - and a GFCI wouldn't save you from a shock either.

Sorry, that last post shouldn't have been from my wife ;-)

Markie

Ah, it's late at night and I wasn't thinking clearly. And I thought that the point of an isolating transformer (the main safety benefit) was that it WOULD protect you from a severe rail to rail shock while a GFCI theoretically wouldn't always (I say theoretically, because the human body will basically always leak SOME current to earth, and it takes almost nothing to trip the GFCI).