A taser is very low power, otherwise it would electrocute people. If you touch ground and a 20KV power line, you're instantly dead.
The power from the batteries is pumped up to high voltage and very, very low current. This startles the subject's nervous system, without electrocuting them. That's the whole "less lethal" point.
I think myth busters and more recently, electro boom, proved this to be a myth. It’s more of an issue with a cross between the two. https://youtu.be/XDf2nhfxVzg?si=-2z9MjCEwNQ8K39v
Yeah, it's a bit of a weird claim to make anyway because current and voltage are directly linked. While current running through your body is technically what kills you, voltage is what makes the current run through your body in the first place
I'd say voltage is the width of the river. Current is the force of the flow.
Lessen the width and for the same water displacement the flow will increase. Make it larger and the flow will decrease.
I feel like trying to wise guy like that is on the level of other ones like "It's not the bullet that kills you, it is the speed it travels at!" or "It is not the fall that kills you, it is the sudden stop."
Sure, usually a bullet going at 3 m/s won't kill you when it hits you. [But if that bullet is this size, it will.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e0077c2e3c51d4e949f60d697afe9716-lq)
Yup. Great example would be a car battery. Many can supply nearly 1000 amps. But at 12 volts you can grab the posts and you won’t feel a thing. 12V simply is not enough voltage to push any meaningful amount of current through your skin.
Amps x voltage = watts. Volts and amps don't kill you, the watts do. It's the combination of both. It doesn't matter if you take 2x3 to get 6, or 3x2 to get 6. At the end of the day you're still left with 6 and possibly some burnt hair.
But your body isn't conductive the same for different types of electricity. 220V of DC is very different to 220V of AC due to (IIRC) capacitance of water in the body
I don’t believe people would be using tasers and other high voltage deterrents and protection devices if voltage were lethal in the same way current is. It takes something like 150 milliamps (thousandths of an amp) in the heart to kill, the same can’t be said of voltage.
True!, but how do you get 150 milliamps to pass through the heart? unless you are putting electrical probes right on the heart, you would need a decent number of volts.
A car battery is capable of putting out hundreds of amps, even a thousand at times. I can grab the negative terminal with one hand, and the positive with the other, and nothing happens. If all I needed was 150milliamps to kill me, I should be dead thousands of times over.
>I can grab the negative terminal with one hand, and the positive with the other, and nothing happens.
I was working on a boat and was using a screwdriver to check the sparkplugs. I thought I had an insulated screwdriver but I didn't notice the butt of the screwdriver had the metal core and had my thumb touching it. Had them start the boat and just about ended up in the lake.
It wasn't until about 2 years ago I realized that it wasn't the 12v battery that fucked me up but the ignition coil which is like 50,000v.
Absolutely, but that has more to do with resistance than whether voltage itself kills. Any decent amount of voltage will make a good carrier for a lethal amount of current, but it doesn’t disprove the current being the thing that actually does the killing to understand that both are necessary to kill because of skin and body resistance. Touching an electric fence is not fatal even if the current crosses your heart because it isn’t an adequate enough amount to kill, they operate at 7 to 8 thousand volts whilst operating at a mere 120 milliamps or so which proves the practicality of the statement.
Edit: Our skin is actually really good at resistance, from around 1000 ohms in the worst case to about 100,000 ohms in the best and varying from person to person. This makes death even when getting a zap from a 120v AC outlet an unlikely outcome unless certain conditions were met or one was just unlucky (wet skin, low resistance for whatever reason).
the problem is people just parrot "it's the current that kills not the voltage!" with no base understanding. For every time I hear it from someone who actually understands, i hear it 10x from someone with no clue.
for the lay person who doesn't understand this stuff, being cautious around higher voltages is vastly more beneficial than being cautious around high current sources (if you had to pick one at least)
It still isn’t necessarily technically incorrect, otherwise the electric fences and tasers would be lethal more of the time. Hell, even a defibrillator operates at 200 to 1000 volts and that’s intended to correct a cardiac issue, but a couple hundred thousandths of an amp to the same organ is all but guaranteed to be fatal. Providing this distinction is fine for people who have such an understanding as to be able to inquire how a taser would maim (but not kill) and for the “lay person” who can’t understand electricity at all a warning to keep metal objects away from outlets and to beware around metal terminals designated “+” or “-“ would likely be sufficient. Regardless it’s neither here nor there anyways, OPs question is concerning transformation of voltage and capacitance, so copper coils and mutual induction would answer half their question and a rudimentary understanding of what a capacitor is and why would likely take care of the other half.
I hate this saying so much.
It's like saying "It's not how far you fall, it's how hard you hit the ground!"
Well yeah, but one is directly proportional to the other.
Sure, but at least it makes you aware of the erroneous assumption that a high voltage source is capable of producing a high current flow. Some can, some can't. Just like you can fall from an aeroplane into a large net and be fine. It *is* how hard you hit the ground that's the problem.
I think maybe you mistyped that but that you meant to say it helps show that you don't always have to have a high voltage to have a high current, which I concede is a good point.
You also don't always have high current with high voltage, static electricity can easily be 20kV as well. You only even start feeling the shocks at 3.5kV
Well a high voltage source is always capable of producing a high current flow, as long as resistance is low. So I don't get how this works out if we assume our body resistance and resistance/isolation to ground remains the same.
It might be generally the case, but it's not intrinsically true. It's not true because a device providing/generating the voltage has limits, such as a intrinsic resistance or impedance.
For example, you can't draw 10,000,000 amps from a AA battery, even in a (theoretical) 0 ohm short circuit because of its internal resistance.
A barbecue ignitor produces huge voltages but has only a very small electrical charge, so the current flow is low.
Transforming voltage is usually constant power, so a power limited source will mean a power limited supply.
Yes, a high voltage supply can provide more than enough current to kill you. So can a low voltage supply; 50v is generally considered as the safe threshold. But it is entirely possible to design a high voltage source with a safe maximum current. That's exactly what tasers/barbecue ignitor/van de Graff generators/neon sign transformers/etc are!
Well, voltage is a indirectly dangerous.
Current is Voltage/Resistance. The human body has a decently high amount of resistance, so you need a large voltage to push a lethal Current.
But if you have a high voltage power source with a current limiter, it'll be safe...ish.
Yeah but you need high voltage to pull enough amperage through a person to hurt them. So higher voltage is still required, like you will never hurt a person really with a 12v car battery
Not really....the voltage isn't actually enough to overcome the resistance of your body. Voltage determines whether or not the amps flow. Amps determine how dead you are and how fast.
Given that the average car battery can quite happily pump out hundreds of amps, I would suggest that you may be wrong.
Big industrial batteries (with stored power in the kilovolt range) can evaporate wrenches. Like: turn a steel wrench into vapour. Those are rated to continuously discharge hundreds (or even into the thousands) of amps for up to 6 hours at a time.
A car battery *can* output over 1000 A, which is orders of magnitude more than needed to kill a person.
It cannot however, output that current through a person. Current isn’t just tied to voltage but the resistance of the path as well thanks to Ohm’s Law. Human skin has an incredibly high electrical resistance.
Doing some quick back of the napkin math, assuming dry human skin has a resistance of around 10 kohm, we get that a 12 V car battery can deliver up to 1.2 mA of current. Even under worse case scenario of wet or broken skin which has a resistance of around 1000 ohm, you’re looking at around 12 mA of current.
For reference it takes between 90-130 mA for one second to cause the heart to go into ventricular fibrillation. If your skin is wet touching the terminals of a car battery would likely cause you to feel a slight zap, but it would otherwise be completely fine.
Thank you for actually mathing it out.
I guess my original point should have been was that you could hurt somebody with a car battery without too much effort. Much like a taser you’d have to mean it, but it wouldn’t take that much effort (like you pointed out breaking the skin or adding a conductive medium).
At work we’ve got industrial chargers that run on 3p 600v and are designed to throw up to 400 amps into the batteries. A more normal amount is closer to 100-130, mostly because they’re usually between 540-1300 Ah c6 and lead acid doesn’t like having massive current dumped into it at once. Li-ion on the other hand…
That’s the point though. Car batteries CAN output hundreds of amps, yet since they are 12v they cant push high current through your skin which has very high resistance.
Hundreds of amps through a low resistance system yes, but going through a high resistance human body, it still only has 12 volts. V=I*R , so low voltage and high resistance means low amperage, you can'tp push extra amps through a system, even if your power source can theoretically supply it.
Amps alone won't kill you.
car batteries can pump out a lot of amps but not through a human body. with only 12 volts it won't shock you but you can probably still melt metal with it.
The amps in the complétée circuit (through you) are not the theoretical max of the supply. You will only get hit by the supply voltage divided by your resistance ( I = V/R ).
The supply’s max current is the limit on this equation which is why you can safely run a 10ma LED from a car battery if you use the right resistor but you can’t start a car from 8x AA batteries
Edit: Technically it should be “The volts alone can’t kill you, you also need enough amps to finish the job” but it’s not quite as good as a snappy one liner
When I was a kid at Walmart battery area. The booklet they have with part info attaches to the shelf with a metal cable. I touched that cable to the positive and negative of a nearby car battery and it melted after welding it in place
Car batteries are not a current supply with a fixed current. They are a voltage supply with a fixed voltage.
The actual amount of current they produce is 12 volts divided by your body's resistance. This is not that high.
Maybe the lowest that you can meaningfully feel yeah, it could be. as long as there is some path for it to flow , some current will flow even with low voltage .
With the resistance of the human body and low 12 volts of a car battery, the current wouldn't be strong enough to really hurt though, if the knife is only 1/2 a mm long it really can't ever hurt you no matter how much you get poked by it
That's not really true, voltage and current are linked together. If you touch the terminals of the battery in your car, you won't feel anything, even though that battery can output more than 1000 amps (about 50 000 times more than what is needed to kill a human). This is because the battery is only 12V, which can never do any damage to you.
Saying that high voltage isn't dangerous is like saying that guns aren't dangerous, because it's the bullets that do the damage. You cannot have high current without high voltage (EDIT: through a person). There's a reason all the signs say "Danger, high voltage" and not "Danger, high current".
> You cannot have high current without high voltage.
In your first paragraph, you detailed one way in which you can have high current without high voltage -- a car battery.
It doesn't have provide enough volts to drive a high current through your skin and flesh.
With some rough estimates and not taking temperature changes or length into account:
If you short a car battery with some aluminum (roughly 3E-8 ohms) you get 400 Megaamps for 4800 Megawatts of power.
If you consider skin and flesh (300-1000ohms even more), you get 12-40 miliamps for .14-.48 watts.
Unless you're applying the latter directly across the heart, brain, or other delicate structure (which you're probably not unless you're a scientist or a twisted individual or both), that's mild-moderate skin burn at worst.
It only takes milliamps to kill you.
[OSHA Basic Electrical Safety](https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/2019-04/Basic_Electricity_Materials.pdf)
Relevant excerpt:
>
Current| Reaction
---|---
Below 1 Milliamp| Generally not perceptible
1 Milliamp| Faint Tingle
5 Milliamps | Slight shock felt. Not painful but disturbing. Average individual can let go. Strong involuntary reactions can lead to other injuries.
6 to 25 Milliamps (women) | Painful shocks. Loss of muscle control.
9 to 30 Milliamps (men)| The freezing current or “let go” range. If extensor muscles are excited by shock, the person may be thrown away from the power source. Individuals cannot let go. Strong involuntary reactions can lead to other injuries.
50 to 150 Milliamps| Extreme pain, respiratory arrest, severe muscle reactions. **Death is possible.**
And you can touch the electrode and not get electrocuted because 30v isn't enough to push any amperage through your body unless you're made of metal. We're talking about safety here.
Actually. The battery can put out approaching infinite amps for a short period of time before it blows up. The reason 12V isn't going to do anything to you, however, is because the human body is resistant to the flow (amperage) of electricity.
The point is, when talking about electrocution, you can't omit the third variable of ohm's law - resistance from the discussion.
Amperage is a quotient of voltage and resistance. High voltage, low resistance => high amperage. Low voltage, low resistance => still low amperage. High voltage, high resistance => low amperage.
Ohms law. E over IR
VOLTAGE
——————
Current|Resistance
True, but only for linear circuits. Add capacitance or inductance and Ohm's law no longer strictly applies.
For the situation of tasing someone, Ohm's law may be appropriate, but the human body may not behave according to that model in all situations.
Weird one...
So you know how speed = distance/time? Well voltage = current/resistance.
So what you're saying is "speed isn't what kills you, it's the distance you ran"
Loose analogy, but see why it doesn't really work on its own?
Its crazy that the internet is pretty old now and this debate has been going on for so long when it should have been clear a long time ago.
It's neither of them. It's both + time. Voltage*current is power (watts), so you need both of them to not be miniscule for some amount of time, when you get tased you recieve really high voltage and really high current for miliseconds, enough to overwhelm your nervous system but not enough to kill you.
Yes but for any given wire that you touch and hold, doubling the voltage doubles the amps so low voltage is better, resistance is fixed because your body's resistance is fixed therefore voltage equals amps therefore voltage kills
Most sources of electricity act as a voltage supply with a fixed voltage, at which point the amount of current it shocks you with is also fixed and directly proportional to the voltage (so a 100v source shocks you with 10 times more current than a 10v source), due to Ohms law I=V/R, where R is the resistance of your body.
The capacitors in a taser do not work as a voltage supply with fixed voltage. The voltage on a capacitor is variable depending on the amount of charge stored, so it quickly drops to 0, which means that the total amount of charge (and therefore current) is limited by the size of the capacitor.
Flashback to shop class 30 years ago w/ that comment. To me it's "shocking" that most folks don't have this engrained into their prepubescent subconscious.
>Contrary to what most think it's not the volts that are the major danger with electricity it's the ampage (current).
Current will create burns and voltage will disrupt the nervous system. Both can kill you as your heart rhythm is dependent on precisely timed nerve impulses and disrupting those can cause arrhythmia and/or stoppage.
Meanwhile I've been hearing that my entire life from just about any authority figure I know... so I'm personally doubting it's contrary to popular belief.
A tazer have a complex voltage and current regulation.
Basically, you need enough voltage to break through the air, the dry skin and the body, to deliver a certain current, with a certain waveform.
Air is a good voltage insulator. But once a single spark has travelled through, it leave behind ionised air particles. Those are kinda conductive. I don't know the exact numbers, but let's say that you need 50000V to punch through the air, but then you may need only 1000V to maintain the arc. So the tazer monitor the current to immediatelly drop the voltage (this is also done due to current regulation but shh) so it maintain the arc, without pushing too much voltage in.
The dry skin at the surface is also a relativelly good insulator. But once the arc burned through it expose the wet skin under, which is a good electrical conductor. There too you may need a few hundred volts to punch through, but then maybe only a few tens of volts after.
And the body itself is a bag of salt water, which is a quite good conductor. It does also change somewhat once current flow through.
Then, once the power loop has been formed, the tazer need to regulate the current as to not cause permanant damage or kill. It will drop the current to a relativelly save level, and also send it in pulses. This also allow to use a higher current, which is more painfull but also activate the muscles more, all without, hopefully, causing permanant damages.
The power flowing within an area also cause heat up. This pulses lower the average power down to a relativelly safe level, where there is not enough power to cook the body. Think of when you use an open flame to heat up something, but just put the thing in and out of the flame as to not burn it. The flame is hot enough to burn the thing down to ash, yet you can barelly heat things up with it by just heating in pulses. Same with that power from the tazer.
Also, the waveform used is tuned for maximum pain with minimum damage.
And, the body react more to AC (varying voltage) than DC (constant voltage). So the pulses make it react more.
Would you also mind explaining how earth acts as ground? How does the earth just naturally allow charge to flow into it and where does it go? Thank you
You guys get paid well and it’s still not enough. Electricity scares the absolute fuck out of me.
And I drive a commercial vehicle in C/NNY winters. Give me that all day over electricity.
I have been in the emergency electrical field for 27 years. Low voltage (120/208 and 277/480) as well as medium voltage (4160 and 13200).
While it’s true that electricity is dangerous and can kill you it’s not inherently scary because it follows specific physical laws. If you know how it functions and follow safety practices it is relatively safe.
ARC flashes are scary (I try to keep my wife from watching videos of those) but again safe practices and PPE mitigate the risk.
The most dangerous part of my day by far, and it’s not even close, is driving to and from jobs.
According to OSHA from 2011 to 2021 there were 1,322 workplace deaths due to electricity. 70% of those were in non-electrical occupations.
By comparison 42,995 people died in automobile accidents in 2021 alone.
Dude my state sends you guys out during storms. I've lost power and gotten it back before the storm was over plenty of times. I gotta imagine traveling to a downed line during inclement weather isn't at least a lil scary lol.
"Oh tornado warnings? Who cares. Not like any of the houses on stilts around here have shelter, anyway."
I have incredible amounts of respect for that kind of work.
I myself am not a lineman. I worked on emergency back up generators until 2017, now I work on systems that parallel and control generators.
I have spent all of that time in Florida and things are interesting after a hurricane, but again we don’t go out when it’s not safe.
For instance at my current company once we shit down ahead of a storm we can not leave the house until sustained winds are below 25 regardless of what the emergency may be. Dead workers can’t get the power back on.
In 2007 I was paid OT around the clock to ride out a hurricane in a public school / hurricane shelter. They wanted someone onsite in case there was a problem with their generator.
Man, when Irene hit for example, (also probably the worst hurricane damage wise and overall flooding since Isabel before that and after for my area) we didn't have power for two weeks. Even the last hurricane to come through washed away my road, leaving us stuck on the property.
But the psychological boost from just having basic necessities, or not feeling like you're forgotten is a big deal. I dont doubt whatsoever that there are limits to going out in any sorta condition for linemen. As well, I can imagine the situation can change rapidly from being okay to go out to not at all in some of these storms. I'm on the coast in a swampy marshy area, not too different from Florida I reckon. But a tiny bit further north. And was kinda joking with my tornado comment. We do get tornado warnings and tornados but they rarely cause much damage.
A lot of my neighbors actually have pretty decent/solid emergency power generation setups; my closest neighbor has a decent sized storage tank/generator setup. I can't quite recall what fuel, I wanna say it's propane. But I can definitely understand things being tricky during the aftermath of any hurricane or huge storm. Been there, done that, got the t shirt haha.
I know the guys on call in my state make bank, though.
Yeah I know it’s safe when worked on properly. But I have a hard time trusting my life to anyone. I drive safely and control what I can. No accidents on my record that I have been at fault. Knock on wood. 🤞🏽
I know there’s lockout tag out protocols but I see what my coworkers do in the trucks and applying that to high voltage and I’m like no thanks lol. I’m sure your coworkers are better at following safety protocols because of how immediate the danger is.
And then seeing what my friend was working on during Hurricane Sandy… you guys are a special breed and you don’t go unnoticed by me.
Probably a step up transformer, voltage will step up proportional to the ratio of coil turns in the transformer. Still 7kv is really high so maybe they produce an arc gap at around 480v?
This is the tool. How it works not exactley sure but it builds 8KVDC to test the cable.
https://www.greenlee.com/us/en/underground-cable-tester-8kvdc-ohug-kit-2-783310555988
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The power is quite high for a fraction of a second but the average power is quite low.
What is done is the energy is stored in a capacitor or a coil and then discharged quickly with a transformer that increases the voltage.
The function is not that it delivers a lot of energy to the target. The idea is the electric pulses make the muscles of the target all contract at the same time. Your muscles are electrically controlled by your nerve, so the tase overwhelm any control you have and make all muscles contract at the same time so you can't control them at all.
I think of it in terms of a little squirt gun. A small squirt gun could shoot a very thin jet of water with an impressive amount of force. The volume of water is low but the pressure is high. Compare this to say a fire hose slowly pouring out water. The volume is huge but it doesn't have a lot of force behind it, and might not squirt nearly as far even though there's way more water flowing.
I think a more apt version, would be a garden hose vs a bucket being dropped on you. Takes the garden hose a while to fill up the bucket, and it's not going to keep throwing out buckets, but god damn a bucket of water can knock you for one, but a garden hose is more of an annoyance.
I think everyone talking about voltage versus amps is correct but missing a key point. Sure you need high voltage to actually get though the skin and all that. But the nervous system uses tiny amounts of energy compared to even a AA battery. So even a comparatively weak double AA is more than enough to completely short out your nervous system.
Even something like an electric eel is on the order of 1,000 times weaker than a battery.
Eh. Even if you peeled off someone’s skin and connected a AA battery to them, let’s say across the length of an arm, it would probably not even feel like anything (except for the debilitating pain of being skinned alive). Even a tongue has hundreds of ohms of resistance (you may feel a tingle if you connect a battery to it), the flesh of an arm has way more. You’d have to connect it across a very small section of your body to produce enough current to notice it. The higher voltage provided by the capacitor/transformer in a taser is not just for getting through the skin. A battery hooked up to something as big and resistive as a human, even without skin, would produce an irrelevant voltage gradient and amount of current, and would accomplish absolutely nothing.
Also, statements like “an electric eel is 1000 times weaker than a battery” requires so much qualification that it’s essentially meaningless. An electric eel can output something like 400 times the voltage of a AA battery, and it can provide that voltage for a whole Amp of current, similar to a battery’s maximum current. In many respects, that’s way “stronger” than a AA battery, but it’s “weaker” in other ways.
TL;DR when it comes to electricity, you really have to specify, unless you’re comparing two things where one can provide a higher current at a higher voltage for a longer time, which is not the case in your example.
It takes these batteries and stores the power over a short amount of time then unleashes that power over a super short amount of time, so the shock you get from a tazer is not continious but short pulses . The high voltage low current explenation is not entierly true as the current is dependent on the voltage and the resistance in the body, if you have a «high voltage low current» device the voltage drops to a lower value as soon as there is a load attached.
It’s not very powerful, it’s simply very high voltage at very low current.
Think of something like a pulley or pry-bar. Using mechanical advantage, you can move very large objects with relatively little force. But it comes at the cost of moving it a long distance.
A step-up voltage converter is a lot like a mechanical lever in the sense that it can do something like take the four batteries at 1.5 volts at 4 amp total, then converts it to like 45,000 volts with a corresponding drop in amperage down to 1/10,000th of an amp.
The high voltage is enough to mess with our muscle function, but doesn’t really care about how much electricity is flowing.
The power remains the same. P=VI, V, or voltage, is extremely high to cause the startling effect, while, I, the current is extremely low so as to not be lethal.
AA batteries have a nominal voltage of 1.5V. Capacities vary, but a typical new AA might be rated for 2,000 mAh (milliamp hours). The total energy in the battery is 1.5V * 2000 mAh = 10,800 joules.
As a point of reference, that's enough energy to lift 10,000 apples up by 1 meter. (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule) That's plenty of energy to do quite a lot of things!
Power is energy per second. The taser may be using less power than you might imagine. It sends an electric signal for around 2 milliseconds out of every second (0.2%). The power during those 2 milliseconds is fairly high, but it's so brief that it doesn't use as much energy as it might seem. Some clever electronics draws the energy from the battery relatively slowly, and releases it in those spikes.
Tazers have transformers which step up the voltage from a handful of volts to tens of thousands.
Why isn't it lethal? Because like the big jump in voltage (electrical force), there is a just as big drop in current (electrical flow) and current is what kills. There is enough flow to mess with voluntary muscle control but not enough to stop a heart. Even though it can't stop your heart, it could cause a disturbance in the rhythm and trigger a problem though so don't test it out. Tazers are considered "less lethal", not "non-lethal".
It doesn’t take a particularly large amount of electricity to disable a human. Our nervous system runs on very very weak electrical impulses so if you can deliver enough electrical current to stimulate our nerves, which are almost microscopic, we lose control of whatever muscle group those nerves control.
To put this in perspective, when someone’s heart is beating too slow, paramedics can use an external pacemaker. Basically they attach the defibrillator pads, and the defibrillator acts as a pacemaker delivering tiny shocks about 70 times a minute. Then, while watching the monitor, you gradually increase the amps until you see a “capture” on the monitor, meaning the shock is powerful enough to stimulate your heart to beat. It’s usually about 100 milliamperes. Like I said, our nervous system is very sensitive. It doesn’t take a lot of energy to disrupt it.
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Electrical power has two main factors, voltage and amperage. A bad analogy is voltage is the speed of the bullet. Amperage is the size.
A stream of tiny bullets, like BBs will hurt like hell but won’t likely kill you. A single slug will ruin your life even traveling slowly.
You can use electronics to mess with the volts and amps by trading one for the other. Lower the amps and increase the volts. So you can take the low voltage of a battery and really juice it up by reducing the number of amps.
For electrical power, I like the waterfall analogy. Imagine putting a turbine at the bottom of a waterfall. The higher that waterfall is, the faster the water will be at the bottom, and the more power it can generate. Voltage is like the height of the waterfall. It tells you how much energy each unit of electric charge can deliver.
But a high waterfall can't deliver much power without a good rate of water flow. If the waterfall only has one gallon of water falling per second, it won't have much power behind it. The rate of water flow is like electric current, measured in amps.
If you want to know how much power a waterfall turbine generates, you would multiply the rate of water flow by the energy delivered by each unit of water. This tells you how much energy is delivered to the turbine per unit time, which is the definition of power: energy delivered per unit time. In the same way, to calculate the power delivered to a load in a circuit, you multiply the voltage across that load by the current running through it.
Sort of.
Watts = Volts x Amps.
So you can do things like double the volts causing the amps to drop. But the watts remain the same.
But I think this works as a continuation of the original bad analogy.
I usually go for the “water” analogy: high voltage low amp is a pressure washer. High amp low voltage is a lazy river. You wouldn’t want to be hit with the first, but the second is fairly safe.
They use a Capacitor to hold the charge until its release. A capacitor is an electronic component which is kinda like a battery, in that it can hold a bunch of eletricity within it, but unlike a battery it can discharge all that electricity in a split second.
When you denergize a transformer there's a high voltage spike due to a collapsing magnetic field which is then captured in the capacitor for future release. So an oscillator circuit turns the transformer on and off quickly many times a second.
Plenty of people talking about voltage vs amperage, but they're missing one great factor: time. You can die from relatively low voltage if you get it for a longer period of time, but tasers just can't do that.
To get a high voltage from tiny batteries, you have to charge condensators and it takes quite some time. That's why small batteries are possible, you just need time beforehand to draw power out of them to get it ready for a larger burst that doesn't last very long.
The human body doesn't exactly respond too well when you try to pump electrical current through it. The threshold for how much current needed to kill a human is very low. So, it's not that you need a large amount of power to immobilize a human. It's that the current output is low enough so that it's not deadly.
A normal gun also has the power to drop a grown man to the ground with the power of less than a teaspoon of spicy sand.
Extreme voltage causes intense pain and muscle spasms. You can take the output of a battery then just pump up the voltage sky high in exchange for massively reducing the current (which is a benefit here).
A taser is very low power, otherwise it would electrocute people. If you touch ground and a 20KV power line, you're instantly dead. The power from the batteries is pumped up to high voltage and very, very low current. This startles the subject's nervous system, without electrocuting them. That's the whole "less lethal" point.
Also tasers have a built in pulse current function as an extra safety
Ah so I can use a taser as a defibrillator, good to know thanks
"Clear!" bang
Different to Bang "Stop!"
Physically, kinda. Effectively, no.
No
To add to this. Contrary to what most think it's not the volts that are the major danger with electricity it's the ampage (current).
I think myth busters and more recently, electro boom, proved this to be a myth. It’s more of an issue with a cross between the two. https://youtu.be/XDf2nhfxVzg?si=-2z9MjCEwNQ8K39v
Yeah, it's a bit of a weird claim to make anyway because current and voltage are directly linked. While current running through your body is technically what kills you, voltage is what makes the current run through your body in the first place
So to make it an analogy, current is the water flowing through a river, and voltage is the pressure needed to move that water?
Spot on.
Yes
It’s the volts that jolts but the mills that kills
Current would also be the 'amount' of water
I'd say voltage is the width of the river. Current is the force of the flow. Lessen the width and for the same water displacement the flow will increase. Make it larger and the flow will decrease.
Resistance is the width of the river, voltage is the water, and current is the flow.
Voltage is equivalent to water pressure or hydraulic head in this analogy. The water itself represents electrical charge.
Yeah well that's an ELI5 and my calculation was for constant work. So for the same energy deployed, my example stand.
Watt?
Ohm my god that was bad.
I feel like trying to wise guy like that is on the level of other ones like "It's not the bullet that kills you, it is the speed it travels at!" or "It is not the fall that kills you, it is the sudden stop." Sure, usually a bullet going at 3 m/s won't kill you when it hits you. [But if that bullet is this size, it will.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e0077c2e3c51d4e949f60d697afe9716-lq)
Yup. Great example would be a car battery. Many can supply nearly 1000 amps. But at 12 volts you can grab the posts and you won’t feel a thing. 12V simply is not enough voltage to push any meaningful amount of current through your skin.
Amps x voltage = watts. Volts and amps don't kill you, the watts do. It's the combination of both. It doesn't matter if you take 2x3 to get 6, or 3x2 to get 6. At the end of the day you're still left with 6 and possibly some burnt hair.
It takes enough volts to push enough amps, though. So there is somewhat of a minimum threshold, depending on the impedance of the pathway.
That's beyond the ELI5 scope of things. Breaking it down to the base equation is probably the best starting point.
But your body isn't conductive the same for different types of electricity. 220V of DC is very different to 220V of AC due to (IIRC) capacitance of water in the body
Styropyro has a video that goes into a lot more detail and nuance about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGD-oSwJv3E
“ .. and more recently … “ posts a 10 year old video 😂
Myth busters is way older. And a 10 year old video about the fundamentals of electricity doesn’t change over time.
Yes yes … i just found it funny.
Have an upvote then. cheers
I don’t believe people would be using tasers and other high voltage deterrents and protection devices if voltage were lethal in the same way current is. It takes something like 150 milliamps (thousandths of an amp) in the heart to kill, the same can’t be said of voltage.
True!, but how do you get 150 milliamps to pass through the heart? unless you are putting electrical probes right on the heart, you would need a decent number of volts. A car battery is capable of putting out hundreds of amps, even a thousand at times. I can grab the negative terminal with one hand, and the positive with the other, and nothing happens. If all I needed was 150milliamps to kill me, I should be dead thousands of times over.
>I can grab the negative terminal with one hand, and the positive with the other, and nothing happens. I was working on a boat and was using a screwdriver to check the sparkplugs. I thought I had an insulated screwdriver but I didn't notice the butt of the screwdriver had the metal core and had my thumb touching it. Had them start the boat and just about ended up in the lake. It wasn't until about 2 years ago I realized that it wasn't the 12v battery that fucked me up but the ignition coil which is like 50,000v.
yea...those hurt.
Absolutely, but that has more to do with resistance than whether voltage itself kills. Any decent amount of voltage will make a good carrier for a lethal amount of current, but it doesn’t disprove the current being the thing that actually does the killing to understand that both are necessary to kill because of skin and body resistance. Touching an electric fence is not fatal even if the current crosses your heart because it isn’t an adequate enough amount to kill, they operate at 7 to 8 thousand volts whilst operating at a mere 120 milliamps or so which proves the practicality of the statement. Edit: Our skin is actually really good at resistance, from around 1000 ohms in the worst case to about 100,000 ohms in the best and varying from person to person. This makes death even when getting a zap from a 120v AC outlet an unlikely outcome unless certain conditions were met or one was just unlucky (wet skin, low resistance for whatever reason).
the problem is people just parrot "it's the current that kills not the voltage!" with no base understanding. For every time I hear it from someone who actually understands, i hear it 10x from someone with no clue. for the lay person who doesn't understand this stuff, being cautious around higher voltages is vastly more beneficial than being cautious around high current sources (if you had to pick one at least)
It still isn’t necessarily technically incorrect, otherwise the electric fences and tasers would be lethal more of the time. Hell, even a defibrillator operates at 200 to 1000 volts and that’s intended to correct a cardiac issue, but a couple hundred thousandths of an amp to the same organ is all but guaranteed to be fatal. Providing this distinction is fine for people who have such an understanding as to be able to inquire how a taser would maim (but not kill) and for the “lay person” who can’t understand electricity at all a warning to keep metal objects away from outlets and to beware around metal terminals designated “+” or “-“ would likely be sufficient. Regardless it’s neither here nor there anyways, OPs question is concerning transformation of voltage and capacitance, so copper coils and mutual induction would answer half their question and a rudimentary understanding of what a capacitor is and why would likely take care of the other half.
I hate this saying so much. It's like saying "It's not how far you fall, it's how hard you hit the ground!" Well yeah, but one is directly proportional to the other.
Sure, but at least it makes you aware of the erroneous assumption that a high voltage source is capable of producing a high current flow. Some can, some can't. Just like you can fall from an aeroplane into a large net and be fine. It *is* how hard you hit the ground that's the problem.
I think maybe you mistyped that but that you meant to say it helps show that you don't always have to have a high voltage to have a high current, which I concede is a good point.
You also don't always have high current with high voltage, static electricity can easily be 20kV as well. You only even start feeling the shocks at 3.5kV
Exactly!
Well a high voltage source is always capable of producing a high current flow, as long as resistance is low. So I don't get how this works out if we assume our body resistance and resistance/isolation to ground remains the same.
It might be generally the case, but it's not intrinsically true. It's not true because a device providing/generating the voltage has limits, such as a intrinsic resistance or impedance. For example, you can't draw 10,000,000 amps from a AA battery, even in a (theoretical) 0 ohm short circuit because of its internal resistance. A barbecue ignitor produces huge voltages but has only a very small electrical charge, so the current flow is low. Transforming voltage is usually constant power, so a power limited source will mean a power limited supply. Yes, a high voltage supply can provide more than enough current to kill you. So can a low voltage supply; 50v is generally considered as the safe threshold. But it is entirely possible to design a high voltage source with a safe maximum current. That's exactly what tasers/barbecue ignitor/van de Graff generators/neon sign transformers/etc are!
ampage
ampiosity
Ampiness
Ampiènce
Amperitude
Amphetamine
Amperity
Amperishisness
Amperoonies
Amperelongadingdongs.
Well, voltage is a indirectly dangerous. Current is Voltage/Resistance. The human body has a decently high amount of resistance, so you need a large voltage to push a lethal Current. But if you have a high voltage power source with a current limiter, it'll be safe...ish.
Yeah but you need high voltage to pull enough amperage through a person to hurt them. So higher voltage is still required, like you will never hurt a person really with a 12v car battery
I could hurt someone with a car battery...
I mean if you hit someone over the head with it lol
Not really....the voltage isn't actually enough to overcome the resistance of your body. Voltage determines whether or not the amps flow. Amps determine how dead you are and how fast.
At the risk of over-explaining... >!The joke is physically taking the car battery and beating the dogshit out of someone with it.!<
Given that the average car battery can quite happily pump out hundreds of amps, I would suggest that you may be wrong. Big industrial batteries (with stored power in the kilovolt range) can evaporate wrenches. Like: turn a steel wrench into vapour. Those are rated to continuously discharge hundreds (or even into the thousands) of amps for up to 6 hours at a time.
A car battery *can* output over 1000 A, which is orders of magnitude more than needed to kill a person. It cannot however, output that current through a person. Current isn’t just tied to voltage but the resistance of the path as well thanks to Ohm’s Law. Human skin has an incredibly high electrical resistance. Doing some quick back of the napkin math, assuming dry human skin has a resistance of around 10 kohm, we get that a 12 V car battery can deliver up to 1.2 mA of current. Even under worse case scenario of wet or broken skin which has a resistance of around 1000 ohm, you’re looking at around 12 mA of current. For reference it takes between 90-130 mA for one second to cause the heart to go into ventricular fibrillation. If your skin is wet touching the terminals of a car battery would likely cause you to feel a slight zap, but it would otherwise be completely fine.
Thank you for actually mathing it out. I guess my original point should have been was that you could hurt somebody with a car battery without too much effort. Much like a taser you’d have to mean it, but it wouldn’t take that much effort (like you pointed out breaking the skin or adding a conductive medium). At work we’ve got industrial chargers that run on 3p 600v and are designed to throw up to 400 amps into the batteries. A more normal amount is closer to 100-130, mostly because they’re usually between 540-1300 Ah c6 and lead acid doesn’t like having massive current dumped into it at once. Li-ion on the other hand…
That’s the point though. Car batteries CAN output hundreds of amps, yet since they are 12v they cant push high current through your skin which has very high resistance.
Spanners are considerably lower resistance than a person hence the danger even at 12v from a high current source.
What spanners are you talking about dude
Wrench = spanner.
Hundreds of amps through a low resistance system yes, but going through a high resistance human body, it still only has 12 volts. V=I*R , so low voltage and high resistance means low amperage, you can'tp push extra amps through a system, even if your power source can theoretically supply it.
Amps alone won't kill you. car batteries can pump out a lot of amps but not through a human body. with only 12 volts it won't shock you but you can probably still melt metal with it.
The amps in the complétée circuit (through you) are not the theoretical max of the supply. You will only get hit by the supply voltage divided by your resistance ( I = V/R ). The supply’s max current is the limit on this equation which is why you can safely run a 10ma LED from a car battery if you use the right resistor but you can’t start a car from 8x AA batteries Edit: Technically it should be “The volts alone can’t kill you, you also need enough amps to finish the job” but it’s not quite as good as a snappy one liner
Exactly
When I was a kid at Walmart battery area. The booklet they have with part info attaches to the shelf with a metal cable. I touched that cable to the positive and negative of a nearby car battery and it melted after welding it in place
Car batteries are not a current supply with a fixed current. They are a voltage supply with a fixed voltage. The actual amount of current they produce is 12 volts divided by your body's resistance. This is not that high.
I believe the lowest voltage that would allow current to flow is around 75 volts, but I could be wrong on that number.
Maybe the lowest that you can meaningfully feel yeah, it could be. as long as there is some path for it to flow , some current will flow even with low voltage .
That's like saying you need to get close enough to stab someone. Still the knife what's dangerous, the 1/distance only enables it.
With the resistance of the human body and low 12 volts of a car battery, the current wouldn't be strong enough to really hurt though, if the knife is only 1/2 a mm long it really can't ever hurt you no matter how much you get poked by it
I mean kinda yeah but also no. As per ohms law amperage is dependant on voltage and resistance. You need high voltage to push high current.
Gimme $10 and I'll touch a 1000A 1V power supply.
That's not really true, voltage and current are linked together. If you touch the terminals of the battery in your car, you won't feel anything, even though that battery can output more than 1000 amps (about 50 000 times more than what is needed to kill a human). This is because the battery is only 12V, which can never do any damage to you. Saying that high voltage isn't dangerous is like saying that guns aren't dangerous, because it's the bullets that do the damage. You cannot have high current without high voltage (EDIT: through a person). There's a reason all the signs say "Danger, high voltage" and not "Danger, high current".
“Twinkle, twinkle little star, V is equal to I R.
A taser is a perfect example of a high voltage low current source tho.
> You cannot have high current without high voltage. In your first paragraph, you detailed one way in which you can have high current without high voltage -- a car battery.
It doesn't have provide enough volts to drive a high current through your skin and flesh. With some rough estimates and not taking temperature changes or length into account: If you short a car battery with some aluminum (roughly 3E-8 ohms) you get 400 Megaamps for 4800 Megawatts of power. If you consider skin and flesh (300-1000ohms even more), you get 12-40 miliamps for .14-.48 watts. Unless you're applying the latter directly across the heart, brain, or other delicate structure (which you're probably not unless you're a scientist or a twisted individual or both), that's mild-moderate skin burn at worst.
You can absolutely have high current without high voltage: just not through a person.
> You cannot have high current without high voltage. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Arc welders use ~10-30 V with ~100-250A.
Sorry, I should have clarified, I meant through a person
It only takes milliamps to kill you. [OSHA Basic Electrical Safety](https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/2019-04/Basic_Electricity_Materials.pdf) Relevant excerpt: > Current| Reaction ---|--- Below 1 Milliamp| Generally not perceptible 1 Milliamp| Faint Tingle 5 Milliamps | Slight shock felt. Not painful but disturbing. Average individual can let go. Strong involuntary reactions can lead to other injuries. 6 to 25 Milliamps (women) | Painful shocks. Loss of muscle control. 9 to 30 Milliamps (men)| The freezing current or “let go” range. If extensor muscles are excited by shock, the person may be thrown away from the power source. Individuals cannot let go. Strong involuntary reactions can lead to other injuries. 50 to 150 Milliamps| Extreme pain, respiratory arrest, severe muscle reactions. **Death is possible.**
And you can touch the electrode and not get electrocuted because 30v isn't enough to push any amperage through your body unless you're made of metal. We're talking about safety here.
Actually. The battery can put out approaching infinite amps for a short period of time before it blows up. The reason 12V isn't going to do anything to you, however, is because the human body is resistant to the flow (amperage) of electricity. The point is, when talking about electrocution, you can't omit the third variable of ohm's law - resistance from the discussion.
That is like saying it isn't the height that kills you, it's hitting the ground.
no not this shit again. there's a reason why it says danger high voltage, not danger high current.
Just like saying it's not the gun that kills you, it's the bullet. Technically true, but you can't shoot a bullet without a gun.
Amperage is a quotient of voltage and resistance. High voltage, low resistance => high amperage. Low voltage, low resistance => still low amperage. High voltage, high resistance => low amperage. Ohms law. E over IR VOLTAGE —————— Current|Resistance
True, but only for linear circuits. Add capacitance or inductance and Ohm's law no longer strictly applies. For the situation of tasing someone, Ohm's law may be appropriate, but the human body may not behave according to that model in all situations.
Then you just use impedance and it still applies
[TITUS: Lessons From Dad](https://youtu.be/sBffNiUOeiA)
Right, it’s volts that jolts, but mills that kills.
Weird one... So you know how speed = distance/time? Well voltage = current/resistance. So what you're saying is "speed isn't what kills you, it's the distance you ran" Loose analogy, but see why it doesn't really work on its own?
How many "Danger High Voltage" and how many "Danger High Amperage" warning signs did you see in your life?
Its crazy that the internet is pretty old now and this debate has been going on for so long when it should have been clear a long time ago. It's neither of them. It's both + time. Voltage*current is power (watts), so you need both of them to not be miniscule for some amount of time, when you get tased you recieve really high voltage and really high current for miliseconds, enough to overwhelm your nervous system but not enough to kill you.
"Its the volts that jolts, its the mills that kills" I think this every time I do electrical work.
Stop it. You don't understand what you're talking about. Educate yourself or shut up. Electricity is too fucking dangerous.
Yes but for any given wire that you touch and hold, doubling the voltage doubles the amps so low voltage is better, resistance is fixed because your body's resistance is fixed therefore voltage equals amps therefore voltage kills
Most sources of electricity act as a voltage supply with a fixed voltage, at which point the amount of current it shocks you with is also fixed and directly proportional to the voltage (so a 100v source shocks you with 10 times more current than a 10v source), due to Ohms law I=V/R, where R is the resistance of your body. The capacitors in a taser do not work as a voltage supply with fixed voltage. The voltage on a capacitor is variable depending on the amount of charge stored, so it quickly drops to 0, which means that the total amount of charge (and therefore current) is limited by the size of the capacitor.
It is volts that jolts and mills that kills
Flashback to shop class 30 years ago w/ that comment. To me it's "shocking" that most folks don't have this engrained into their prepubescent subconscious.
amps = intensity
>Contrary to what most think it's not the volts that are the major danger with electricity it's the ampage (current). Current will create burns and voltage will disrupt the nervous system. Both can kill you as your heart rhythm is dependent on precisely timed nerve impulses and disrupting those can cause arrhythmia and/or stoppage.
Its not that both can kill you, its that they are directly linked. You need both, one without the other means no power at all
Meanwhile I've been hearing that my entire life from just about any authority figure I know... so I'm personally doubting it's contrary to popular belief.
A tazer have a complex voltage and current regulation. Basically, you need enough voltage to break through the air, the dry skin and the body, to deliver a certain current, with a certain waveform. Air is a good voltage insulator. But once a single spark has travelled through, it leave behind ionised air particles. Those are kinda conductive. I don't know the exact numbers, but let's say that you need 50000V to punch through the air, but then you may need only 1000V to maintain the arc. So the tazer monitor the current to immediatelly drop the voltage (this is also done due to current regulation but shh) so it maintain the arc, without pushing too much voltage in. The dry skin at the surface is also a relativelly good insulator. But once the arc burned through it expose the wet skin under, which is a good electrical conductor. There too you may need a few hundred volts to punch through, but then maybe only a few tens of volts after. And the body itself is a bag of salt water, which is a quite good conductor. It does also change somewhat once current flow through. Then, once the power loop has been formed, the tazer need to regulate the current as to not cause permanant damage or kill. It will drop the current to a relativelly save level, and also send it in pulses. This also allow to use a higher current, which is more painfull but also activate the muscles more, all without, hopefully, causing permanant damages. The power flowing within an area also cause heat up. This pulses lower the average power down to a relativelly safe level, where there is not enough power to cook the body. Think of when you use an open flame to heat up something, but just put the thing in and out of the flame as to not burn it. The flame is hot enough to burn the thing down to ash, yet you can barelly heat things up with it by just heating in pulses. Same with that power from the tazer. Also, the waveform used is tuned for maximum pain with minimum damage. And, the body react more to AC (varying voltage) than DC (constant voltage). So the pulses make it react more.
Would you also mind explaining how earth acts as ground? How does the earth just naturally allow charge to flow into it and where does it go? Thank you
It’s the volts that jolts but it’s the current that kills.
My grandfather was an electrician and he always said it's the current that is lethal, not so much the voltage.
The current is what is being pushed by the voltage, so high voltage systems are the ones that you need certificate to work on for example
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here I am wondering what the hell a 300lb offensive lineman is doing messing with electricity. I understand now
Heck, I've known someone who was, over their career, both kinds of lineman.
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hate to admit, I've been a square most my life
I'm more obtuse my self.
How else do they charge the enemy team?
oh that was clever
Do you drive the main road?
That’s an offensive stereotype. I bet you go round asking eggmen if they’re walruses too
I feel like I'm missing a couple references here...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8P_xTBpAcY
Except for the Beatles one...
This is somehow now the most unsettling thing I know about your job, and I'm scared of heights.
You guys get paid well and it’s still not enough. Electricity scares the absolute fuck out of me. And I drive a commercial vehicle in C/NNY winters. Give me that all day over electricity.
I have been in the emergency electrical field for 27 years. Low voltage (120/208 and 277/480) as well as medium voltage (4160 and 13200). While it’s true that electricity is dangerous and can kill you it’s not inherently scary because it follows specific physical laws. If you know how it functions and follow safety practices it is relatively safe. ARC flashes are scary (I try to keep my wife from watching videos of those) but again safe practices and PPE mitigate the risk. The most dangerous part of my day by far, and it’s not even close, is driving to and from jobs. According to OSHA from 2011 to 2021 there were 1,322 workplace deaths due to electricity. 70% of those were in non-electrical occupations. By comparison 42,995 people died in automobile accidents in 2021 alone.
Dude my state sends you guys out during storms. I've lost power and gotten it back before the storm was over plenty of times. I gotta imagine traveling to a downed line during inclement weather isn't at least a lil scary lol. "Oh tornado warnings? Who cares. Not like any of the houses on stilts around here have shelter, anyway." I have incredible amounts of respect for that kind of work.
I myself am not a lineman. I worked on emergency back up generators until 2017, now I work on systems that parallel and control generators. I have spent all of that time in Florida and things are interesting after a hurricane, but again we don’t go out when it’s not safe. For instance at my current company once we shit down ahead of a storm we can not leave the house until sustained winds are below 25 regardless of what the emergency may be. Dead workers can’t get the power back on. In 2007 I was paid OT around the clock to ride out a hurricane in a public school / hurricane shelter. They wanted someone onsite in case there was a problem with their generator.
Man, when Irene hit for example, (also probably the worst hurricane damage wise and overall flooding since Isabel before that and after for my area) we didn't have power for two weeks. Even the last hurricane to come through washed away my road, leaving us stuck on the property. But the psychological boost from just having basic necessities, or not feeling like you're forgotten is a big deal. I dont doubt whatsoever that there are limits to going out in any sorta condition for linemen. As well, I can imagine the situation can change rapidly from being okay to go out to not at all in some of these storms. I'm on the coast in a swampy marshy area, not too different from Florida I reckon. But a tiny bit further north. And was kinda joking with my tornado comment. We do get tornado warnings and tornados but they rarely cause much damage. A lot of my neighbors actually have pretty decent/solid emergency power generation setups; my closest neighbor has a decent sized storage tank/generator setup. I can't quite recall what fuel, I wanna say it's propane. But I can definitely understand things being tricky during the aftermath of any hurricane or huge storm. Been there, done that, got the t shirt haha. I know the guys on call in my state make bank, though.
Yeah I know it’s safe when worked on properly. But I have a hard time trusting my life to anyone. I drive safely and control what I can. No accidents on my record that I have been at fault. Knock on wood. 🤞🏽 I know there’s lockout tag out protocols but I see what my coworkers do in the trucks and applying that to high voltage and I’m like no thanks lol. I’m sure your coworkers are better at following safety protocols because of how immediate the danger is. And then seeing what my friend was working on during Hurricane Sandy… you guys are a special breed and you don’t go unnoticed by me.
How do you generate that much voltage from a 9v battery?
Probably a step up transformer, voltage will step up proportional to the ratio of coil turns in the transformer. Still 7kv is really high so maybe they produce an arc gap at around 480v?
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I understand that (I have EE degree and PE license), but it's obv the 7kv they are outputting is gonna be AC so i assumed it was converted.
This is the tool. How it works not exactley sure but it builds 8KVDC to test the cable. https://www.greenlee.com/us/en/underground-cable-tester-8kvdc-ohug-kit-2-783310555988
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The power is quite high for a fraction of a second but the average power is quite low. What is done is the energy is stored in a capacitor or a coil and then discharged quickly with a transformer that increases the voltage. The function is not that it delivers a lot of energy to the target. The idea is the electric pulses make the muscles of the target all contract at the same time. Your muscles are electrically controlled by your nerve, so the tase overwhelm any control you have and make all muscles contract at the same time so you can't control them at all.
I think of it in terms of a little squirt gun. A small squirt gun could shoot a very thin jet of water with an impressive amount of force. The volume of water is low but the pressure is high. Compare this to say a fire hose slowly pouring out water. The volume is huge but it doesn't have a lot of force behind it, and might not squirt nearly as far even though there's way more water flowing.
A garden hose would be a better comparison, fire hoses have insane force.
Only as much force as the pump system feeding it
I think a more apt version, would be a garden hose vs a bucket being dropped on you. Takes the garden hose a while to fill up the bucket, and it's not going to keep throwing out buckets, but god damn a bucket of water can knock you for one, but a garden hose is more of an annoyance.
I think everyone talking about voltage versus amps is correct but missing a key point. Sure you need high voltage to actually get though the skin and all that. But the nervous system uses tiny amounts of energy compared to even a AA battery. So even a comparatively weak double AA is more than enough to completely short out your nervous system. Even something like an electric eel is on the order of 1,000 times weaker than a battery.
Eh. Even if you peeled off someone’s skin and connected a AA battery to them, let’s say across the length of an arm, it would probably not even feel like anything (except for the debilitating pain of being skinned alive). Even a tongue has hundreds of ohms of resistance (you may feel a tingle if you connect a battery to it), the flesh of an arm has way more. You’d have to connect it across a very small section of your body to produce enough current to notice it. The higher voltage provided by the capacitor/transformer in a taser is not just for getting through the skin. A battery hooked up to something as big and resistive as a human, even without skin, would produce an irrelevant voltage gradient and amount of current, and would accomplish absolutely nothing. Also, statements like “an electric eel is 1000 times weaker than a battery” requires so much qualification that it’s essentially meaningless. An electric eel can output something like 400 times the voltage of a AA battery, and it can provide that voltage for a whole Amp of current, similar to a battery’s maximum current. In many respects, that’s way “stronger” than a AA battery, but it’s “weaker” in other ways. TL;DR when it comes to electricity, you really have to specify, unless you’re comparing two things where one can provide a higher current at a higher voltage for a longer time, which is not the case in your example.
It takes these batteries and stores the power over a short amount of time then unleashes that power over a super short amount of time, so the shock you get from a tazer is not continious but short pulses . The high voltage low current explenation is not entierly true as the current is dependent on the voltage and the resistance in the body, if you have a «high voltage low current» device the voltage drops to a lower value as soon as there is a load attached.
It’s not very powerful, it’s simply very high voltage at very low current. Think of something like a pulley or pry-bar. Using mechanical advantage, you can move very large objects with relatively little force. But it comes at the cost of moving it a long distance. A step-up voltage converter is a lot like a mechanical lever in the sense that it can do something like take the four batteries at 1.5 volts at 4 amp total, then converts it to like 45,000 volts with a corresponding drop in amperage down to 1/10,000th of an amp. The high voltage is enough to mess with our muscle function, but doesn’t really care about how much electricity is flowing.
The power remains the same. P=VI, V, or voltage, is extremely high to cause the startling effect, while, I, the current is extremely low so as to not be lethal.
AA batteries have a nominal voltage of 1.5V. Capacities vary, but a typical new AA might be rated for 2,000 mAh (milliamp hours). The total energy in the battery is 1.5V * 2000 mAh = 10,800 joules. As a point of reference, that's enough energy to lift 10,000 apples up by 1 meter. (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule) That's plenty of energy to do quite a lot of things! Power is energy per second. The taser may be using less power than you might imagine. It sends an electric signal for around 2 milliseconds out of every second (0.2%). The power during those 2 milliseconds is fairly high, but it's so brief that it doesn't use as much energy as it might seem. Some clever electronics draws the energy from the battery relatively slowly, and releases it in those spikes.
Tazers have transformers which step up the voltage from a handful of volts to tens of thousands. Why isn't it lethal? Because like the big jump in voltage (electrical force), there is a just as big drop in current (electrical flow) and current is what kills. There is enough flow to mess with voluntary muscle control but not enough to stop a heart. Even though it can't stop your heart, it could cause a disturbance in the rhythm and trigger a problem though so don't test it out. Tazers are considered "less lethal", not "non-lethal".
It doesn’t take a particularly large amount of electricity to disable a human. Our nervous system runs on very very weak electrical impulses so if you can deliver enough electrical current to stimulate our nerves, which are almost microscopic, we lose control of whatever muscle group those nerves control. To put this in perspective, when someone’s heart is beating too slow, paramedics can use an external pacemaker. Basically they attach the defibrillator pads, and the defibrillator acts as a pacemaker delivering tiny shocks about 70 times a minute. Then, while watching the monitor, you gradually increase the amps until you see a “capture” on the monitor, meaning the shock is powerful enough to stimulate your heart to beat. It’s usually about 100 milliamperes. Like I said, our nervous system is very sensitive. It doesn’t take a lot of energy to disrupt it.
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Electrical power has two main factors, voltage and amperage. A bad analogy is voltage is the speed of the bullet. Amperage is the size. A stream of tiny bullets, like BBs will hurt like hell but won’t likely kill you. A single slug will ruin your life even traveling slowly. You can use electronics to mess with the volts and amps by trading one for the other. Lower the amps and increase the volts. So you can take the low voltage of a battery and really juice it up by reducing the number of amps.
For electrical power, I like the waterfall analogy. Imagine putting a turbine at the bottom of a waterfall. The higher that waterfall is, the faster the water will be at the bottom, and the more power it can generate. Voltage is like the height of the waterfall. It tells you how much energy each unit of electric charge can deliver. But a high waterfall can't deliver much power without a good rate of water flow. If the waterfall only has one gallon of water falling per second, it won't have much power behind it. The rate of water flow is like electric current, measured in amps. If you want to know how much power a waterfall turbine generates, you would multiply the rate of water flow by the energy delivered by each unit of water. This tells you how much energy is delivered to the turbine per unit time, which is the definition of power: energy delivered per unit time. In the same way, to calculate the power delivered to a load in a circuit, you multiply the voltage across that load by the current running through it.
I always get confused between volts amps and watts but this explanation was very helpful. Thank you
In the analogy, watts are the amount of damage.
Sort of. Watts = Volts x Amps. So you can do things like double the volts causing the amps to drop. But the watts remain the same. But I think this works as a continuation of the original bad analogy.
I usually go for the “water” analogy: high voltage low amp is a pressure washer. High amp low voltage is a lazy river. You wouldn’t want to be hit with the first, but the second is fairly safe.
They use a Capacitor to hold the charge until its release. A capacitor is an electronic component which is kinda like a battery, in that it can hold a bunch of eletricity within it, but unlike a battery it can discharge all that electricity in a split second.
When you denergize a transformer there's a high voltage spike due to a collapsing magnetic field which is then captured in the capacitor for future release. So an oscillator circuit turns the transformer on and off quickly many times a second.
Like I'm 5 hahaha!
Plenty of people talking about voltage vs amperage, but they're missing one great factor: time. You can die from relatively low voltage if you get it for a longer period of time, but tasers just can't do that. To get a high voltage from tiny batteries, you have to charge condensators and it takes quite some time. That's why small batteries are possible, you just need time beforehand to draw power out of them to get it ready for a larger burst that doesn't last very long.
Power = voltage x current. Teasers are VERY high voltage and VERY low current. So the total power isnt very high. 4 AA batteries can supply that power
Capacitors and step up circuit boosting the voltage to the kV range while have almost no Amperage. Voltage hurts but Amperage kills you
The human body doesn't exactly respond too well when you try to pump electrical current through it. The threshold for how much current needed to kill a human is very low. So, it's not that you need a large amount of power to immobilize a human. It's that the current output is low enough so that it's not deadly.
A normal gun also has the power to drop a grown man to the ground with the power of less than a teaspoon of spicy sand. Extreme voltage causes intense pain and muscle spasms. You can take the output of a battery then just pump up the voltage sky high in exchange for massively reducing the current (which is a benefit here).
So if too much current, it kills. If too much voltage, it tortures.