Maybe put a blur over the picture?
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All depends on your definition of “low voltage”. If you want to get pedantic, according to the IEC anything below 1500VDC or 1000VAC is considered “low voltage”.
That being said, I still prefer to not touch any bare wires driving household current.
Even these are known to be pretty sketchy and may not deliver the kind of power you need to charge something like an iPad.
This! Power over Ethernet is a wonderful thing! As soon as I moved into my condo I wired all the rooms with high quality Cat6 cabling. Years later I was able to hardwire all of my Wi-Fi APs with only a single ethernet cable each with no need to dick around with extra power hookups. I certainly didn’t plan for this when I originally did the cabling (I just wanted clean cabling between rooms), but it was really nice to be able to take advantage of this.
Just use one of these:
(I’m joking – please don’t ever do this.)
Agreed. I’ve taken care of it.
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In Canada, Trailer Park Boys is life. Did have a telephone company installer do the functional equivalent once; he opened up an IBM 3270 controller cabinet, found a receptacle that was energized through an isolation transformer, and plugged his drill in there. Even though there was standard AC on the wall about three feet away. Anyway, when he put his drill onto the piece of equipment he was working on the floating ground took out the controller.
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… that’s a ‘brown pants’ moment for both the shock hazard, and the pocketbook of whoever gets to pay for the replacement equipment.
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but so are old arcing outlets. The 1970s home I moved into had cracking, loose 2 wire outlets wired with push in terminals. I replaced them with new three wire outlets, wires wrapping all the way around screws. The outlet grounds were wired with green pigtails to green screws I improvised into holes on the metal bx outlet boxes. It probably doesn’t fully meet code but outlet testers show it as good. It is certainly safer than what was there before, and safer than relying on the mounting screws for ground. If I were to do it today I would use GFCI and/or AFCI outlets.
@nixiebunny is correct that these days the third ground conductor is mostly made superfluous by double shielded product design. It mostly just improves the physical stability, preventing plugs from falling out of loose old outlets. In most cases, I would gladly give it up for tight low resistance connections on the hot and neutral.
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