Adding to the other replies. It was probably an older metal bath, with metal drain and high pressure pipes. He was in a grounded tub immersed in water with impurities, which helps conduction. My newer bath is plastic. The plumbing is plastic as well.
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So… I should stop making grilled cheese sandwiches in the bath? Nah, that ain’t gonna happen. If I can’t have a toasty sandwich while soaking in lavender scented bubbles, life isn’t worth living.
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There are wiring regulations but the universe is breeding bigger idiots. I was one of them. I got an IEC female to male cable, cut off the female end and attached an Australian 240 volt mains inline socket. Then I attached a six way power board to the socket and plugged the mail end into the female IEC power outlet on my computer power supply. That way I could switch on all my peripherals from the computer power switch.
Years later my wife called me at work and started to explain that she plugged a 2.4 kilowatt fan heater into the power board under the computer. All I could say was Noooooooooooooo.
So it cost us a power supply. More recently I was at work late and noticed that there are very few GPOs around the office. We have these little power boards on our desks and the cleaners seem to think nothing of plugging their vacum cleaners into those outlets.
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One time I plugged a 2000 watt, 20 amp heating coil into an 18 gauge wire (yeah, I missed the “1” before the “8”. I swear, it looked beefy). Good times. Always know exactly where your breakers are, and keep appropriate fire extinguishers close at hand.
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I am astounded, I thought that sort of monstrosity died in the 1980s.
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Nope. A lot of the little USB chargers use it, as well as LED light bulbs. It’s not too bad if done property, especially with respect for component ratings and isolation.
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Right. Thus the maybe. I’ve seen clawfoot tubs with PVC/ABS piping (yeah, kinda ruins the esthetic, but some folks are cheap) that were surprisingly well-isolated.
I’m an erstwhile electrician with an insatiable sense of curiosity, and had a friend who claimed that his tubside radio wouldn’t electrocute him if it fell in because his clawfoot tub was plumbed with plastic pipes.
And he was right! Sticking a live 120v two-prong extension in the tub produced a tiny bit of leakage — sometimes (but not usually) enough to trip a GFCI — but not enough to do serious damage. (The three-prong extension, OTOH, usually tripped the GFCI, presumably because of leakage through the bathwater to the third (ground) prong.)
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PVC plumbing is against building/fire codes in many places, probably due to the poisonous smoke it makes when it burns.
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Look, I used to do this stuff professionally. And when it comes to electricity, or for that matter anything containing energy, no professional will ever say “never” or “always”.
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What about when the soapy/dirty bathwater was draining, possibly providing a conductive path?
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When this was tested, was it just tap water without anything else? Because that is quite non-electric without salts or something providing electrical transference.
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Agreed–I just happen to love that particular turn of phrase. Besides, between working on updating the outlets in my house and helping electricians chase sparks back in my USAF days, I know all too well the dangers of electrocution. The batteries for the aircraft I worked on were shaped like this, but weighed about 90 lbs:
The male receptacle in the front top center (with the pos/neg terminals and screw-hole in the center) received a female-shaped plug that screwed into the battery. And at the time, the govt-issued belt buckles we wore were thin rectangular pieces of metal that almost perfectly bridged those two poles if the person carrying the battery held it at hip-height and against their abdomen.
I’ve also had the pleasure of being awoken to the sound, sight, and smell of a raccoon who made A Really Bad Choice when wandering within the confines of a power substation in Quincy, CA. Took about 1.5 minutes of extreme heat, light, and noise, and he was a crispy critter when the power finally cut out.
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Pure water is not a conductor, true. However, in Real Life ™ water is conductive unless it just came out of the business end of a lab-grade nanopurifying process, and if you let the nanopure water sit in a bathtub for a couple of hours, it will become conductive due to atmospheric contamination. And any water that’s been through a chlorination or softening process will be pretty well loaded up with sodium and/or chlorides and thus a pretty good conductor.
That being said, the issue is whether electric current will find a path to ground through a bather’s body more agreeable than the path to the neutral conductor roughly 1/4" away from the hot conductor. So less conductive bathwater could actually assist this process!
…image this experimental setup, for example: for inexplicable reasons (involving microwave ovens and non-dairy creamer) the extension cord’s neutral leg is heavily oxidized and made of a metal with poorly conducting oxides, but the hot leg is pure unoxidized copper, the water is nanopure and thus cannot conduct (it must be forced to dielectric breakdown), the plumbing is all lead-soldered copper connected to building neutral and the bath fittings are chromed brass, and the bather has forced some sweaty part of his (can’t be her, women aren’t this stupid) anatomy up against the cord end while also pushing the hot water valve up his nose as hard as possible, and then lightning hits the ground a few inches from the building. I’m pretty sure under those conditions you would have electricity pass through your body instead of just arcing to the other pole of the extension cord.
STOP GIVING PEOPLE IDEAS.
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Yeah, you still didn’t answer the question (because it wasn’t your experiment) and I’m still a person who has fiddled around with 120v wires in tap water because it’s still not conductive. The point is that filling the bath and running a test without even as much as soap is going to give false confidence.
I’m not giving people ideas, I’m saying that England isn’t going to be changing to 120 because of one dummy, or even hundreds of dummies. We can’t even manage to get people to not shoot themselves when cleaning their guns here in the States, so idiocy isn’t a good enough reason to stop people from hurting themselves.
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A squirrel did this to our substation on 26th December a few years back. Crispy squirrel indeed.
The belt buckle thing is interesting. The Europlug was never adopted in the UK because we weren’t fast enough to stop people importing single trailing sockets which were too small, so that you could stick a pin of the Europlug in the live socket hole and have a babykiller. Designing safe electrical stuff is hard - not astrophysics hard but remarkably difficult to do. Next time you don’t die of electric shock near something electrical give thanks to those hard working people from UL, IEC and CENELEC (to name a few) who work almost completely anonymously.
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My tap water certainly is, but that would not cause me to be shocked in a bathtub. Because electricity follows a path of least resistance and water+me resists more than water.
Well, that’s a good point!
I would vote for you on that platform.
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Make baths great again!
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