Shameless Repost
A bit after the hammer/nail/thumb incident, I decided to do some more DIY - I've had my "accident" so now I'm safe....

Or so I thought.

I needed to remove some cable tacks that were holding the phone wire back - No big deal - They had to come off, the wall painted and new ones put it. It's not rocket science dammit.

Anyway, I proceeded to remove them.

Now, directly below one of them (about halfway up the wall) is a socket.

You might see where this is going....

I touched the one above the socket - the metal bit.

"Bastard, that hurt"

That's right, some moron (not me) had put it through the live wire - how it hadn't shorted out the house, I don't know.

"Well, that's just daft." Thought I - "There's a lesson here"

"I'd better turn off the electricity and carefully remove the cable tack" - Is what I SHOULD have thought/done.

What I did think was "Did that really happen? I'd better touch it again"

"OUCH!" (Followed by much swearing).

That really bastard hurt. I know, I'll touch it again.

"F***, etc"

Yes, that's right I touched it twice, then held on a bit the third time just to check for actual pain. Of which there was a lot.

I was going to get off the ladder, but I realised that I was actually now lying on the ground - "Now, how did I get down here?".....

I turned the mains off at this point and was a LOT more careful the 4th time.

Honest.

The lesson is - I'm shouldn't be allowed out of that padded room....
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 8 Apr 2008, 8:38, 3 replies)

If the pin on the cable clip
was only touching the live wire, it would itself be live (hence your multiple shocks) but it would only cause an electrical problem if it touched another wire (the neutral or earth) simultaneously and caused a short circuit. Shorting to earth should trip the RCD, if your house is so equipped, but shorting to neutral would either trip the circuit breaker (or blow a fuse in an older system), or if the contact was insufficiently good, cause the cable clip to heat up.

This is of course the most dangerous possibility as it can cause fire.

Having read your last post, maybe you should leave this sort of thing to the professionals before you die horribly in a home improvement incident!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Apr 2008, 8:47, closed)

Um
The house didn't have an RCD at the time - it had these dodgy old fuses with suspect wiring....
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 8 Apr 2008, 14:03, closed)

hehehe...reminds me of my father, grandfather and ex-husband
All 3 are electricians. All three have shocked themselves many times. And all three have a tendency to touch the live wire at least a second, if not a third time, just to make sure. Grandfather is the only one to have any serious accidents though. He was cooked to a crisp at a sub-station when I was a baby but actually survived.
( flirting with badgers What? It sounded good at the time., Wed 9 Apr 2008, 2:27, closed)