High requency and pace makers

[Ray C]

Perhaps powering it off then, touching it to ground before handling is something to consider. BTW: 48 volts is the known threshold of safety. You can put your hands across a 12V car battery but with 48 volts, you're tempting fate. Welders usually have an open circuit voltage below that threshold and are often in the 20 to 30 volt range. There is also something called Capacitive Discharge. The human body can be a store of built-up charge or depending on conditions, a void of charge. The effects are additive so, touching a charged probe (depending on positive or negative electrode) can give you a zap much larger than the OC voltage of the welding unit. It's that zap that can trigger an arrhythmia because the current is momentarily traveling through all parts of the body until voltage equilibrium is reached.

Ray


PS: I used to make/design invitro fetal heart monitors. Here IS some advice. Don't handle a live TIG probe. )

Good info. The old Miller Econotig is always hot- no foot control, so it's searching for ground more than I thought.

 

[Hawkeye]

Good advice on the cabinet ground, Ray. We went away from ground rods some years ago. Now, I have to dig in a steel plate 2 feet below the surface, in an area that will hold some ground water. Pounding rods was a lot easier.

For a welder ground, I'll see if I can still get a ground rod. I'm a pretty good shot with a hammer. I should be able to hit the sprinkler pipe on the first try with no problem.

 

[Ray C]

A "steel" plate? Wow, that's weird. Steel will eventually ozidize to the point of being somewhat non-conductive. I'm not doubting you at all... just wondering why you regulatory authority would go that direction...

In my area, we have all underground power, cable, phone etc... People are digging and cutting into stuff all the time. When I put up a fence some years back, I paid for a precise survey and that included a marking of all underground utilities. They spray painted the ground where everything was buried. I layed-out reference objects and tape measures and photographed from a thousand angles. -Even still I get worrried when I dig in my yard.

 

[Hawkeye]

Galvanized steel. Like the rods were. Any metal will actually form a halo the longer it is in the ground and build up a really good connection with age. Used to see that in my metal detector days. As soon as you disturbed the soil around an old nail, it was a lot harder to detect. And the little nail was actually still there, after many years.