chaniarts wrote:
On 9/9/2013 10:41 PM, Bill Graham wrote:
Bill Graham wrote:
John Doe wrote:
It would be like setting off a firecracker in your cat's mouth.

That's just one possible scenario. It probably wouldn't be worse.
Another possibility is the outlet sourcing up to 15 amps through
your cat's/kitten's mouth without tripping the circuit breaker. The
electricity would probably burn some flesh and your cat would run
away crying. Also possible is a much lesser shock that would
hopefully scare it into stopping before it's injured. There are
many possibilities depending on how your cat's teeth/tongue/saliva
contact the wires. The BOOM scenario is a distinct possibility
though, as you can experience by cutting through an appliance
wire. As a kid, you might have touched a 9 V battery to your
tongue. If you did the same with a 120 V wire prong (like a
snake's tongue), it would probably go BOOM and burn a serious hole
in your tongue. I wouldn't want to try that experiment.

Shielded cords plus GFI's will prevent that from happening. Read
about them he
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...ctric/gfi.html

Please remember that some circuit interrupters can act very quickly.
There is a guy who builds them into his table saws. He can put his
hand into the saw blade when it is running, and the break will stop
the saw so fast that it doesn't even break his skin. Of course, this
requires more than just the GFI. He also has to stop the saw. But he
is able to do both, using a GFI to initiate the process.....

sawstop, and it doesn't use a gfi. it senses the capacitance of the
human body.

Yes. But the essentiuol thing to remember is thsat the circuitry to stop the
saw, or pull the breaker to protect the cat, is completely se3perate from
the circuit that interrupts the power based on too much power draw through
the main circuit. The breaker is tripped , not by too much po9wer being
drawn through it, but by a mechanism that senses the presense of the cat or
the operators fingers. And this requires much less power such as a few
milliambls of ground current, or the capacitance of the finger that is only
close to the saw, and not touching it. My iPad senses my fingers without
actually being touched. It would be entirely possible to build a device that
interrupted thousands of watts of raw power, based on the close proximity of
ones fingers. The GFI does this. It uses a completely seperate circuit to
pull the breaker other than the one that normally pulls it. That's why the
cat's mouth feels no power at all, and he is protected.