Don't have a GFCI outlet? Get one! Almost died!

BRS
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Tidal Gardens
holy cow!!!! My profession being an EE your socks and carpet saved your butt!! if you were actually grounded through your feet that current would've traveled right up your arm and down through your body through your feet and to earth ground which more than likely could have killed you on the spot, takes a mere 6mA that's .006 amps to stop your heart, you got lucky the current looks like it went up your arm the exited at your bicep and went back into the tank.....crazy stuff!! glad to see you made it out with minor injuries.....and for sure the AFCI is the way to go in the panel I just wired a circuit in my basement in my new house with one knowing I will have a tank there in the future.
 
quik95lt1 said:
holy cow!!!! My profession being an EE your socks and carpet saved your ***!! if you were actually grounded through your feet that current would've traveled right up your arm and down through your body through your feet and to earth ground which more than likely could have killed you on the spot, takes a mere 6mA that's .006 amps to stop your heart, you got lucky the current looks like it went up your arm the exited at your bicep and went back into the tank.....crazy stuff!! glad to see you made it out with minor injuries.....and for sure the AFCI is the way to go in the panel I just wired a circuit in my basement in my new house with one knowing I will have a tank there in the future.
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Thanks for your input and welcome to R2R!
 
Deltec
dang!!!! Good thing you're alright!!! I've had some shocks before but wow!!!

When I UG to my new tank I had a GFCI installed too. Best $20 ever spent. I was fixing one of my led fixtures and pulled the cord off the unit. Let it on top of the tank, it slowly fell into the tank. Tripped the outlet. Couldn't figure out why until I started pulling things one by one. As my wife reset the outlet, I noticed my Naso jerking. Five times she did this and then I saw it: the cord in the water! I'm so glad I had it done!!

Glad you're ok
 
Glad your ok! I had 2 strip outlets hanging vertically under my old 90g acrylic stand...had pumps, lights, skimmer etc connected to it. Occasionally my wife's boys would turn the power strip controlling lights off so they could play their video games with a glare from the lights. One day I was doing a water change and went to flip off both strip outlets under tank and got a minor shock from both outlets. Glad I fixed this before boys got under there again to flip off. End of day...saltwater conducts electricity so easily....I def play it safe when doing maintenance things and the power is on. Got a new Red Sea Max-500 tank. Love the "electrical drawer"...keeps electrical area separate from sump area and dry and safe. Each flip on/off switch on the front with rubber coatings.
 
Anthony Wood said:
Well my tank almost killed me last night. First I'll start off by saying when I first had a dedicated breaker and outlets run to my fish room months ago. I specifically asked the electrician to install a GFCI/AFCI breaker so I didn't have to use multiple GFCI/AFCI outlets. There must of been some sort of miscommunication obviously because he just out a regular breaker in or I wouldn't be on here talking about it.

Well last night I was putting the finishing the final touches on a new isolated tank I had installed in the fish room for nudibranch breeding. The last step was taking one of the 200W Aqeon Pro heaters out of my RO/DI holding drum and putting it in the new tank. Well unknown to me and unseen to the eye the gasket where the cord goes into the heater had become bad, so once I plugged it in I had 2.27 amps running ungrounded in the new tank. The reason I know the amps being drawn is because that's what my Archon controller told me it was drawing. Now that I look back on it I should have tested the water with a multimeter to be safe but at this point I thought I had the proper breaker installed.

In the time between me plugging the heater in and give the tank a final look over. The air stone in the tank had become dislodged and was floating at the surface. So not thinking anything about the heater the moment I stuck my hand in the water considering ohm's law I had to of had well over 1 amp running threw my body. For those of you that don't know much about electricity 1 amp + stops your heart not mentioning all the other nasty things that type of power does like burning internal organs, bursting veins, stopping breathing etc.... Back to my story my hand is in the water and instantly I lose all control of my body. I straightened up flatter then a board. It must have looked like I got hit by a police tazer gun. Luckily I was leaning away from the tank, so when I lost control I was thrown through an open adjacent door and hit the ground faster the a sack of bricks.

The only reason I believe I'm still alive today or not in a hospital bed getting skin graphs needing new organs, is due to the fact that I had wet socks on wet carpet. This gave the electricity a path to follow which prevented it from doing severe damage elsewhere. Ok if you have gotten this far reading and still thinking this can't happen to me well I didn't come out of this without some wounds. Here's a picture for thought.

image.jpeg

This is the aftermath and I'm lucky to have only this. After I left the ground the electricity it made its way up my arm towards my watch and stopped at my bicep when my hand finally left the water. Left a nasty electrical burn.

Moral of the story....make sure for certain you have a GFCI breaker or outlet that your aquariums are plugged into it may save your life someday!! I'm certainly lucky to still have mine. Think about it this way without a GFCI safety in place your putting your life in the hands of that $10-$100 heater you bought.
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You didn't have one amp running thru your body. You would be dead as .023 amps can kill you.
 
AS
MoneyMike1987 said:
You didn't have one amp running thru your body. You would be dead as .023 amps can kill you.
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It is possible he did not, but it is possible he did. While 0.023 amps can kill you the more commonly accepted number is 0.1A or 100 mA. There are many factors that come into play. Not the least of which is the path through the body and the length of time you are exposed to the current.

A good friend of mine was shocked by 34,500 volts at well over 50 amps and survived. He has some pretty good scars from the skin grafts but he made it.
 
No lawyer would take this case for free. Without death, disability, or disfigurement the actual damages would not be worth their time and unless you can prove gross negligence punitive damages are unlikely.

Not to metion it would be an extreme long shot to win without proving aqueon has a KNOWN manufacturing or design defect that could be reasonably expected to cause injury or death. This "case" would be over when they ask if the device was plugged into a working gfci receptacle.

All products fail. Cheap products usually fail more often. Does not mean you can expect to sue someone(and win)
 
Deltec
Steve K said:
Googling "how to install gfci outlet" as I read this thread.
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It is exactly like installing a regular outlet. No difference at all. The GFCI outlets just tend to be a bit bigger and have the test/reset buttons on them

If you are going to install a GFCI receptacle I would strongly recommend doing it on an outlet between the breaker and the outlet your aquarium uses. Especially if the tank sits in front of the outlet. A properly installed GFCI outlet will actually remove power from every outlet installed after it in the chain. It can be a bit difficult to figure out the order receptacles are wired in but it is worth the effort, imo.

Doing this not only better protects the outlet the aquarium plugs into, but you can do stuff like putting a nightlight in an exposed outlet that is easily visible. That way if your aquarium is in a less frequently occupied room you know your GFCI has tripped if you see the light out. Typically there are 7-10 receptacles per breaker spanning 2 or 3 rooms.
 
This is how I installed one.

http://www.lionfishlair.com/DIY/gfci.shtml

I've been hit a couple of times. One time I was removing live rock from the tank and sitting in on garbage bags on the floor. I hadn't realized the extension cord at the connector part had been pulled onto the garbage bags filled with pools of water and rock. Then I stepped on it. It was a horrible horrible feeling.

But, that's not an electrical burn you sustained. You scraped that somewhere along the line.
 
Deltec
Will a GFCI receptacle work if you have an UPS plugged into it and then an APEX plugged into the UPS and finally your aquarium devices plugged into the APEX?
 
You do not need a breaker, an oulet will protect every other outlet downstream from it. Breakers should be used on installs like retrofits where you do not know the downstream connections. Also gfi and arc fault outlets may misoperate with metal halide and some flouresents.
 
Tidal Gardens
as an update... in case you aren't confident installing an outlet or are lazy (stop looking at me!) You can buy a GFCI plugin adapter. that plugs into your wall socket. You'd just have to use one per wall socket you're using. They're around 15 bucks each.
 
MoneyMike1987 said:
You didn't have one amp running thru your body. You would be dead as .023 amps can kill you.
Click to expand...

Idk what the resistance is between wet skin on my hand in the tank and a wet foot on a wet floor as a ground is. But I actually was curious about how much stray current was in the tank so I put my Carolina work boots on today, stood on a rubber mat and put the heater back in the same tank and plugged it back in. Got the multimeter out and tested the amps. The multimeter read 1.076 amps running stray in the water at the moment I put my hands in. You can do the math but I'm gonna say I got zapped by more then .023 amps lol
 
Avast
I would educate somewhere around 20 ma actually. You still had motor control of your legs and midsection to pull the tank on yourself.

I hope the hospital put you on a ekg when you went in. If you told them you had electrical shock and they didnt monitor you, very bad.

Like I said I would guess HOPEFULLY < 100mA touch potential between your hands, otherwise you would be having / had chest pains.
Probably .010 to .02 mA step potential. Based on the fact that you still had control and (I dont know if you did or didnt) loose digestive functions.

For anyone still reading this, if you take a shock please go get an ekg (heart scan)
 
Woah, that's insane! I'm going to check all my outlets tomorrow. Glad you're okay, I can't imagine going through that.
 
BRS

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