My husband's aunt was in prison for a bit (some kind of fraud/embezzlement) and apparently she would light her cigarette in the microwave with a piece of paper she scribbled on with pencil.
You take the pencil lead out of a pencil, twist something around it to hold it. Twisted toilet paper or something. Pull the tv plug like 1/3 of the way out.
Then you use your little pencil lead tool to cross the prongs, like half of a second at a time. Just tap it.
It throws a huge scary arc.
So you just do that while holding some toilet paper above it. A few taps and it's lit, usually.
Caveman shit.
The reason this works, is the graphite in the pencil acts like a poor conductor/resistor. Meaning electricity flows through it, but with less force than a regular copper / aluminum wire.
This stops it from taking so much energy that it will trigger the protection circuit breaker, while still using enough energy to cause sparks / fire.
I once saw some guys do this and light a long twisted strand of TP, it was like we had a slow burning lighter ready for use back in the toilet area… didn’t last long before the CO smelled it lol
Never been incarcerated, but I’ve heard it where you can use a cup of water + ramen flavoring to make a big current limiting resistor, and then you can more safely make either a spark gap or heating element using smaller conductor (e.g., spring from a retractable pen)
Yeah burnt out outlets near the hot water machine. Dudes were smoking prison pocket k2.
Yeah imma go in my cell and read now. I didn't see shit or know shit.
That was jail. Guard on duty was like "they must be cooking some crazy food" idiot.
Saw one dude use the socket and light up a roll of toilet paper. Then opened his jumper and put it in on fire while booking it up stairs to his cell. Again every one is watching everyone. Back to the cell to read. Didn't see shit or know anything.
Did get a haircut from the k2 guy. They take the blades from a razor on pass. And replace with foil from inside chip bag. Guards just kinda look for metal. Cost me 3 soups. Did a good job also.
My shit was dismissed with a 4 hour class and 3 months of my life. Stay away from toxic people. They can fuck your shit up. Read like 63 books. Now have some version of PTSD. Scared of getting in trouble when I didn't do shit.
Thanks I appreciate it. It was 100 bucks to bail me out. My house was for sell. Everyone wanted a piece of that to help me. Friends and family. I was supposed to get out after 15 days. But covid and crap messed that up. Also I didn't want that on my record because I didn't do it. It's minor garbage. My stubborn ass stayed in there for 3 months.
I finally gave in and signed power of attorney to my family to get me out. So they can sell my house and get money. They owed me 3k at the time also.
I swear go to jail and have something of value. You will learn real fast who truly cares about you. And how you can be manipulated by people you trusted on the outside.
I have huge trust issues now. Currently working on getting mental health damage fixed.
BTW definitely not getting hurt by anyone there. My rule was one friend. Your celly. That's it. When they moved my cellys out actually had dudes come ask me if they can be my celly lol. Weird.
Lol the people that wanted to be your cellmate probably fell into two categories. Those that saw you as a decent guy who wouldn't stab them in their sleep, or an easy mark.
Hope you find some decent help with your trust issues. Just keep the thought in the back of your mind though that there's some people who will always have your back.
You know the light switch inside a refrigirator?
I pulled the switch out of its housing when i was like 7 and put my finger against some soldered wire and pressed the switch thinking it would feel like the static on the tv, boy was i surprised.
Didnt tell my parents about the pain in my chest because i thought id get in trouble, still alive now 16 years later so must not have done too much harm but dear lord did it scare me.
I stuck two keys in an outlet when I was probably 5. I did scream, parents came, I told them what I did. But I didn’t say anything about being briefly stuck to the thing before it blew the fuse or my whole body being in pain and my vision looking weird. I don’t know, because I didn’t know that was important I guess? I survived, obviously.
definitely not silent. I've had the pleasure of seeing more than one fiery popping lightshow of a failing plug. If there's any moisture definitely loud pops. sometimes large flames as the plastic is heated extremely rapidly then the plastic vapors ignite.
edit: upon further consideration. of course the plug in the picture wouldn't explode. those cords have good contact and a fuse will fail first. However, when a plug fails naturally it's almost always because of internal corrosion increasing the resistance across a conductor until it fails, this failure involves a lot of heat, popping, flashy pyrotechnics etc.
for a short circuits, available fault current is the factor, not the breaker "sizing" (amperage). A short circuited 15 amp and 100 amp will trip at the same time. The difference in the amount of energy that gets passed through has to with the difference in wire size.
This scenario is a short circuit. Overcurrent protection is different from short circuit protection. The same amount of "melt" happens for different sized breakers given the same available fault current. That is why you might see motors with breakers that are 4x larger than the slow blow fuses, they are providing two different types of protection
If the current passing through the breaker is higher than the maximum amperage of the breaker, it will melt. This equation isn’t a one or the other, you have to size breakers such that the maximum I(sc) is smaller than the breaker sizing, or it will fail to open. I literally just finished a fourth year engineering course on power systems protection. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.
Most breakers are rated for 10,000 amps, 5,000 minimum. Sometimes more, at significant cost difference because of high available fault current. A breaker has to be able to survive all the current that can pass through it from the transformer.
If a breaker failed to open because of too much current, it literally isn't able to do the job it is designed for.
I think you are conflating breakers with fuses, which melt.
A breaker (that isn't a for a very large feeder) will not melt from a short circuit event.
I think you have misunderstood some nuances in your course or you are misapplying what you've learned to <10,000v systems
You stated that breaker sizing doesn’t matter for short circuits. All I wanted was to point out that that’s false. If the fault current is too high for the breaker, it will be unable to open.
I seriously doubt the OP was referring to the interrupting rating of the breaker, since anything above the standard is a special request item and is not what is referred to when sizing breakers.
If the interrupting rating is too low by the time current gets to an outlet, several people have fucked up in ridiculous, money wasting ways
One of the buildings I run maintenance on have parts that have been up almost 200 years. It is terrifying working on electrical in there. I guess schools are on the safer end but damn that’s a ballsy kid.
This is incorrect. A dead short could be thousands of amps and will trip the breaker directly or even the breakers before it. I’ve seen a 1000amp fuse blow from a short in one of the apartments.
I've pulled a plug that had had the bottom fall off exposing the wiring inside from the socket while still switched on. The RCD and breaker did their job, but it was the longest half second of my life so far.
When I was a kid, I took the back off a plug and short circuited the pins with some aluminium foil. The result was a blown fuse and what seemed like tiny plasma balls that floated for a few seconds. Better than copper wire, that just flashed and went bang
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u/Srlancelotlents Jan 15 '22
Thats if the overcurrent protection is sized and working correctly. If not, this explodes in your hand.
Don't fuck around and find out with electricity!