Brazilian Electric "Suicide" Shower Heads [video]

The worst case scenario is instant death, which has happened to a family member. It's just a risk that is accepted in Brazil that wouldn't be in Europe or the US.

The same is true of many gas appliances sold in Brazil. My CO alarm regularly goes off in Brazilian homes when cooking - another death of a family member of a friend is why I carry that now.

Again a perfectly acceptable risk in Brazil that also kills Brazilians, but that isn't accepted in some other countries. For now, at least.

If the wire touched the metal, or water got into the element and bridged the circuit to earth, the breaker would cut out immediately.

The suicide shower relies on the exposed resistive heater having a lower resistance than the water, and then a functional earth-leakage breaking device.

In perfect conditions, they're probably Safe Enough™, but there are so many failure modes. Earth failure (corrosion? never installed? fast enough?), dodgy water chemistry, exposed cabling, an exposed join because the included terminations are only ~15cm. Often installed in countries without rigorous electrical safety standards. Just a bad idea.

It seems that the standard rated power of Brazilian showers is 5.5 kW. But then again, Irish weather seems harsher than Brazilian weather.

The tanks generally also have a heat exchanger within that's hooked up to the wet central heating system, that way you can have 1 boiler so both central heating and water heating.

A very common (albeit somewhat old-fashioned) plumbing setup in this part of the world is an 'open vented' system where hot water is supplied at comparatively low pressure - a cold water storage tank in the attic provides a pressure head of about 0.5 bar to a hot water tank, which feeds the hot taps. That's plenty for hand washing, but not really enough for a shower.

Whereas the electric shower takes mains pressure cold water only - giving you a shower without needing to replace or upgrade your hot water / central heating / boiler system.

There are other options (such as a pressure-boosting pump on the hot tank outlet - or replacing the tank with something newer) but changing between types is difficult enough it would usually only be done as part of a complete bathroom refit, which can easily cost $5,000+

No. Proper gas powered water heaters have oxygen sensors for quite some time, and ours kick-in before we feel anything about oxygen levels, and it doesn't reset until you get proper amount of fresh air in.

Moreover, newer models are completely sealed, breathing air from outside and directly dumping exhaust outside with a fan, via a coaxial pipe.

Wikipedia has a handy map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#/media/File:...

Do you mean the American Electric "Suicide" Computer?

Yes I've been zapped by it numerous times.

Zapped by shower heads? Don't know anyone.

Almost died from a gas heated shower because of a leak? I know one person.

Yes, this is anecdata.

http://www.aplomb.nl/SMPS_leakage/Doc_ie.html

FWIW it's just a nickname for their apparently dangerous design (which doesn't necessarily translate to actually dangerous), it has nothing to do with suicides.

In pretty much every other country, this is illegal and against code because it is considered very unsafe. But somehow it seems to work for Brazil, Turkey, and a bunch of poorer nations.

It doesn't (usually) kill the users due to a bunch of clever design and good luck, which goes like this:

* The power grid provides two wires. "Live", normally around 220 volts AC (110 in usa), and "Neutral", usually near zero - perhaps 5 volts AC. The Earth is at 0 volts AC, and is connected to all your water, pipes, plumbing, metal things in your bathroom, etc.

* Normal devices like light bulbs allow electrons to flow between Live and Neutral, but should not allow electrons to flow to Earth. Normally, if flow to earth is detected, a GFCI/RCD will switch everything off for safety, since a human might be on that path!

* The resistance of a wet-skinned human is such that if 5 volts AC is put across them, they'll barely feel it, but if 220 volts AC is across them, they'll probably die.

* This shower relies on connecting Live (220V) to the water, and also connecting Neutral (~5V) to the water. That causes electrons to flow through the water, and it to heat up.

* However, the connections are arranged so that the neutral is far closer to your head than the live - so the voltage your head sees is perhaps only 5 volts relative to the Earth (and the wet floor you're standing on). You feel the tingly electric-water, but you don't die today.

* But the big risk is that if the neutral wire were to fail anywhere between the shower and the power station for any reason, now the water you're standing in becomes Live at 220V and you die today.

For example I lived in an apartment where the shower literally refused to work until I had to tinker with it and disable its grounding.

Now you are wondering, why I disabled the grounding of a dangerous electric shower? Well, it is no less dangerous than the rest of the whole stupid building, that although it is extremely against the building code to do so, they literally tied the "neutral" wire to the "ground" wire in the whole building. Meaning that all grounded power sockets, were actually not grounded at all and instead had the ground pin connected to the neutral pin.

Yes, it is bad and dangerous as it sounds, got shocked multiple times at that apartment and had appliances short circuit. But did complaining to authorities did anything to fix it? Nope. They don't care until someone die, then they find some random guy not connected to politics to sue.

See lastest supreme court decisions, that freed all corrupt construction company people that have connections to the party in power.

Brazil has deep, chronic issues, with corruption and the construction industry, you literally can't build anything big without corruption, it is just silly. My father was a civil engineer and the stories I heard from his friends were just crazy balls, not only the corruption people know about, but lots that people don't. Did you knew that São Paulo has some tunnels with MISSING SUPPORTS because people fucked up and let cement leak from the machinery into the river, and the government decision to fix the situation was just tell engineers to not put some safeish percentage of supports on their section and not tell other engineers about it so nobody know what supports are missing? This way the government avoided buying more cement after the last batch ended in the river.