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Comment by Morthanc | Hacker News Reader

I'm brazilian. Me and everyone I've ever known had electric showers in their homes.

Despite the clickable name, they are perfectly fine. If they weren't, the entirety of latin america wouldn't be using them. The worst case scenareo is if the house doesn't have grounding. In that case you can get a lil' zap when closing turning the shower off while wet. I remember when growing up, my mom would rent cheap apartments in the beach for us to stay a few days during the holidays, and she always made us shower while wearing flip flops to avoid getting the lil' zap. I'm not entirely convinced this worked.

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> The worst case scenareo is if the house doesn't have grounding.

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.

Both of you are right. If installed properly it's safe, however worst case scenario used to be not "just" instant death but death by carbonization with your body being set on fire by electricity.

Pictures of that are some of the most horrifying things you'll see. Fortunately this does not happen anymore due to residual-current devices and safety mechanisms in the shower heads.

Source: Brazilian police forensics expert in the 90s

The video showed only a very economical switching mechanism and a dependency on having the earth wire properly connected. I would feel a lot better about using it if a hair-trigger balance fault interruptor was integrated into the showerhead.

I'm sorry to hear about these deaths.

One mitigation for the gas risk in Latin America is that houses are rarely fully sealed with shut windows like they are in US and Europe. Because of the high electricity prices, windows are often open for ventilation.

Yeah, all the problems I've had were in relatively high-end apartments in SP and Brasilia, for exactly that reason. The killer combination of AC and gas cookers.

I have an induction cooker. It doesn't have the gas issue but magnetic, eletric and eletromagnetic fields are orders of magnitudes above the safety values according to my measures. I don't know how safe that is on the long run (and AFAIK nobody does). Yet the scientific consensus is slowly changing to show that non-ionizing radiation isn't as safe as previously thought and is linked to brain cancer and male infertility among other things.

Its probably based on the same myth that makes people think its the rubber tires that makes cars safe during a lightning storm.

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