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Comment by realty_geek | Hacker News Reader

True story (even though as the years go by I find it hard to comprehend myself)

I was in a boarding school in Ghana in the late 80's and pretty much every day there would be someone boiling water with a fork directly wired to a 240 volt socket. All the beds were metal bunk beds and there was plenty of combustible material in each dormitory.

I am pretty sure this was replicated in the dozens of other boarding schools across the country. Somehow I never heard of any deaths or serious injuries from it.

Not in the slightest bit advocating for it. It was a desperate solution in desperate times but it has massively skewed my comprehension of risk compared to pretty much anyone I meet in Europe.

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Not uncommon in Brazil to have an electric water heater installed on a shower head, sometimes with lightly covered wiring. Was gobsmacked when I first saw them. One even gave me a tingle when touching the faucet and I told the owner. :sweat-smile:

I remember some showers I took in Rio that, to my surprise/dismay, required bringing a match along to light the water heater within the shower. That now seems tame by comparison.

My flat in Czechia had a gas burning tankless water heater in the shower. Standard tub with a shower head and water heater directly on the wall.

The floor of the tub was also at least 10" above the bathroom floor. I literally broke a rib trying to get out of the damn thing

Those things were everywhere in the Netherlands when I was a child - 70's. I had one above the sink in the kitchen in my student apartment (half of a pigsty converted to human habitation, pigs in the other half, a thin wall in between - that's what you get when studying at an agricultural university and living on a farm) running off a propane tank in the garden. We had one in the kitchen and a bigger one in the bathroom, running off natural gas which the country had plenty of after the discovery of a large gas deposit in the northern Netherlands. There were no vents to the outside, the things just vented into the room. They're called 'geisers' (geysers) in Dutch.

Those would output absolutely blisteringly hot water as well. Almost boiling. As I recall they'd often also have the tap directly attached to them. We kept the pilot light on ours always lit, though I can totally see people turning them off fully when not in use for a bit. The fancy ones had a button to light them. The less fancy ones involved a match and a startle as the gas caught fire.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I had forgotten all about those!

Extremely common in the UK too - you just have a 7.2kW feed going into your shower cabin, while regulations prohibit you from having any electrical sockets anywhere in the bathroom lol.

Which leads to an idiotic situation where in Europe it's extremely common to have your washing machine in the bathroom, but in the UK everyone goes "oh no we can't have that it's extremely unsafe" while standing next to an electric shower fused at 32amps.

Tbf the building regulations are meant to make it somewhat safe, but I've personally seen dodgy work done by electricians where they wired a shower using a 16amp wire which obviously subsequently melted after some use.

Sounds like a instantaneous electric hot water heater. Quite common, in places like Philippines, that do not have cool/cold air temperatures, and less developed electricity supply.

The UK doesn’t allow any receptacle circuits in a bathroom? Not even if they’re protected with an RCD? That’s a GFCI for Americans.

I am well acquainted with throwing water on resistive heating elements from taking a lot of electric saunas, so electric instant hot water heaters don’t really scare me. The proximity of the current is irrelevant to me when just 30 mA will kill you.

Electric tank water heaters work on the same principle, a high resistance conductor encased in a ceramic insulator which is encased in metal.

>>The UK doesn’t allow any receptacle circuits in a bathroom? Not even if they’re protected with an RCD? That’s a GFCI for Americans.

So to be fair - until last year(or 2023?) you couldn't have them at all, then they changed the rules to say you can, but they have to be at least 3 metres away from the nearest bath or shower. For reference, my entire bathroom is 2.5m by 2m - and I suspect 99% of British bathrooms aren't much bigger than this. So in theory - you can. In practice....not so much.

Splashes and wet hands are much riskier for receptacles than for a permanent and/or hidden connection. Not to mention hairdriers, space heaters, TVs etc falling into the bath. Pretty much everything smaller than a washing machine is bound to end up in there if the flex is long enough

Sure, but it's not like continental Europe has a higher rate of electrical accidents in bathrooms just because you can dry your hair in the bathroom - RCDs are a thing everywhere.

UK regs don't disallow hairdriers in the bathroom though. On the other hand, if EU regs do nothing to prevent plugging a socket from the bath, what are they even for?

Yeah, got one of those in a hotel in Florence. Definitely weirded me out conceptually, but I assume they're not electrocuting people on the daily so whatever.

Heh. Or shaving blades [0]. Just don't touch the water!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjJ1N4uJyV8

I remember reading (or watching) about these shower heads and IIRC, there is very little current making it's way into the water (or at least it wasn't traveling very far down the streaming water to reach the bather, I don't remember the details).

  I reckon if the mineral content were just right, it might not end so well though.

People in prison in the US use the same method to boil water for ramen/drinks on 120V household current.

As so someone living in the US, I'm often amazed by most the rest of the world relying on outlets and plugs for safety, instead of safer voltages.

The US uses 120 V because it evolved that way historically, not because it’s safer. Europe’s 230 V systems have better plugs, grounding, and breakers, and they end up being just as safe in practice, if not safer.

US residential power distribution transformers are 240 V, with a center tap. There are sometimes 240 V plugs, when high-current appliances aren't hard wired. Usually that's clothes driers and ovens/ranges. Water heaters and central HVAC systems are usually hard wired to 240 VAC.

For everything else, where more than a KW or two is overkill, the plugs connect between the center tap and one output of the transformer, for 120 V. It gives the advantage of high power where it's needed, up to 12 KW peak or 9.6 continuous, without dangerous voltages where the power isn't needed.

Modern outlets do have all of the modern safety features, like shutters and arc or ground fault detection, but the more appropriate voltage means that when they aren't available, it's still safe. There's kind of a running joke for DIYers that everyone claims to turn the power off before rewiring outlets, but no one really does, unless it's a 240 V outlet.

The concept of not cutting the power before rewiring seems hogwild to me. I touched a 120v line I thought I had turned off and am really grateful my ass fell backwards because no one else was home

I blew a chunk out of my electrician's pliers with 120.

A near-retirement electrician died wiring up his wife's new mall store by himself with 120.

120 is usually safe-ish, but it has dangerous power still.

What brand of pliers were they, and did they seem to be made from recycled gum wrappers?

A trick I learned when you want to flip the breaker but don't want to go all the way back to the panel is to just stick a screwdriver into a light socket.

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