Teenager dies in bath from a phone?

Man of Honour
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I suspect it is more likely the water ingress around the charger itself was the problem and she touched somewhere close enough with all the water to get a mains shock.

(There are very good reasons not to have electric sockets in a bath or shower room after all).
 
Soldato
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I electrocuted myself on one of those disposable cameras you wind up.

What i did was take it apart and touched some copper plate, which AFAIK, discharged the capacitor powering the flash.

Pretty good shock, felt like at least 1 second of continuous discharge.

Anyone here know the voltage/ amps of that so i can compare.
 
Caporegime
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https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~p616/safety/fatal_current.html

Voltage is irrelevant when it comes to being electrocuted and all that matters is if the current can pass through your heart and having wet skin makes it more likely to happen

Voltage is not irrelevant, there is such ignorance of elementary physics in this thread. Voltage determines the current as per Ohm's law, I = V/R. According to your link wet skin has a resistance value of 1,000 ohm, 5V/1000 = 0.005A, well below the 0.1A that causes v-fib and that doesn't even take into account the internal resistance of the body.

What happened here is no doubt some mains extension socket being dropped into the bath.
 
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Soldato
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Probably a cheap knock off charger with poor seperation between the mains input and charging output. Delivered mains voltage up the charging wire.
 
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Soldato
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Teenagers are renouned for risk taking, not thinking of the consequences of their actions etc but i'm sure it's not just teenagers who have made such mistakes

I used to be a right headcase as a teenager, and to be honest I'm actually surprised that I survived those years with nowt more than a few minor broken bones and some scrapes and scratches (amongst the worse was gravel in my chin after trying to jump a canal on my Raleigh Mag Burner, that hurt like a ******* bitch). But one thing I never did was take live electrical items into the bath with me.
 
Man of Honour
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I used to be a right headcase as a teenager, and to be honest I'm actually surprised that I survived those years with nowt more than a few minor broken bones and some scrapes and scratches (amongst the worse was gravel in my chin after trying to jump a canal on my Raleigh Mag Burner, that hurt like a ******* bitch). But one thing I never did was take live electrical items into the bath with me.

My guess is that some people are so accustomed to carrying a phone that they don't think about it at all.
 
Man of Honour
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Probably a cheap knock off charger with poor seperation between the mains input and charging output. Delivered mains voltage up the charging wire.

A good chance - the design/construction on some of them, especially the cheap ones common in 3rd world parts, is shockingly bad.
 
Soldato
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Most countries appear to allow sockets in bathrooms. It's the UK that's unusual (for good reasons IMO).
You are allowed mains sockets in UK bathrooms I believe, they just need to be far enough away from the bath/shower - I think it's 3 metres. Of course most of us plebs don't have a bath or shower rooms that big. :D
 
Soldato
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Who are 'they'? Accidents happen all the time, why have you deemed this particlar girl deserving of your award?
Young enough not to have not had kids incident totally avoidable... Two big no no's everyone knows about... Fire and fuel, driving and texting, electricity and water... Perfect Darwin candidate ...
 
Soldato
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Voltage is not irrelevant, there is such ignorance of elementary physics in this thread. Voltage determines the current as per Ohm's law, I = V/R. According to your link wet skin has a resistance value of 1,000 ohm, 5V/1000 = 0.005A, well below the 0.1A that causes v-fib and that doesn't even take into account the internal resistance of the body.

What happened here is no doubt some mains extension socket being dropped into the bath.


Status-Unconfirmed by Darwin, But fun anyway!

https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html

:p
 
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Probably a cheap knock off charger with poor seperation between the mains input and charging output. Delivered mains voltage up the charging wire.


Quite a lot of the Chinese "wall warts" are truly astonishingly badly made and a plain fire / shock hazard, many have no proper low to high voltage isolation, and CE stickers are pence a sheet from all over the show.
 
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I electrocuted myself on one of those disposable cameras you wind up.

What i did was take it apart and touched some copper plate, which AFAIK, discharged the capacitor powering the flash.

Pretty good shock, felt like at least 1 second of continuous discharge.

Anyone here know the voltage/ amps of that so i can compare.

micro or milli Amperes but at about 1kV plus, a charged high voltage capacitor is dangerous but you would be very unlucky to die from a shock from a camera flash gun the cap will have little stored energy per se. Cattle electric fences are 5kV plus but a short extremely low amperage pulse. You know you've been bitten but you'll live to know not to touch it again ;) The real killers are high voltage DC supplies like some big RF amplifiers run. I have a 6kV at 2 Amp DC supply, not only would you almost certainly die, you would also suffer pretty appalling burns and flesh damage. It's volts that jolts but it's lots of volts with lots of mills that kills. A 12V car battery can supply up to a thousand amps but you can hold both terminals and feel nothing. Half an Amp at 500V DC can certainly kill if you are unlucky or have a weak ticker.
 
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