3 ms·
A hobbyist can definitely do the proper research and build perfectly safe high-voltage / high-current installations, no doubt about that. Electricity is indeed
by crote 3y ago
A hobbyist can definitely do the proper research and build perfectly safe high-voltage / high-current installations, no doubt about that. Electricity is indeed not magic. The key part here is knowing what you are capable of, and more precisely knowing where your limits are. However, it is quite obvious that this person has not done the proper research, and their work is held together mostly by hopes and prayers.
The problem is that random people on the internet see "guides" like these and treat them like an Arduino project: just something to mindlessly copy in a spare Saturday afternoon, and the worst that can happen is that it won't work. They will not do the research, and they will not take adequate safety precautions - they never had to do so before and they never had any issues, what's the big deal?
That's fine with most DIY projects. Heck, it's even fine with most DIY projects involving mains voltage - a guide for installing an outlet will always tell you to turn off the breaker first, at which point it really isn't all that dangerous. You're just plugging some pre-made and known-to-be-safe parts together, it's less complicated than building a computer. You have to actively try to screw that up.
This is a different beast. You're building a new thing which is handling mains voltage out of the cheapest parts you can find. You can totally do an Arduino-like project with that mentality - the average Arduino project going horribly wrong will result in a brief spark and some nasty smoke coming out, it's no big deal. But a project like this going wrong? It will set your house on fire.
- jacquesm 3y agoMostly agreed but: > But a project like this going wrong? It will set your house on fire. No, the most likely outcome is that it will either cause a breaker to trip or that it will simply stop working. 'it will set your house on fire' is only one of the three possible outcomes and the least likely one. It can happen though and that's why this guy should be doing his stuff for himself rather than broadcasting it to the world because the final product isn't 'good enough'. Apropos Sonoff, the brand you advertise in your original comment: they had a pretty serious issue at some point where they had a fuse in a holder inside the devices that got excessively hot because it wasn't rated for the current of the socket. And that is a fire risk. https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/as26oj/sonoff_fire_hazard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/as26oj/sono...
- crote 3y ago> It can happen though and that's why this guy should be doing his stuff for himself rather than broadcasting it to the world because the final product isn't 'good enough'. That's exactly the point I've been trying to make. Of course "it WILL set your house on fire" is an exaggeration and other failure modes are far more common, but the fact that it is even a remotely-possible-but-plausible outcome means projects like these shouldn't carelessly be shared with the general public.
- atoav 3y agoYeah, I mean that is indeed the most likely outcome. If there is the proper breaker installed, the wires are wired in the correct way, there is no lightning-induced power surge, etc. The idea of electrical safety rules is to reduce catastrophic consequences in unlikely scenarios. This way we drove down casualties.
- sokoloff 3y agoLikely interesting note: Mains voltage is not considered “high voltage” in industry (minimum 600 volts AC, but higher under many standards [1000VAC per IEC]). Mains voltage is “low voltage” in an electrical industrial safety context.