The DEADLIEST Electrical Tester?

this is a vault stick and it could kill you but how could something that's designed to protect you ultimately lead to your demise well in this video I'm going to be exploring the dangers associated with non-contact voltage testers and I'm also going to give you some tips on how to stay safe whilst using them and working with electricity all right your Legend I've got to put it in a disclaimer and that is that if you are in Australia you are not allowed to do any live electrical work unless you're a licensed electrician it's just as simple as that but I know in some other countries like the crazy Brits and the Americans you can actually do minor electrical works on your own home so this one's for you now it kind of goes without saying that these things are favorites amongst DIYs and electricians worldwide in fact I just rip this straight out of my tool bag but even as an apprentice I was told that these are nothing more than just a blunt instrument I mean they're literally blunt you know what I mean I mean you don't have to go far on electrical forums where people are calling these things deskix and widowmakers but how can such an Innovative technology get such bad press so I think to understand the dangers is you actually need to know how they work now there are a ton of different brands out there I've got two one here is the Vault stick and then another one that's always on is the prologue and if it does that throw it out I actually need that to spot all these different brands and models it's important to note that they all essentially work the same way and they use something called capacitive coupling you see the very tip of a vault stick is a small antenna and when it comes close to a voltage source it acts sort of like one side of a capacitor the very tiny current that is induced into that antenna is then boosted up by an amplifier circuit but as you may know you can't get current to flow unless you've got a complete circuit and this is where the kind of magic comes in it actually uses the capacity properties of your body or any other material to complete the path back through ground I think personally I'm bloody impressed now there are a ton of videos out there that can explain this way better than I can a couple of videos that spring to mind is Electro boom where he actually made his own one from scratch and then also bigclive.com where he took a vault stick and ripped it apart and recreated it I'll leave a link to those videos in the description below alright so now you know how it works I'm wondering if you can pick up on any of the dangers well well the first one is batteries now because these are battery powered of course you can have very little voltage but no voltage at all this as a result is unable to power the circuit and can give you some false positives now as good as a vault stick is it doesn't actually indicate to you whether there is any power on or if you've got low voltage on your batteries that's why some people prefer some of the ones where you can turn on this one as crappy as it is actually has an on off switch and you can see it's broken because it comes up straight away there are many other offerings out there that actually have an on off button now this can also be problematic because if the switch itself fails just like we can see in this recall then you can have an issue where people think that the power is off I mean you can't win now the second one's a little less obvious as the Vault stick relies on a return path to ground or Earth it means that if you've got a high impedance throughout your body or whatever you're standing on it may not give you a positive reading a good example of this is when you might be up an insulated ladder or in the roof where the path to ground just isn't that great and I can actually demonstrate how this works using a really simple power board and this leftover overload that I destroyed the other day in a video it was fun check it out so as you can see as I test across the top of this power board I could pick up the active pretty much anywhere but if I set this up on top of this overload get a signal and then touch and Let It Go there's simply too much impedance through the body of the destroyed overload for it to get up off the ground but when I touch it it uses the capacitance through my body so what do you do do you just throw your Vault stick away and never use it again well no it's actually a really good tool if used in the right way so a couple of tips before using your Vault stick now that you know how they work make sure that when you're using them you've actually got bare contact with your hands and a good grounding to Earth this doesn't mean take your shoes off you've already got enough capacitance it's fine another great tip that I was taught when I was an apprentice is that before any time you use it rub it up and down your skin to create static and this will give you an indication as to whether it's on or working again pretty rudimentary but it does work another great tip is to test it against a known source this is kind of a no-brainer if you know that there's voltage on a circuit somewhere test to see if it works against that and without a doubt you should not be using this as the single source of testing particularly when you are working with live electrical parts I found several documented instances where unfortunately apprentices have used a vault stick as their single source and as a result have suffered an electric shock so if this is just a supplementary testing device what do you use well I would recommend this this is the fluke rcd and socket tester and for you guys over in America that's GFCI I mean this thing is kind of a no-brainer I reckon the majority of people doing minor electrical Works would be working on a socket Outlet so these things simply plug in it gives you an indication as to the correct polarity and also you can test your rcd or gsci which I'm not going to do because all the power will go out now without a doubt the best thing you can use to detect voltage is a multimeter I've got to hear the fluke 179 a bloody love fluke now a couple of tips before you just go start poking probes into holes which you shouldn't do anyway first up test your tester and the best way to do that is put it onto ohms and then test the continuity of your leads around 0.1 or 0.2 ohms is absolutely ideal also why you have these connected move your test leads around if you get any abnormal readings or fluctuations it's probably that these are damaged and you'll need to replace them now you're satisfied the test is working Chuck it into ac voltage AC not DC so let's Chuck this in and see what voltage we get active neutral 240 volts right on the money yeah baby if you're in the UK your PIN outs should look something like this and if you're in the U.S they should look something like this hey if I didn't convince you why don't you go and check out my extremely hilarious but mostly dangerous electrician reacts series and if I did convince you just go and watch it anyway it's funny

Channel: thinkLIST

Views: 339,817

Keywords: volt stick tester, volt stick lv50, volt stick bright, non contact voltage tester, non contact voltage detector, non contact voltage tester pen, electroboom fail compilation #2, electroboom funny compilation 3, electroboom guitar, bigclivedotcom death, bigclivelive youtube, death stick, electrical tester, electrical testing, electrical tester how to use, multimeter, multimeter tutorial, how to use a volt stick, how to use a voltage sensor, how to use a volt sensor

Id: MjpA35Lgx9o

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022