How do they know which is which?
How do they know which is which?
Serious question.
28 comments
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By taste.
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Fun fact: A skilled linesman can use their tongue to tell the difference between 9V DC and 115kV AC.
The more you know*
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You can tell it's 14.4kV by the linemans muscle spasms and sudden loss of consciousness. If he bursts into flames or is immediately vaporized, that's the 115kV.
Although, the way you can tell if the lineman really knows what he's doing is if he gets someone from the right-of-way crew to do the tongue test for him.
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115kV AC.
well, they can, once....
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A great tip for those who need a little cooling off after the end of a hot day; who would have thought to include AC with power lines! What will they think of next?
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Fluke makes a bunch of tone generators and circuit finders that you can use to figure out which line you need to work on. I assume linesmen have something similar for their more robust needs.
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Power linemen have phasing sticks to determine which phase is which.
Datacom wires are, to start, much lower on the pole than power cables, and have markings on the cable jacket to determine what the cable actually is (fiber, coax, tel, etc). Beyond that, there is usually some tagging at each service point.
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That's nothing!
Sorry for the stock imagery; I've seen even more extreme salad but can't find it now.
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When we had our broadband installed the guy doing it took way too long and got very frustrated and made a mess of it, but it worked. Two days later it stopped working.
When the fault engineer came and fixed it, turned out the original engineer had connected us to the wrong cable, so when another engineer came to set up our neighbour's Internet, they disconnected ours.
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Cut it and wait for someone to complain.
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Ah, the 'ol reliable Scream Test.
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If you think this is bad you should visit Mexico City. I don’t know who has the worst wiring in the world, but it’s like your photo, except 10x more tangled and everywhere you look you will find wires literally dangling in front of you while you walk down a street or cross walk. Who knows which ones are live.
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I love weird style transformers.
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More than meets the eye?
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28 comments
Pro tip: you can use the plastic tabs from bread bags as little wire tags
Additional Pro Tip: Colored Zip Ties
Good tip though 👍
Zip ties are too small to write on.