Linkrocks250 :
I work in a church and we have stage lights hanging up. I have to use a lift to go up and turn them off since our lightboard just went out. The last time I used the lift to go up and mess with the lights I was shocked by every light I touched and it really sucked. The lift isn't grounded so it's about 50K Volts and I'd prefer not to be tased every time I have to work on lights haha. How would I ground myself to avoid getting shocked?
You have a wiring fault if you are being shocked by anything inside of a building. Think a little bit- your stage lights connect to one or more circuits in your building, so you can throw the breaker(s) or pull the fuse(s) that supply the one or more circuits, which would completely de-energize that/those circuit(s) so you do not get shocked. I had a similar issue in a house I owned, there were a bunch of fluorescent troffers in a suspended ceiling and one of the lights had the ground disconnected. Whenever I touched one of the metal suspended ceiling supports, I got a shock. I tested a known ground to the support and got 65 volts on my DMM, which confirmed the issue. I threw the breakers to the lighting circuits, went through all of the fixtures, and voila, the previous Bubba didn't connect a few grounds. I connected them, threw the breakers, and surprise, surprise, I didn't get shocked.
50 kV is a lot of volts, that is substation distribution line/subtransmission line voltages, and would clearly easily kill you if you even got within a few feet of it (electromagnetic field effect) unless it were at microamp currents such as with a Van de Graaf generator. Even in that case, you'd still feel a shock, it just wouldn't be lethal.
You also would NOT get shocked if your lift was not grounded. The only way you get shocked is if you ARE grounded and a conductive pathway to a potential difference exists through you. If the light is at 50 kV (unlikely, but let's say it's true) and you are NOT grounded, you touch the light and you are also at 50 kV. No potential difference, no current flows, you are NOT shocked. The guys that work on the transmission lines that transmit 230 or 345 kV touch live wires all the time but aren't harmed. How? A helicopter drops them right onto the line and they touch nothing else, so there is no potential difference, so they don't get shocked. I know this because 1) I am an engineer and took enough electrical theory to figure it out, and 2) my folks have a pair of transmission lines running through their property, a 69 kV subtransmission line for the regional operator and a 345 kV transmission line for the national grid. Of course being a proto-engineer in my younger days I saw linesmen do their work and found out how they did it safely.
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