finally, good "voltage or current" answer

Electoboom who touched a microwave oven transformer: You can't kill me

My rule of thumb is “if the numbers look scary, then be scared”

"But Touching That Doesn't Kill Me Either" -styropyro

Seeing styropyro rub the car battery leads together and make those big ass sparks was some supervillain type shit. Getting some whiplash from iron man 2 vibes.

I can’t believe he actually called Australian currency ‘low power’

This kid is getting the mad man look. He is going places. What ever company he starts, I'm investing.

“What kills you: amps or volts?” Me: Actually it’s the electricity

"start with low power stuff like i did-" BBRRRRRWR

Very good that you said freqeuncy and duration too.

This guy is so freaking cool- he looks like someone tried killing him by dumping a plugged in toaster into his bath but it just ended up giving him super powers and immense knowledge of how power works

It's actually the stupidity that kills

The way someone explained it to me was like a waterfall. You can have HUNDREDS of tones of water rush over you at little to no elevation, and you wont die. You can have a drop of water fall from thousands of meters above you, and you wont die when it hits you. but when you combine both, a thousand tonnes of water dropped from thousands of meters up.... well, you get the picture lol.

if it go *kssssh* = no kill if it go *ueeeh* = no kill but if go *fwooooum* = kill obvious /s dont go playing with the angry pixies at random.

I’ve just gained confidence about hooking up jumper cables

imagine the first person to touch the tesla coil and finding out its not gonna kill them, and then him trying to convince other people that its not dangerous

“Is it voltage or current that kills?” ~ “Yes”

As an electrician, I will completely agree. The physics behind electricity is not really difficult to understand, but it is for some ppl and that's when things go bad. Like anything else, a healthy dose of knowledge, a heaping level of caution and a pinch of paranoia keeps you from being on the wrong end of those angry little pixies. "How do I know I'm a good electrician? I'm still alive."

The "amps vs volts" thing, as well as the "electricity only takes the shortest path to ground" misconception shows how many people are dangerously overconfident in their knowledge of electricity.

Finally, someone who doesn’t say “amps kill”

Love a responsible guy politely teaching us about electricity. I dont know responsible ppl in my life, this is genuinely relaxing

*"Is it the volts or amps that kills?"* *"let's find out"*

I've been a commercial electrician for 6 years. Your knowledge of electricity makes me feel like I've been standing still my whole life

Looking at the comments and the amount of people saying "it is amps" and then proceeding to say that you need voltage to deliver the amps before it kills is ridiculously high. They are literally just proving Pyro's point unless I'm missing something, which is possible since I am no electrical engineer.

0:08 We had an electrical safety "expert" give a talk at our work place who said it was current not voltage which kills. I got into an argument with some senor engineers afterwards about whether it's safe to touch a 12V car battery, I'm glad to see I was right (might not want to try it on a boat with salt water though). :D

This is a solid short video.

I've totally used a car battery on a few people that swore by the "volts doesn't matter, amps are what kills" Grabbed a car battery, explained it can easily output over 100amps, then look them dead in the eye, and grab both terminals and ask "why aren't I dead???" Then a wonderful teaching lesson about ohm's law and why it doesn't harm me

Love how he has his hair in a bit of a frazzled style lol

whenever i get asked about electricity i always say, "well it depends..." the dark arts confuse too many

and people call gamers nerds? This guy is a real life super villain

Bro this guy is just a supervillain who overdosed on antidepressants at Arkham Asylum and was then released as it was determined that he was no longer a dander to society.

Me, a proud watcher of electroBOOM videos: “styropyro, please, PLEASE don’t say Amps!”

I have the utmost respect for car batteries and this dude welded a bar to it lol. 😂

I love that he had Aussie coins there in his speaker

I Love you videos man, good to see the science and see someone interested. Reminds me of the Magic School Bus and Bill Neigh days when kids were encouraged to care about science more.. its good to see.

Ive tried many times to learn about electricity but it just seems beyond my comprehension or i havent put enough effort in it. Watching these videos has made it way easier to understand for a simpleton like me thanks!!

*ElectroBOOM liked that*

Lol I was scared to jump my car until I realized I was holding both leads and not getting shocked.

I think people often forget that this dude is like very smart and went to all the college

The question is about a few things: what path is the electricity taking through you? If you're touching a few kilovolts in one hand and your bare feet are grounded, you're dead. The voltage that matters is the voltage across you, or the voltage between what you're touching and ground. Voltage and current are related by the resistance that your body offers to ground. A high current means your tissue can burn. Or your muscles will contract, meaning you won't be able to let go of the wire/lead you're holding. If your skin is wet the resistance decreases exponentially. It also depends on if the current is alternating or not. DC is less dangerous than AC because it can't start heart fibrillation as easily. In fact, defibrillators use DC to fix fibrillation. High frequency AC is actually less dangerous than low frequency for the same reason. 60Hz AC (the stuff in power lines) is therefore incredibly dangerous even though it's relatively low voltage at 120V.

Aussie coins!

I'm proud to be this channel's 15th subscriber

"Start with low power stuff like I did" kinda has a "work your pain tolerance up like I did" kinda vibe lol

Styropyros hair says it all about his history with electricity

My choice for high voltage playing is DIY 10 pF capacitor. You can't charge it very high because of corona (not a virus). And if you charge it to 5-10kV, discharge will not kill you.

Where'd you get the Aussie coins from lol

It would be funny if during recording he would said "touching this doesn't kill me" and after touching it he would die

"You're dead before you hit the floor" - shocking, frankly.

Jerry rig everything be saying “it’s not the voltage, it’s the amps”

The human body has an internal resistance of 1'000 ohms so you need one volt for every mA. It's the weakest that will be the bottleneck.

I'm impressed how he didn't say "pretty cool right?" 😂

“Your dead before you hit the floor” he said that so cheer fully

Current kills when there is enough voltage to run it through you, I suppose is the most succinct way to put it. Ofc that neglects scenarios like super high frequency AC often just burning rather than shocking

Amps kill... but voltage is the ability to push amps through something. So the answer is yes.

Bruh I love how his hair is all frilled and staticy😂😂😂😂

I just want you to know that you are doing a fantastic job, please continue this into your older ages.. you won't regret what life has in store for you thats for sure! Thanks for the interesting content it's quite electrifying!

Well, power (Watt) = voltage (V) * current (A) right Generally in physics more power is more dangerous, whether its electrics, mechanics, dynamics, you name it.

POV: You are trying to find some 9 year old with 50 year of electrical experience 💀💀💀

I would suggest that it is the voltage, source impedance, frequency and duration that determine the lethality of a shock or arc flash. The current through your body is a variable dependent on those factors.

This mans electric bill must be through the roof

Why isn't anyone talking about how handsome styropyro is, he looks like a freaking supermodel.

I got a feeling that if you have to ask this question you shouldn't be fucking with it

Your neighbors must hate you with how much you make the lights dim

Electro boom would probably approve

I'm glad to hear someone say "both". Of course, many people will compare voltage to pressure. And in terms of pressure, there are limits to how much pressure is safe for humans. And the same does for voltage. If something is low voltage, there is less of a "force" that wants to push electricity to the other end of a battery. And because our body has a high resistance, there won't even be much current anyway. its like trying to accelerate a car with the energy of a single bullet's worth of gunpowder. you need both more energy, and a greater pressure of energy to push a car, or to create a deadly current. Terrible explanation XD But voltage and power are like 2 sides of the same coin. A higher voltage with the same resistance causes a higher current. So having higher of either can be deadly. What matters is what the *voltage potential* is. A falling pebble has little potential to hurt you, and much larger rock has a greater potential, because, more energy.

Yo!....bro your a bad ass looking scientist 😎

This guy has a voice that sounds like it should be in a movie

Bro shocked my self as a child telling my cousin we had flashing Christmas lights? Caught my fingers in the plug. Wow.. I'll never forget that Christmas

Low power stuff?

I don't really like this explanation, it treats voltage and current as if they were independent. To be clear, the amount of current passing through something is a direct result of the voltage across it. It is ultimately the current that kills you, but you cannot get a high current without having a high voltage. To go through the examples you showed: - The car battery can produce many many amps, but it won't when passing through your body because your body has a high resistance. - The tesla coil (and indeed a regular static shock) has thousands of volts and therefore actually does produce quite a high current, but this only lasts for the smallest fraction of a second, which isn't enough time to actually cause any damage (which is something you did allude to). - The power supply setup has both a high voltage (and therefore high current) as well as the ability to sustain it, so it is quite dangerous. TLDR: Prolonged current is what kills you, but current is a direct result of voltage.

I don't even touch both ends of a AA battery, I stay irrationaly safe in hopes that it builds a habbit in my brain

For the car battery it's only 12 V which is not enough voltage to push through your body. The reason the rods spark like that is because they have a very low resistance and touching them together is like opening a massive valve on a low pressure dam so it dumps a bunch of current. But you could block a small hole in that damn with your finger because it's low pressure and your body has a high resistance. The high voltage stuff like a van de Graff generator don't hurt much because although there is a great deal of force behind the charge there is not much charge so it quickly drops to 0 volts after slapping you hard with a tiny bit of current. But if you sustain that voltage because you have a lot of charge you can kill someone.

THANK YOU Get so trigged by the "it's the voltage that kills not the current" crowd, I used to say that it's the charge (Current * Time in seconds) that kills which I suppose is more accurate but still isn't the full story

No one came back here yet?

His hair is perfect for him.

Finished watching this entire channel 👍 More please ❤️

a cool 284 likes and 199 views, makes sense

Basically to put this into an easier to understand form, imagine you have an character in a video game that deals 100 damage in 10 seconds, and an other that deals 1 damage per milisecond. Who deals 100 damage first? Well the second one does. This is an example of what between intensity or voltage kills someone.

You’re the best dude, keep going. Your jokes are so awesome

We have come to the conclusion: Styropyro is invincible.

If you have enough voltage to overcome the resistance of the human body, and the source is capable of delivering more than 0.1 amps, that can be lethal. Car batteries are only 12 volts (12.6 fully charged) which is just not enough to overcome the human body's resistance. The tesla coils are such low current that it's not enough to hurt you. Anything over about 40 volts (in normal conditions) that can deliver any amps at all is where you can get yourself into trouble.

I don't get why people always try to go for such cryptic answers to such a simple question. My answer: Amps don't exit. You can't put x amps through a circuit at will. Amps are determined by the voltage provided and the resistance of said circuit. A = V/R. The human body has a fairly high resistance, so to put a lot of amps through it you need a lot of voltage, otherwise it gets divided into nothing. The ultimate thing that does damage is how much actual energy gets put into your body, and the measure for that is watts (W = V*A). If A is dependent on V (because your body has a fixed R), then more V makes more A makes more W. It's like a truck, it can hit you going 100mph, but if it's made out of styrofoam it's not gonna hurt you too much (you are the resistance to the path of the styrofoam), but if the truck is made of solid tungsten, you are gone. Think of that weight as voltage. One thing is for sure, in order to deploy a lot of V, and therefore a lot of W, you need a lot of power. if you're using a small fan rotating from the wind as your generator, and use a transformer to bring it up to 5000 volts, the second the 2 leads touch your skin the fan will lock up instantly and those 5000v will drop to 0v, so even though it may have been able to deploy a few thousand W at first, it only did so for maybe a few nanoseconds, which isn't enough to destroy your body (think about it like an induction stove top, you need sustained power to eventually make water go hot enough to the point where it evaporates). Unfortunately for anyone who touches a power outlet those fans on the power network are actually either tens or hundreds of 300ft tall wind turbines or something equally as ridiculous - able to continuously deploy the power of many tungsten trucks hitting something at 100mph. These are facts. And universally true. The reason you can touch Tesla turbines like that is because high frequency current going through a conductor has what is called the "skin effect". The current will gather at the edge of a conductor. Plus small Tesla coils don't have the infrastructure to continuously deploy those many V, and when it's touching you it's doing so through many high voltage pulses that last a very short time and your skin has time to dissipate that heat. So while it may have very high V (and therefore W) many times a second, it only ends up deploying them for a very minute fraction of that second, spread over many points of that second. Essentially like many small fans of the previous analogy. So the W may be high for a few ns at a time, but the average over the whole second is still extremely low. If you have a big Tesla turbine, the frequency and duration won't save you. Your skin can only dissipate the energy from the small pulses fast enough, and a big turbine will overwhelm that ability. Skin effect still applies, so you will get serious skin burns instead of internal organ damage - which is preferable. So if you're trying to ask what kills, the answer is W. Not peak W, but W sustained any amount of time that overwhelms your body's capability to dissipate that energy. And it kills most efficiently at lower frequencies where it can go straight to the parts of you that keep you alive.

"ONLY A COUPLE THOUSAND VOLTS AT LESS THAN AN AMP" FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Your stuff is inspiring man keep doing you

You should make some videos about skin care tricks and tips.

*shocks himself*, *dies*, *different guy walks in*: “it was both”

*start with low power stuff to build up your resistance to higher stuff*

This was more helpful than I thought it'd be, but electricity still scares me.

This man is one joker moment from a supervillian. Love it. Long time sub

That speaker vibration at the end feels like a shitpost and I can’t stop laughing

I don't want to blow up my 10€ speaker.

“Start with low power stuff like I did” *Speaker explodes*

Back in highschool, my teacher was trying to teach us the concept of electricity and I was the first one that got asked the same question. At that instant, all I could think of was no amps means no volts and vice versa, so I just answered “1 cannot exist without the other, both are equally as dangerous at the right amounts.” He just turned to face the class and said “Well it looks like I could dismiss the class earlier than I thought”. Turns out, he was expecting a discussion and a whole debate with students on both sides of the argument… I killed all the fun because he then continued to give us homework and that was it. :/

That's why I dislike the DANGER signs that only call out volts. What did volts do to deserve that?

I remember changing a car battery when I was 14. My dad always told me that a car battery is safe to touch and it won't electrocute me. The problem was that he didn't make me aware that if the positive charge hits a metal in the car, it will short the battery. So yeah, car batteries are safe to touch but if you hold the positive charge with a ground, it may cause some dangerous things to happen.

Came because that looked like a jiu-jitsu shirt Stayed for the lesson

“Start like I did” *coins vibrate violently*

Lmao I’m seeing this about 2 weeks before doing my own solar. Only electrical work I’ve ever done is a basic inverter installation. If you don’t hear from me a month from now, you know what happened

They tried to make it seem simple when I was in school and I thought I was dumb. I wasn't overthinking it. It is that complicated.

His advice for us was given while his hair looked like he stuck two fingers in the socket! 🤣🤣🤣