Good thing you never touched it. What your boss did is possible and if he really understands what he is doing and is not connected to the grid then he can do it. But for any ordinary homeowner absolutely do not try this. You could burn your house down or even worse kill some poor lineman/electrician working on the problem somewhere else on the grid who isn't expecting the equipment he's working on to go live out of nowhere.

[–] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Exactly this. It's so insanely selfish and pretty illegal.

That said, 120v backfeed is unlikely to kill and linemen kind of expect and test for residual current because of accidents like this causing falls, but it doesn't mean it's okay, and the chances of hurting someone are still non-zero.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

But doesn't the transformer convert the current back up? So it could be way more than 120v on a line that they're expecting to be shut down. At least that's my understanding of it.

But either way yeah, they probably check for it, but no you shouldn't do it because you there's a possibility that you could kill someone.

[–] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You'd have to be pumping up quite a bit I think to reverse through the residential transformer with just your little generac home unit, but you may be correct if there are no one way circuits or backfeed fuses. Even so, hopefully it wouldn't kill. Home voltage stepped up would lose its amperage and be like an extremely anemic taser potentially.

I'd love to hear from an electrical worker on the topic, but yea, it's the amps that kill more than the volts.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah I don't know much about it myself, but I know enough to not do this kind of thing. Just going by what I've heard about it.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Wouldn't it come down to wattage rather than straight voltage?

My guess is even if the voltage is ramped back up (which does sound accurate), that voltage would droop quickly if anything tried to draw power from it. Probably still not a fun time for anyone on the lines, but Tesla coils go up to something like 20kV and I got shocked by those back in high school. It fucking hurts (actually, more like extreme discomfort) but isn't fatal.

Not that I'm saying a generator or battery at 20kV is the same thing as a 20kV static discharge, just saying that even extreme voltages can be ok. It's about the amperage, not the voltage. Would a home generator or car battery have the amperage if ramped up to thousands of volts, especially considering the whole point of the ramp up is to reduce the amperage to increase efficiency.

I'd also figure, unless the outage was just one house disconnected from the grid, wouldn't any generator or battery end up powering the whole neighborhood and quickly overloading if it tried to send power back out to the grid?