Strange electrical anomaly
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This isn't one of those gag LED won't shut off type videos, it's 100% legit. Maybe someone it used to seeing this, I really don't know but thought I'd share it and feedback is always most appreciated.
A friend of mine asked if I could custom wire LED strips into display cases. I decided to solder them in place. When I touched the soldering iron tip to the positive (+12v) of the LED strip and put my finger on the resistor a few LEDs would glow. Maybe more of a flicker. My soldering iron's tip is earth grounded. I checked the soldering station and it is isolated with infinite resistance across the tip and the AC side with a dead short from the tip to ground.
Pretty freaky, there's an electrician coming to check it out. I couldn't measure any AC or DC between myself and that third prong but the LED had no problems showing it...
[video=youtube_share;dkZ-GjmX7As]
A friend of mine asked if I could custom wire LED strips into display cases. I decided to solder them in place. When I touched the soldering iron tip to the positive (+12v) of the LED strip and put my finger on the resistor a few LEDs would glow. Maybe more of a flicker. My soldering iron's tip is earth grounded. I checked the soldering station and it is isolated with infinite resistance across the tip and the AC side with a dead short from the tip to ground.
Pretty freaky, there's an electrician coming to check it out. I couldn't measure any AC or DC between myself and that third prong but the LED had no problems showing it...
[video=youtube_share;dkZ-GjmX7As]
![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/dkZ-GjmX7As/0.jpg)
Comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IelSPYNaVcw
Can you guesstimate the rate of "flicker"? 60 FPS maybe?
Seriously though, you can see how much electricity you have in you if you touch a finger on a probe tip on a scope
DO
TEST LIGHTS ON FLOOR
IF WORK THEN INSTALL IN CEILING
INSTALL: TEST LIGHTS ON CEILING
IF WORK THEN BEER
TAKE LIGHTS DOWN
LOOP
BEER: 'never got here
Long story short, the lights worked perfectly on the floor, but not on the ceiling. Turns out they needed to be grounded. But even ungrounded, they worked on the floor since they were relatively close to the ground/earth and the "field" made the connection. Quite maddening until I figured it out. Fortunately, in the kitchen, there was a nice new shiny copper cold water line handy to ground the lights, which quickly solved the problem. Eventually, I had that beer.
I soldered the rest of the strips in anyway:
The "designer" will be affixing the strips. Not my design, just the guy with the soldering iron...
Apparently if you stick LED's in an electrocuted hotdog they light up, regardless of positioning or polarity. The article doesn't explain how this happens, though.
Nothing looks bad to me but im not an electrician. Seems to be wirenuts in a grounded junction box looks fine. Your lights looks good by the way.