Blue Door Painters discusses fundamentals of electrical safety concerns arising in painting and redecorating projects
Electricity is all around us. It charges our air during the dry season, creating sparks when we go to open our car doors. It courses through our walls. It makes our gadgets operate that heat and cool our houses, bring us light in the darkness, and give us the power to communicate with people halfway across the world in a manner of seconds. Whenever you remodel your house, you need to take all of the potential hazards into account while in the planning phase of the project. For many jobs, this includes carefully going over any and all electrical hazards present on the job site.
With most coating projects, the largest concerns are unfinished circuitry in a developing house, and the electricity used to power many of the tools that make redecorating work more effective and efficient. Regardless of whether you are a contractor or a homeowner, understanding where the electrical safety hazards are, and what you need to do to to safely navigate them, is important to make your redecorating experience safe and productive.
In order to safely navigate electrical hazards, you have to understand how electricity works. It may seem like you flip a switch and the machine you are using just starts working by magic, but this is not the case; electricity works in a predictable, and, if properly understood, controllable manner.
Electricity involves a flow of energy, or current. Wherever this current is directed, an electrical charge will occur. Certain materials channel or conduct this current, while others block, inhibit, or insulate it. With clever design, electricity can be channeled through devices that harness the current in order to accomplish work.
All electrical equipment uses a series of paths created by putting conductive materials where the current is desired and insulative materials where it is not. These paths direct the current from a source of electricity, through a work-accomplishing device, and then to a “ground”, or area of electrical attraction and dissipation. In the case of a ‘closed circuit’, the ‘ground’ is a return to the electrical source itself, which channels the current back through the circuit instead of dissipating it; in this manner, electricity can be recycled and circle through a circuit until it runs out of momentum.
Electric current will always seek the most conductive path from its source to the most readily available ground. If all is functioning properly, this current will be completely contained within the tool you are using or the wall you are painting, and will never be exposed. Electric hazards occur when the intended path of the current gets exposed or interrupted.
The dangerous thing about electricity is that the human body is a readily conductive substance. While pure water cannot easily conduct electricity, water with mineral impurities (such as salt, a significant component of human blood) conducts electricity regularly. And the earth – the literal ground that a person stands on – is a readily available ground. Unless it is blocked from doing so by a non-conductive substance, an electrical current will seek the earth through a human body if that body interrupts its circuit. The flow of this current is very disruptive to the critical electric functions of the body, and can lead to burns, numbing, pain, tissue failure, organ damage, loss of consciousness, and death, and it will continue until either the source of electricity dissipates (which is unlikely to happen in most situations because the current is generated by a community power plant), or the contact between either the person and the circuit or the person and the ground is interrupted.
To understand electrical hazards and accidents, therefore, it is important to understand what substances conduct electricity, and what substances insulate it, so that you can identify when an exposed or interrupted current – and therefore an electrical hazard – is present, understand where the current is likely to flow and how to protect against it, understand how to interrupt a current in the event that oneself or another worker gets caught in one, understand the severity of an electrical threat, and understand when and how the heat generated by electrical current can cause a fire hazard. Stay tuned for our next installation, where we get down to the nitty gritty of electrical safety for painting and redecorating.