My father wanted to kill a mole by putting a steel pipe into the ground and connecting live wire to it. I thought it would cause the short circuit but it didn’t. Why?
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Earth can be a good or poor conductor. I’ve seen 7200 volt distribution lines laying on dry sand and not trip the breaker.
An overcurrent device is just that, it needs to see current in excess of its tripping point. In the example above, dry sand is little more than glass, the same thing insulators are made of. It simply didn’t pull enough current to trip.
So maybe your Dad hooked the circuit up to a 20 amp breaker. If he’s in sand, rock, etc., he might only pull 1 amp, or 15 amps…neither of which would trip the breaker. But it only takes 5 milliamps through the body to kill.
What your Dad has done is made a death trap for anything and anyone that touches that pipe, which at the very least opens him up for all sorts of liabilities even if he doesn’t kill someone.
There’s an old story of some idiot that wired his trashcan the same way to keep the neighbors dog from pissing on it. Trouble is, the neighbor kid leaned his bike against it and it killed the kid instead.
Your Dad is playing with fire.
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