Why you don’t get zapped when touching both terminals of a 12v car battery
In: Technology
Because your skin and body structure is a very poor conductor to electricity. Take a sewing needle and poke your fingers, and it’ll zap you no problem.
your skin is enough of a resistor to stop a 12v system.
If I remember correctly, your body has a resistance of about 100,000 ohms and a wrench has a resistance of about 1 ohm, so that’s why a wrench sparks and you don’t.
It’ll definitely zap a wrench; it’s probably the resistance of your skin. I bet if you lick both fingers and touch it it’d zap the shit out of you.
I am not suggesting that you _try_ this, but dry skin is higher resistance than wet skin, for example.
I’ve felt the battery zap me. It doesn’t work on your fingers but you’ll feel it on the soft inner part of your forearm.
You *do* get zapped.
Dry skin has an electrical resistance in the hundreds of thousands of ohms. 12V ÷ 100,000 Ω = 0.00012 amperes, or 0.12 milliamperes, or 120 microamperes. **Your body will conduct an electrical current that low, but you won’t feel it.**
Wet skin has an electrical resistance of less than a thousand ohms. 12V ÷ 1000 Ω = 0.012 amps, or 12 milliamps. This is definitely perceptible, even painful, but not fatal. Nonetheless, don’t touch a car battery’s terminals with wet hands.
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