A
Articate
Hey! I found this forum for the purpose of investigating this oddity I've found in my apartment, so here goes:
For some time my girlfriend has been saying she feels prickling in her hand when she uses the bathroom sink. I've proposed it was just the faucet that delivered the water in some way that makes it feel like that, but she's been pretty adamant that that's not the case, and today she proved me wrong, when I took my DMM to investigate. I found that there's about 0.2V of voltage in the running water from all the faucets in my house. Only Volts DC is sensitive enough to measure this on my DMM, so I realise it's probably the right way to measure voltage in this case, but to my DMM it has a clear polarity, meaning I get up to -0.2V when switching the probes. I get nothing when I touch the probes together (of course), and it recently struck me that no DMM are ideal, so the thought has occurred to me that it is the DMM itself that's doing this in some way. I even tried measuring voltage over a single 330 and 10k Ohm resistor to see if I'd get any sort of reading, which I didn't.
So, there's the statement of my girlfriend. She says she's felt it time and again when she's using the bathroom-sink, and I asked my mother today, and she said she's felt it, too, particularly when she's had a cut or similar on her hand, which makes sense due to loss of resistance. I have felt the prickling myself today, and it also hurts holding my tiny cut on a finger under the water, even if water is just running down my hand, and not dripping on the cut itself, making me pretty sure we're dealing with actual current. I have been unsuccessful in measuring any current in the water, so the only reading I've done is V DC. We're in an old apartment building in Norway, from 1912, well preserved. As I've understood, in the old days you'd actually ground something by hooking it up to the copper plumbing, since the copper plumbing was actual ground. I've theorized the possibility that someone below us on the building (we're the top floor) as changed out the old copper pipes, and the pipes have lost their natural grounding. In the kitchen, where I also get a reading, the metal sink has continuity with ground from a socket in the room, and the faucet itself gets a sort of geigerteller sound going when you try to measure continuity, but I'm guessing that's because it's not a solid faucet, and probably has some inner tubings.
We're baffled. My father is very knowledgeable on household electricity and plumbing and he's a DIY guy that knows all the inner workings of such things, so I was stomped when he didn't get what this could be. So I'm hoping someone here can help understand what this is. I'm still open to this being nothing. Water in any cut can hurt, and I might've just felt tingling from warm water when I felt my alleged prickling today, so I don't know.
For some time my girlfriend has been saying she feels prickling in her hand when she uses the bathroom sink. I've proposed it was just the faucet that delivered the water in some way that makes it feel like that, but she's been pretty adamant that that's not the case, and today she proved me wrong, when I took my DMM to investigate. I found that there's about 0.2V of voltage in the running water from all the faucets in my house. Only Volts DC is sensitive enough to measure this on my DMM, so I realise it's probably the right way to measure voltage in this case, but to my DMM it has a clear polarity, meaning I get up to -0.2V when switching the probes. I get nothing when I touch the probes together (of course), and it recently struck me that no DMM are ideal, so the thought has occurred to me that it is the DMM itself that's doing this in some way. I even tried measuring voltage over a single 330 and 10k Ohm resistor to see if I'd get any sort of reading, which I didn't.
So, there's the statement of my girlfriend. She says she's felt it time and again when she's using the bathroom-sink, and I asked my mother today, and she said she's felt it, too, particularly when she's had a cut or similar on her hand, which makes sense due to loss of resistance. I have felt the prickling myself today, and it also hurts holding my tiny cut on a finger under the water, even if water is just running down my hand, and not dripping on the cut itself, making me pretty sure we're dealing with actual current. I have been unsuccessful in measuring any current in the water, so the only reading I've done is V DC. We're in an old apartment building in Norway, from 1912, well preserved. As I've understood, in the old days you'd actually ground something by hooking it up to the copper plumbing, since the copper plumbing was actual ground. I've theorized the possibility that someone below us on the building (we're the top floor) as changed out the old copper pipes, and the pipes have lost their natural grounding. In the kitchen, where I also get a reading, the metal sink has continuity with ground from a socket in the room, and the faucet itself gets a sort of geigerteller sound going when you try to measure continuity, but I'm guessing that's because it's not a solid faucet, and probably has some inner tubings.
We're baffled. My father is very knowledgeable on household electricity and plumbing and he's a DIY guy that knows all the inner workings of such things, so I was stomped when he didn't get what this could be. So I'm hoping someone here can help understand what this is. I'm still open to this being nothing. Water in any cut can hurt, and I might've just felt tingling from warm water when I felt my alleged prickling today, so I don't know.
