Friday, September 18, 2009

Zzzt! Oww! Zzzt! Oww! Zzzt! Oww!

I was leaning my arm on a Juniper firewall (which I use for work), and touching my iPod in its Bose dock, and got what felt like a heat burn (the Juniper is not cool to the touch), but turned out to be an electric shock!

Who's more likely to blame? Apple, Bose, or Juniper?

Time to dig out my multimeter.

 

UPDATE: I got my multimeter out and there is about 80 Vac between ground and the housing of the iPod when it's sitting in the dock. The other iPod in the house shows the same thing. I then plugged one of the iPods into the DC adapter (DC adapter into wall socket, USB-to-base cord connecting it to the iPod) and *that* gives 37 Vac between wall ground and the iPod housing.

WTF? Is this why iPods occasionally explode?

Or have I just managed to totally forget how to use a multimeter??

6 comments:

Aram said...

Someone local go check if JD is ok.

rantingnerd said...

Who is this "JD" you speak of?

Unknown said...

Are you using 3 pin plug?

rantingnerd said...

Kevin -- the Apple iPod charger wall-wart and the Bose dock plug are both (polarized) two-prong.

You think my house grounding is wrong? (If so, time to call the electrician....)

Unknown said...

Apparently what you describe is caused by bad or lack of grounding. I'm a CS major though so I'm obviously just relying that opinion.

rantingnerd said...

The neutral and ground are good (only small inductive voltage between them); neutral-to-hot and ground-to-hot show 118Vac. So that's not it. I think someone may have wired a few iPods backwards.