Disagree. DC current will seek the path of least resistance, and will not go down the pole.
I’m unsure if this is an apartment, but I would start by reaching out to the landlord and say your lights have been acting up whenever they are using it. Maybe say your electric bill has been higher, maybe stage that a little bit by simply leaving a light on for a month. Have them inspect the floor damage too.
Once they leave, I would install cannibalize a power cable, plug it into the wall and hook the hot wire up to one of the screws.
The benefit of using AC, is that it is less likely to take the path of least resistance and travels as waves back and forth, doesn’t necessarily matter if they are grounded or not, they will feel it, likely marginally lower since it is also going into everything their 8ft pole is touching.
…I don’t know why I’m on a villain arc this morning.
Ah btw, if there’s resistance while drilling a hole for a ceiling lamp, stop.
Could be a heating pipe, with decades old heating sludge.That’s just quitter talk.
A car battery would do shit all. Dry skin potential point is like 65V.
I highly doubt the electricity would flow to the pole itself at all if you connect both contacts to the top
Theoretically, the building is ground and you only need to connect one cable.
But I’m with you, use AC.
The screws will melt and probably start a fire with the wood they are screwed into. The pole might get hot too from the current that goes through the fasteners but most of the heat would be in the screws and the fasteners and dissipate before it reaches the pole. Hardly any current will flow through the pole itself.
This is cute, but also in case anyone needs to learn something today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstitial_space
That wiki says it’s common in hospitals and labs. Interstitial space is not the same as a floor cavity.
Also
The heights of these spaces are generally 6 to 8 feet (1.8 to 2.4 m) and allow easy access for repair or alteration
So yeah not common in a residential building.
1.8m!? There’s no way in hell a landlord would allow such a perfectly fine living space to go the waste!
Malkovich?
Tell me you are american without telling me you are american
This bit has nothing to do with America, we don’t have that kind of space between floors in residential buildings, either. You have plenty of real things to shit on us for, but this isn’t one of them.
Make friends with the legends who live downstairs.
How thin would your floors and ceilings need to be for this to be real?
My browser history now includes several Amazon listings for stripper poles.
I have learned that:
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The listing ALWAYS calls them “dancing poles” but Amazon knows what you mean,
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About half of them are sold as “unisex” even though all of the photos of them in use show women,
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Only some require drilling into the ceiling. The few that do ship with screws or lag bolts that are approx. 2 inches in length and come with drywall anchors.
So, if installing any of the poles from Amazon’s first page of results, your floor would have to be approximately 1.5 inches thick.
If the downstairs apartment had no ceiling treatment and you looked up at joists and subfloor, you might get here if she decided to attach between the ceiling joists. In a typical residential structure with a drywall ceiling, you’d need lag bolts some 10 or 12 inches long to reach through the plate of the pole, 3/4" of drywall, 8 or 10 inches of floor system depending, 3/4" of subfloor and 1/2" of flooring.
Excellent answer.
I suspected the same, but metrically.
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Thinner than the lag bolts are long…?
Technically true.
I got drill bits that can go pretty deep. The reason this shit doesn’t happen to professionals like myself is that I am scared of electricity and power tools and have no clue what I’m doing and have people do it for me.
SMH
Ok but for real, that wouldn’t work, right? How would them holding it complete the circuit? The circuit is just gonna be from one screw to the top of the pole back through another screw, not the part the person is holding.
You can short the terminals on a car battery with your body with no issue (there’s a theory that that’s why you see it in movies so much - if anyone actually tries it the studio isn’t giving them an idea that actually works. Same with duct-tape gags and chloroform), but it might melt the hardware and set the floor on fire which would be fun! What they should really do is connect a HV source and charge up the pole. Won’t cause any lasting harm, but hopefully it’ll convince them they drove a screw through a live wire.
Who the hell told you you can short a car battery with your body? You absolutely can’t.
You definitely can. As in you can grab both terminals and not be injured.
Source: am high level electrical engineer.
That’s not a short, by definition.
Isn’t it? You’re shorting the battery terminals by connecting them directly, it’s just a shitty wire lol
The body is a resistor, limiting the fire of the system in the same way if a lamp would be in the circuit.
A short is a circuit with ideally no impedance, there isn’t an ideal circuit and one can debate how much resistance would invalidate the term ‘short circuit’ so both of you might be right.
Yeah I think closing the circuit might be more accurate than shorting it in this case. That’s how we referred to it when I was training to be an electrician.
Oh yeah? What level?
Two joints
That’s decently high ngl.
deleted by creator
Just checking: Is this a semantic argument about my use of “short”?
The way you worded it makes it sound like it’s very easy to short a battery with your body, not that attempting to short a battery will cause “no issue” because it won’t actually work.
I’m aware - I very intentionally spared everyone the lecture on the mechanics of how this works because it is, on the whole, very boring. However if we really wanted to get into the boring technical details nobody but us cares about then yes, you are indeed shorting the battery, it’s just for a ludicrously small amount of current. Ohms law (I = V/R) gives us that.
Oooh, because we’re too dumb to understand the finer details of electrical engineering, is that it? IS THAT IT?
Because yeah I am too dumb to understand even the coarser details of electrical engineering.
Yes exactly, I cannot stand the idea of you plebs learning things. How dare you even ask about this.
Thing is, you also called it “shorting” the battery. Usually a short is an unintended, unsustainable low resistance path.
While your body may technically close the circuit, calling it a short makes it sound like an actual electricution risk. That combined with the unclear “no issue” usage made it pretty confusing, I thought you had no idea what you were talking about until I saw your reply.
It’s just the common parlance. I wouldn’t have done this were it a more technical setting, but this is a shitpost community - so I’ll just have to beg forgiveness for my imprecision. Fortunately, should anyone go to test this by fondling their car’s terminals, no harm will befall them due to my lack of strict accuracy in the description here (though they might get rebuffed by their car if it’s not in the mood).
Did you mean short circuit the battery using your bare hands?
I meant contact both terminals at once with your bare hands.
But that won’t short circuit it is my point
Guys, GUYS! Calm down, you are all a bunch of nerds.
How do you mean?
I mean, a car battery isn’t going to do anything even if you could complete a circuit. You can just grab the terminals on a car battery, 12V isn’t high enough to be noticeable on dry skin.
You’d want to solder on the hot lead of an extension cord hooked up to 120 if you wanted to make sure they never touch that pole again.
Disclaimer: don’t do this, it’ll probably kill.
A electric horse fence is a better option. Will zing you but isn’t lethal and also has an intermittent current. Specifically designed to be touched by living things without harm. But stay away from cattle fencing, that can kill someone with a heart condition.
You would have to try pretty hard to kill yourself with a hotwire even if you had a heart condition. Like lay on your side on the ground and grab the hotwire so maybe the circuit went through your heart and not entirely followed the shortest path to ground along your side.
I think there is potential for some non lethal zapping if done right (one terminal to the poles other to ground)
Your skin is where most of the body’s resistance is, and electrocution / shock can occur at much lower voltages if applied internally/ to a cut.
There’s an urban legend about a navy Electrical engineer stopping his heart by trying to measure his internal resistance with a voltmeter- he stabbed one probe into each of his thumbs and the portion of a single volt the meter uses to test resistance going across his heart was enough to cause afib.
Now, with pole dancing, theres some potential, for a sweaty bikini to make contact with both an electrified pole and the interior of the dancer’s labia, conducting enough electricity to impart a noticeable shock.
No matter the voltage though, I think the main problem is the body being part of the least resistive, or any, path to ground. Unless the screws holding the bottom of the pole also protruded through the downstairs neighbor’s ceiling, and you run the negative wire out your window and into theirs, connecting both ends of the pole to the battery…
Even if you had wires on both ends of the pole, nothing would go into the person because the path of least resistance would be the pole. You would have to energize the pole and directly connect the person to the other wire in order to complete the circuit. Then the resistance of the human body becomes an issue, and using this paper as a reference, the worst case scenario of internal body resistance is ~300 ohm, and the threshold for immediate cardiac symptoms is ~100 mA.
Then, 12V / 300 ohm = 40 mA. So closer than I’d like, but probably not fatal even in the absolute worst case scenario where there is no electrical resistance provided by the skin and a direct electrical path through the heart.
I was thinking no fatal but feel able. Seems like I was way overestimating the ability of sweat as a saline solution conductor to pull power away from the pole and create a shock on the bits below though.
Not unless the person two floors downstairs is in on it
For someone to get electrocuted, the current needs to flow through their body. Electricity always follows the path of least resistance, so there’s basically no way to do that from upstairs.
If you attach both terminals of the battery (or a stripped extension wire) that wouldn’t do it. Assuming the pole is conductive, the electricity would just go into the screws, into the pole, across to the other screw and out. If the pole isn’t conductive it would probably do nothing at all. Maybe the floor is conductive, in which case it would go into the screw, through the floor/ceiling and out the other screw. There’s just no way to do it where the electricity flows from a screw, down the pole, into the body of the pole dancer, then somehow back out and up to the battery.
Even if the person who owned the stripper pole wanted to electrocute themselves it would be difficult. Assuming the pole is conductive, if you attached one electrode near the ceiling and one near the floor, the electricity would just flow through the pole. It wouldn’t make a detour to go through the body of the pole dancer. You’d basically have to clip one side of the battery to your toe, the other side to the stripper pole, and then grab the pole with your hands. And, even then, it might not do it – you’d have to have sweaty hands and toes to make the path through your body conductive.
I really hate the movie trope where people can get electrocuted by stepping into a puddle that has something electricity-related in it. It’s almost as bad as the trope that you get blasted backwards if you’re hit by a bullet / shotgun blast.
so there’s basically no way to do that from upstairs.
Incorrect.
stripper poles are tubes and spin on bearings. follow these instructions and you can most certainly electrocute someone with one.
- drill a hole in the center of the floor that feeds directly into the “tube” of the pole.
- strip 2-3 feet of a solid core copper wire(10-3) to bare copper and kink it into a zig-zag shape that gives it enough width to touch the pole inside.
- feed the wire down into the tube until it stops
- connect that wire to common
- connect the bolts to live
- turn the lights on when you hear them on the pole
- zap!
- make sure you’re using a 30amp breaker and switch
- prepare your butthole for the cops when they show up
- accept you probably just killed a person. two stupids don’t make a less stupid.
You’ve put a worrying amount of thought into this.
🤣 I really didn’t. I used to be a contractor and just understand how this stuff works.
best way to not kill yourself is to know the thousands of ways to die.
Do you really? It seems like you don’t actually understand, because this won’t work.
why not give it a try and come back to tell me I’m wrong.
I don’t need to, because I know how electrical circuits work. I don’t think you do. But, go on, explain why I’m wrong.
What makes you think that will work? That sounds like a very complicated way of just connecting the common to live with no human in the loop.
Ikr, this at least makes the pole get hot because current is actually running through part of it.
But at no point is a human part of the path of least resistance for the electricity.the pole wouldn’t get hot unless it was made of a ferrous metal like steel or iron. most of these poles should be made of aluminum.
You’re confusing induction heating with resistant heating.
the gauge of metal the pole is made from is pretty thin. on top of that, it’s very likely to be made from aluminum.
if electricity follows the path of least resistance, it would be through the person.
- 70% water
- large contact surface
- typically two points of contact from lower to upper. this is why you need to lower the wire as low as you can down the center of the pole with most of the insulation still on. you want to force the electricity to travel as far as possible until someone touches it.
Ok, you’re still failing here. The water content of a human body is irrelevant. A large contact area is irrelevant.
Let me make it easier for you. As I’m sure you know, to be electrocuted an electrical current needs to flow through someone’s body. What part of the neighbour’s body is the current going to enter, and which part is it going to leave?
Nah, that wouldn’t. But if you connected just the hot line (right eye of the outlet smiley face) that would do it. Wouldn’t recommend it because you could kill them by electrocution or kill even more people with a fire.
Sure, if you want the battery to short out and start a fire.
Cut the tips off then drill out the screws so they break off the next time they use it
Seriously though, this is def something you take up with the landlord, the fines and payment for the repairs alone will be punishment enough.
A car battery would not do much. Let’s try 40kHz AC?
Did you mean kV? I don’t know if 40kHz is high enough, but I know at some point it doesn’t even shock anymore, just burns. Hence you can take a screwdriver in your hand, and get it close to high frequency Tesla coil / slayer exciter circuit (not that I know the difference) and have it flow through you no problem, just if you touch the spark directly it burns.
That only solves your problem. It doesn’t add problems for the perpetrator, which is the only thing we are concerned with here.
add a drop of mercury on each screw
You can use it on them too
Cut the hands off the downstairs neighbour with it. Now they don’t need a stripper pole. Pole gets removed and everything goes back to normal (after all the court cases and prison time etc).
Doesn’t actually solve your problem…you further fuck up your own hardwood
We are already in pretty firmly academic territory here
Hammer and punch them back down. Or drip lube down the bolts so it makes the pole unusable.
Or glue. Glue would be hilarious.
Yeah my landlord wouldn’t be too happy.
Running a sufficient amount of electricity through it may turn it into a heated rod.
Could you get a really big drill and drill out the screws?
Then when they try to use the pole it falls down.
This would be an extremely time consuming and potentially destructive process.
First, take a grinder and chop off the tips. Then go to the hardware store and get a 1/8, or maybe 3/16, bit that you think is long enough (note- these are expensive). Then go home. Tap a pilot divot in the flattened tip of the lag bolt to get started. Drill your bit all the way through the bolt without snapping it. Take frequent breaks to cool the bit and avoid dulling the edge. Note that bolts tend to be made of quite hard steel to deal with the high forces they are put under, so expect this to take an annoyingly long time. Then do it again with a slightly larger drill bit. Then again. And then again. Etc. Until your bit is just barely smaller than the bolt. Finally, you go in with a drill bit as large as the bolt, and absolutely destroy all your hard work, tearing down the sides of the bolt in a haphazard way. With a large amount of finagling and cursing, you manage to set the bit in thr hole in the top of yhe stripper pole, and finally completely destroy the bolt, so the remains fall on the floor below.
Far more expedient would be using the grinder to grind the tip off, then cut a slot in the flat surface you made. Or maybe a +. Then put either a flat or phillips bit in your impact driver, and reverse the bolt out. How well this works depends on how hard they cranked down the bolts. If this fails, I would get a hole saw, cut around the bolts, and clamp some vice grips to them to turn them out from above.
But really, I would call a real estate lawyer and force my neighbor to pay a contractor to do all the work for me.
Great guide, but you forgot the step where the bit snaps inside the bolt so you now you have get through that too.
