Toaster in the Bathtub: What Would Happen

bathtub and toaster

“Full” refers to the water to be overflowing. This means there’s a path to the ground.

The electricity passing through the toaster will take the informal path — through the heating elements and back to the supplementary side of the power circuit.

But some of the electrons will strive into the water and “leak” over to the stranded overflow. Pure, distilled water is an insulator. But people don’t usually fill bathtubs with distilled water. They fill bathtubs with tap water normally, having a cluster of liquified compounds.

Most of those compounds are ionic — they dissociate in solution into a positive and a negative ion. That makes tap water a pretty good conductor of electricity.

It’s even worse if you have artificially unstiffened water: metals like calcium that create comparatively insoluble salts are replaced with sodium.

Sodium salts are disassociated easily and produce heaps of ions to carry electricity through the water.

If your skin is wet, it has less than 10% the resistance of dry skin.

Hence, ultimately the consequences hinge on whether your house obeys modern building codes. If it does, all the passages have ground-fault interrupters.

These are little electronic strategies that compare the current flowing in the two sides of the power circuit.

If more current is flowing in one side than the other, some of the currents are “leaking” out and going somewhere it shouldn’t. Possibly through a human being.

So, the GFI bolts off the power until somebody comes along to reset it.

If your outlet has a GFI, then you will have a very unfriendly time period, and then the power will shut off.

But if your opening does not have a GFI, then the likelihoods are you will be incapacitated by the current passing through your body and be incapable to get out of the tub. And then you will be electrocuted.

In rare special cases: one might have two outlets in the garage that don’t have GFIs.

Thus, the resulting electric current is momentary and nearly invisible and likely would just trip the nearest circuit breaker or fuse — but grabbing the electric device while in the bathtub would be extremely lethal.

In the end, with an earth-clattering sound of ruptured plastic and an unqualified cast iron boom, the toaster would crunch into the bottom of the bathtub to a less than pleasing adjunct of plastic shards recoiling around the inside of the bathtub.

One’s fuse might blow. If one is not in the bathtub nothing would happen because a properly installed Bath tube is grounded. even if you sit in the bathtub nothing should happen.

if you sit in the bathtub and there is water in the bathtub, your survival depends on the kind of circuit breaker, which extremely lethal.

But it depends on whether the toaster is connected to electricity and whether the bathtub is filled with water. If it is an empty bathtub, you will break the toaster and maybe the bathtub also.

The danger is when the bathtub is full of water and the toaster is connected to electricity.

Lastly, in a nutshell, nobody should try these at home wondering whether these stunts usually as shown in movies are equally effective or not, owing to the fact that these are extremely dangerous and lethal.