> When I was a kid, for years our fridge would sometimes give me a
> tingle when I touched the handle.
Ours would do more than just tingle, if you made the mistake of touching the
refrigerator and the sink at the same time !
> I discovered that it had been plugged into an old, ungrounded
> outlet with one
> of those grounded-to-ungrounded adapters, with the little
> grounding pigtail cut off.
Ours was made before safety grounds were required, so the cabinet was not
grounded to anything. Apparently the motor insulation was less than
perfect, because the cabinet would float to 50-60 volts if it wasn't
grounded, but not flow enough to notice if it was grounded. But less than a
milliamp can give you a substantial shock and I suspect it flowed a lot more
than that.
Still, it was still cooling just fine when I gave it away many years later.
I'd built a water carbonator into it that I and my friends used through
college to make soft (and hard) drinks, but it wasn't worth hauling to CA
and my folks didn't want it back enough to pick it up from my friend's
house. AFAIK it was still running when he sold the house a few years later
and left the reefer in the garage.
Randall
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