can the effects of stray voltage on a fish be misdiagnosed as a disease in the early stages of exposure to said voltage??

Tamberav · Aug 5, 2021

Treefer32 said:
"Your body needs to be thoroughly grounded in order to feel it."

Hmm yes... but fish swimming in a tank are not grounded either.

david campbell said:
According to the internet. HAHAHAHAHAHA. People can die from swimming in electrified water. Seems odd, I mean they are floating in the lake just like the fish?

1. Adult swimming in or near water that is electrified, his or her body can become a conductor for that electricity,

2. If you feel a shock, swim away from the dock, helps you remember what to do if you feel tingling or shocks. Yell to others to cut the power source.

3. Electric shock drowning is a term used in the US to describe a cause of death that occurs when swimmers are exposed to electric currents in the water. In some cases the shock itself is fatal,

4. Electrocution in water poses a serious and deadly danger to everyone who swims in a lake or a pool. Tragically, the person becomes a conductor of the electricity as it passes through his or her body. This paralyzes the person’s muscles, rendering him or her unable to swim, which could ultimately cause the person to drown.

IMO here’s my two cents about a grounding rod addition. I am and am not a fan, I know a little about the purpose the rod serves. The water with a grounding probe completes the circuit. The current hits the water and seeks out the closes ground, I believe that if using one of these rods. a sump installation would be best because again; the circuit seeks closes ground and since most of the gear is in the sump, alongside the rod then the fish should be protected, unless it’s a dt wave maker that goes bad. then the fish are toast due to the fact that the current passes thru them ,down into the sump and that would most defiantly kill the fish or anyone at 110-120 v

“A ground rod will prevent a person standing in saltwater from being electrocuted by a “charged” aquarium. But it ensures that all the fish in the tank will be electrocuted in case of a 110-volt power “leak”. If you have a power “leak” the electrical charge can travel through the aquarium and through the fish to the ground, killing the fish. Pick your poison; you being electrocuted in a very rare set of circumstances or your fish being electrocuted in a relatively common set of circumstances.”

again very odd that people are affected by swimming in elec water but not the fish. yall heard this before get out of the water if there is lighting. Again just my two cents spend it as you wish adding to the debate to become better educated.

There are videos of people swimming in pools just fine... until they go to reach for the metal railing or ladder and suddenly they are now grounded and being shocked/electrocuted. Stories of people in a lake off a dock and when the metal ladder is lowered they get shocked (from what was a broken dock light).

They are not just swimming, they ground themselves and then get shocked.

I am not going to link any videos as it is disturbing but you can easily find them.

#2 in your post even says to swim away from the dock... for this reason. Swim away from the object that will ground you.

I am not sure what a fish would have to do to ground itself as we don't have metal apparatuses just hanging out in our tanks and most equipment is probably in a sump. Maybe some crazy unlikely scenario you have a broken heater on one side and a frayed pump wire on the opposite side causing current to travel between them.

Treefer32 · Aug 5, 2021

Jay Hemdal said:
I understand what you observed with the tang, but the causation isn’t what you think it was, and we aren’t talking about the same issue. There are chemical reactions in the water that occur with actual short circuits in marine tanks. Additionally, the fish can be affected by the current flowing between the negative and positive lines, not to ground. However, that isn’t what people mean when they say stray or induced voltage….what you had was a open short. When people say stray voltage, they are talking about issues ranging from 5 to perhaps 50 VAC. This is measured between the tank and the ground. There is no electrical potential until contact with the ground is made. In your case, if you had put probes in the tank, one side to the other, you would have gotten a reading on a voltmeter. With stray voltage, you would not have gotten any reading.

Stray voltage does NOT cause health issues. My worry is that people then don’t spend the time to determine what the true issue was.

Jay

Thank you! I did not understand the difference. (my lack of understanding of electricity!) Great point on finding a potential "cause" then stopping any further treatments. I see this in IT all the time. We change something, everyone has something new to blame for their problems that they have been doing wrong forever. Just something new to blame. So, I get it, the path of least resistance in identifying a problem is the one that gets the blame, truth or not.

Jay Hemdal · Aug 5, 2021

Lowell Lemon said:
Jay,

So are you saying that fish health is not affected by electrical current or just HLLE? The OP asked the question as to whether electrical current could be misdiagnosed as a disease process?

Correct, I’ve never seen any fish health issues attributable to stray voltage, only from short circuits. Freshwater systems and direct current may be different….
Jay

Jay Hemdal · Aug 5, 2021

david campbell said:
According to the internet. HAHAHAHAHAHA. People can die from swimming in electrified water. Seems odd, I mean they are floating in the lake just like the fish?

1. Adult swimming in or near water that is electrified, his or her body can become a conductor for that electricity,

2. If you feel a shock, swim away from the dock, helps you remember what to do if you feel tingling or shocks. Yell to others to cut the power source.

3. Electric shock drowning is a term used in the US to describe a cause of death that occurs when swimmers are exposed to electric currents in the water. In some cases the shock itself is fatal,

4. Electrocution in water poses a serious and deadly danger to everyone who swims in a lake or a pool. Tragically, the person becomes a conductor of the electricity as it passes through his or her body. This paralyzes the person’s muscles, rendering him or her unable to swim, which could ultimately cause the person to drown.

IMO here’s my two cents about a grounding rod addition. I am and am not a fan, I know a little about the purpose the rod serves. The water with a grounding probe completes the circuit. The current hits the water and seeks out the closes ground, I believe that if using one of these rods. a sump installation would be best because again; the circuit seeks closes ground and since most of the gear is in the sump, alongside the rod then the fish should be protected, unless it’s a dt wave maker that goes bad. then the fish are toast due to the fact that the current passes thru them ,down into the sump and that would most defiantly kill the fish or anyone at 110-120 v

“A ground rod will prevent a person standing in saltwater from being electrocuted by a “charged” aquarium. But it ensures that all the fish in the tank will be electrocuted in case of a 110-volt power “leak”. If you have a power “leak” the electrical charge can travel through the aquarium and through the fish to the ground, killing the fish. Pick your poison; you being electrocuted in a very rare set of circumstances or your fish being electrocuted in a relatively common set of circumstances.”

again very odd that people are affected by swimming in elec water but not the fish. yall heard this before get out of the water if there is lighting. Again just my two cents spend it as you wish adding to the debate to become better educated.

I’m a boater and ESD is a very real issue that is not well understood. It happens in freshwater, not marine harbors. Most commonly, the person is electrocuted entering or leaving the water when they become grounded. There are cases though, where people have died while floating in the water. In these cases, it isn’t stray or induced voltage (the potential voltage that people measure in their tanks) but rather, a short circuit between two points. An electrical engineer tried to explain to me that this creates current flow that fans out in a field, not a straight line, and that if you intersect the field the current flows through you. The best example I saw was an electric eel swimming in a tank of mixed fish. Little tetras could swim right up to it with no issue, but when a 3’ pack got within about 20”, it intersected enough of the electrical field to get shocked. This was DC of course, and in freshwater.

Jay

ddc0715 · Aug 5, 2021

well, this has been fun to read. so the answer to my OP/question

"can the effects of stray voltage on a fish be misdiagnosed as a disease in the early stages of exposure to said voltage??"
is NO. . Unless said voltage transforms into a current traveling to a grounded point creating a direct narrow, path concentrating the current, this could happen if a DT (NOT SUMP) is grounded. strong direct current kills fish in an instant not slowly as does a disease. dang, I was hoping the results would be different, guess I will remain in fallow for a while.

i have a bad pump that is producing 117 v in the water, I need to buy some feeder fish for my oscar. I see an experiment in the near future. 5g bucket, add the pump without a ground then repeat with a ground.

this is clearly a deep dive into myth-busting the urban legends about stray voltage. I love this hobby.

Lowell Lemon · Aug 6, 2021

All I have seen in this is the expression of opinion versus several individuals as well as store owners who have given experiences as possible fish death by both induction and electrocution. More than one of my customers stores experienced losses until we isolated the problems and grounded the sumps. The fish loss stopped immediately so I guess we all just imagined a correlation. I still ground my tanks cause it is cheap and a safety factor for me as well as the fish!

Dagon the fish god has spoken so our shared experience is invalid on this forum.

Let us also disregard the fact that a fish's lateraline is sensitive to electric currents. At least that is published science...but then again I am not a fish god. I thought science involved observations and repeatable results from several sources to prove theory. Again my ignorance is on display.

Paul B · Aug 6, 2021

Stray voltage in a home tank will never be as high as 117 volts. That is the voltage the power company supplies to homes in the US and stray voltage can never be that high.

Stray voltage has no appreciable amperage and will not effect anything in a tank as was said many times. That stray voltage isn't going anywhere until you put a meter lead in there.

A ground probe will also make it move but it will move the probe and not the fish as electricity always goes to the least amount of resistance.

If you walk under power lines, induced voltage will be induced into your head. Those people with purple Mohawk hair styles spent a lot of time under power lines.

Stray voltage will not kill you or your fish. 117 volts will kill you and your fish but that is not stray voltage.

You can swim in a pool with any amount of electricity going through it as long as you don't try to get out as you will be grounded and fry.

Birds can and do sit on high voltage wires with no problems (although some of them have high voices)

All the fish and whales in the sea don't get killed when lightning strikes although if they are close to the strike that 5,000,000 volts will kill them, not the 50 volts of induced voltage in your tank.

(Electrician 50 years)

Jay Hemdal · Aug 6, 2021

Paul B said:
Stray voltage in a home tank will never be as high as 117 volts. That is the voltage the power company supplies to homes in the US and stray voltage can never be that high.

Stray voltage has no appreciable amperage and will not effect anything in a tank as was said many times. That stray voltage isn't going anywhere until you put a meter lead in there.

A ground probe will also make it move but it will move the probe and not the fish as electricity always goes to the least amount of resistance.

If you walk under power lines, induced voltage will be induced into your head. Those people with purple Mohawk hair styles spent a lot of time under power lines.

Stray voltage will not kill you or your fish. 117 volts will kill you and your fish but that is not stray voltage.

You can swim in a pool with any amount of electricity going through it as long as you don't try to get out as you will be grounded and fry.

Birds can and do sit on high voltage wires with no problems (although some of them have high voices)

All the fish and whales in the sea don't get killed when lightning strikes although if they are close to the strike that 5,000,000 volts will kill them, not the 50 volts of induced voltage in your tank.

(Electrician 50 years)

Paul,

You are/were an electrician? Just this morning, my son went to the union hall to apply for his electrician apprenticeship! They have a cool program here where he takes classes at the community college, and the college works with the trade unions for placement.

Jay

ddc0715 · Aug 6, 2021

Paul B said:
Stray voltage in a home tank will never be as high as 117 volts. That is the voltage the power company supplies to homes in the US and stray voltage can never be that high.

Stray voltage has no appreciable amperage and will not effect anything in a tank as was said many times. That stray voltage isn't going anywhere until you put a meter lead in there.

A ground probe will also make it move but it will move the probe and not the fish as electricity always goes to the least amount of resistance.

If you walk under power lines, induced voltage will be induced into your head. Those people with purple Mohawk hair styles spent a lot of time under power lines.

Stray voltage will not kill you or your fish. 117 volts will kill you and your fish but that is not stray voltage.

You can swim in a pool with any amount of electricity going through it as long as you don't try to get out as you will be grounded and fry.

Birds can and do sit on high voltage wires with no problems (although some of them have high voices)

All the fish and whales in the sea don't get killed when lightning strikes although if they are close to the strike that 5,000,000 volts will kill them, not the 50 volts of induced voltage in your tank.

(Electrician 50 years)

Well not calling you a liar but if 117 is not possible then a professional opion on what I am looking at Here would be appreciated.

That is water scooped from my pool,yes it a hint green. Chlorine is hard to find right now. Hahaha not salt but i can do one in salt if you wish.

ReefGeezer · Aug 6, 2021

david campbell said:
Well not calling you a liar but if 117 is not possible then what am I looking at. Here.

That is water scooped from my pool,yes it a hint green. Chlorine is hard to find right now. Hahaha not salt but i can do one in salt if you wish.

If you are seeing 120VAC between the water & ground, the pump has a short that is allowing actual current to flow through the water when a ground is provided. This could be dangerous, Throw that pump away. Watch your fish. Then decide if it their condition improves. If so... maybe the short was having an effect... if not, something else is at fault. BTW, if that is a short, your GFI should have tripped.

ddc0715 · Aug 6, 2021

come on in an have a seat an Welcome to the debate on ---- is stray voltage a problem for a fish ---- so far the opinions are --- a few say yes and a few say no. the gfi did not pop, on either my tanks plug or this outside plug i used for the photo shoot

Paul B · Aug 8, 2021

david campbell said:
Well not calling you a liar but if 117 is not possible then a professional opion on what I am looking at Here would be appreciated.

That is correct, 117 volts is line current and not stray voltage. Like ReefGeezer said, throw that pump away.

Jay thats great. I was a union electrician in Manhattan. My apprenticeship was almost 8 years.
It was supposed to be five years but when there is no work, they extend it because apprentices work cheap.

After I finished my apprenticeship which was working by day and school two nights a week they made you go to college for another 2 nights a week. I am glad I didn't have to do that.

I worked for I think 48 years and retired early. But being it was Union I get free medical and dental if I want it. Very good pension as well as 401K.

Many young people don't realize they will be old a lot longer than they are young and if you don't want to be working when you are 70 or 80, you need to plan for the future.

ppatches24 · Aug 8, 2021

I couldn't figure out why my fish and inverts could have died on the same night and all looking in great / perfect health disease wise even post mortem. The days/ week leading up to the event, my tomini tang got REALLY aggressive towards my clowns and my firefish would stay in the rocks all day. They wouldn't be out in the open like they usually were. The night it happened during feeding I didn't notice the tang out and about but it was later than usual for feeding and didn't think to much of it. My fish and cleaner shrimp got fried over night because of a heater that was 'leaking' voltage. I don't know that much about electricity and I don't want to make things up. Im not claiming it was one type of voltage or the other that killed my fish, I dont know / dont really care about labeling it with the EXACT type of power/voltage/current it was. But when ever that heater was in the tank the water voltage would start to climb .1 volts every 4 seconds. I have 2 of the same heater; one was exhibiting this behavior and one wasn't. Even with the controller to the bad unit 'turned off' and still plugged in to the wall. It was still leaking power. After long enough of being in there my guess is it finally hit a high enough voltage and killed all but 2 of my fish (a female clown and a male mandarin).

During this process most of my acans, blastos, and some sps were shriveled up for seemingly no reason. After the heater was out of the tank. The next day they were more fluffy and more extended than they have been.

Also in the process found out that my outlet that got wired up wasn't grounded. Sure it was GFCI but the ground wasn't working. So there was nowhere for the power to go except the fish/ the tank. RIP. Lesson learned the hard way. Now its fixed.

A very salty note (so feelings warning) to the few that say no electricity doesnt harm your tank. Well I would send you my heater and tell you to put it in your tank and watch all your live stock be cooked but I couldn't do that to someone, just to prove a point could I? /s I also had to send it back to JBJ because they wanted to test it so I don't have it any more.

I cant wrap my head around some people not being able to understand that electricity, water, and life don't mix?!?!? Like do you stare into the sun to get better vision??!?!

What heaters are you all trusting?

Paul B · Aug 8, 2021

I realize you don't want to differentiate between stray voltage and real voltage but you have to. Stray voltage is everywhere. It is going through you and your fish right now. If you stand near power lines or a toaster it goes through you. That "Stray voltage or induced" voltage (or current) will not hurt your fish.

Real voltage which comes out of your outlets is different and will kill you and your fish and if your GFI wasn't working because you had no ground that "extra" electricity that your GFI would have stopped.

50, 60 or even 80 volts in a tank is just there because any electrical appliance you have in or near your tank will induce that voltage in there. The more "appliances you have in or near the water, the higher it will be but never as high as 117 volts. You can't get away from it unless you remove anything electric from your tank.

If people have no stray voltage in their tanks, they just don't know how to read it or they have a ground probe that doesn't allow your meter to read it. But it is still there.

Is your faulty heater full of dampness or water? If it is, that is real voltage and not induced. Electricity will leak out of it but that reading will be somewhere between 108 and 120 volts. It will kill you and your fish so if it is wet inside, throw it out.

So I have no idea why your fish died or why I went bald. I am also not an expert in anything "except electricity".

ddc0715 · Aug 9, 2021

so in my example, an OP of reading 117-119 v in the water is this real voltage? IF SO then i will have another question.

Brew12 · Aug 9, 2021

Jay Hemdal said:
I’m a boater and ESD is a very real issue that is not well understood. It happens in freshwater, not marine harbors. Most commonly, the person is electrocuted entering or leaving the water when they become grounded. There are cases though, where people have died while floating in the water. In these cases, it isn’t stray or induced voltage (the potential voltage that people measure in their tanks) but rather, a short circuit between two points. An electrical engineer tried to explain to me that this creates current flow that fans out in a field, not a straight line, and that if you intersect the field the current flows through you. The best example I saw was an electric eel swimming in a tank of mixed fish. Little tetras could swim right up to it with no issue, but when a 3’ pack got within about 20”, it intersected enough of the electrical field to get shocked. This was DC of course, and in freshwater.

Jay

I know I'm late to the party, but wanted to comment on this. For current to flow through a person or fish there has to be a difference in potential across this person. If a person is in fresh water and gets between the source of electricity and ground, they become the path of least resistance and current flows through them. This is exactly how electrofishing works.
In fresh water (but not pure water), you get a voltage gradient that is highest at the source and lowest at the ground. It is normally reasonably linear. If you have a 120V source and a ground 12ft away you should see 60 volts to ground at 6ft. Taking this one step further, if you are 6ft tall and lined up between the source and the ground, you would have 60V difference from head to toe which could potentially be fatal.
This is much different in saltwater because of the high conductivity of the water. The voltage at any point in the water will be almost exactly the same as any other point in the water. This is why you can't electrofish in saltwater. You can't develop a different in potential across the fish.

More to the topic.....
As @Paul B said, the source of the voltage matters. The hobby has come to adopt stray voltage as a term but it can be confusing imo. We see 2 types of voltages in our systems. One type is induced voltage, which is what most people are referencing when they say stray voltage. Current flow creates magnetic fields. Any time you have a magnetic field, an electrical conductor, and relative motion between the two, you induce a voltage. If you wrap a 50ft extension cord around a bucket of saltwater and power a large load from it, you can get a very high voltage reading from the water in the bucket. Every motor and power cord near our systems are inducing voltage into it but this process is very inefficient and transfers extremely little power. That is why we can use a ground probe to safely shunt this to ground. It only takes a few milliamps to remove it.
The other type of voltage is fault voltage, or a short directly to the water. These are the faults that can absolutely hurt a system. Instead of the weak voltage with minimal current and magnetic fields, these faults can generate very strong magnetic fields and high current flow. These are what I try to eliminate through the use of a GFCI in combination with the ground probe.

And one final thought to share. A DC pump may or may not cause a GFCI to trip if it faults in your system. It depends on the design of the power supply, design of the speed controller, and the magnitude of the fault.

Brew12 · Aug 9, 2021

david campbell said:
so in my example, an OP of reading 117-119 v in the water is this real voltage? IF SO then i will have another question.

I would agree that this looks like a fault voltage. If you would plug the pump into a GFCI outlet and add a ground probe, it should trip.
Your pool water must also be very conductive!