Talk:Orders of magnitude (current)

Some other suggestions

 * Lightning strike
 * Trip currents for domestic RCD (earth leakage) circuit breakers
 * Domestic appliances:
 * Light bulb
 * Low energy light bulb
 * Vacuum cleaner
 * Electric fan heater


 * Current flowing in a crystal-set radio
 * Minimum current to perceptibly light an LED (I just measured this as ~1uA for a clear LED)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.171.29 (talk) 14:25, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Andy Dingley (talk) 16:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Small current suggestions
10&minus;12 to 10&minus;5 could do with some more examples.

Things like:


 * Microcontrollers and various integrated circuits can draw these small currents in sleep mode etc...


 * There are also things like opamps and mosfets which would draw currents / leak currents in this range


 * Also a good capacitor's leakage current could be of this order. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidjessop (talk • contribs) 14:05, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Aluminium Smelters
The cells in aluminium smelters draw massive currents (5-10kA per cell) at relatively low voltage (10-50V). Somebody should add that with a proper source. CaffeineWitcher (talk) 21:14, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Add and correct currents related to human safety
The item "10 mA - Through the hand to foot may cause a person to freeze and be unable to let go" is imprecise, and cites a poor source (https://www.pupman.com/safety.htm)

There is already an excellent article in Wikipedia with this kind of information: "Electrical injury" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_injury). It contains a chart (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_injury#/media/File%3AIEC_TS_60479-1_electric_shock_graph.svg) with data defined by the International Electrotecnical Comission (IEC 60479-1). It has a good reference ( Weineng Wang, Zhiqiang Wang, Xiao Peng, Effects of the Earth Current Frequency and Distortion on Residual Current Devices Archived 2014-11-08 at the Wayback Machine, Scientific Journal of Control Engineering, Dec 2013, Vol 3 Issue 6 pp 417–422).

Some interesting data to add to import to the "Orders of Magnitude" list:

500 μA - currents between this value and 5 mA, passing from left hand to feet, are perceptible but there is no muscle reaction

5 mA - currents below this value, passing from left hand to feet, induces no muscle reaction

30 mA - up to this value, passing from left hand to feet, there is no irreversible effect

500 mA - currents above this value, passing from left hand to feet, can cause irreversible effects and ventricular fibrilation

2 A - currents above this value, passing from left hand to feet, for more than 50 ms, causes irreversible effects, whit over 50% probability of fibrillation. Andre.luchetti (talk) 16:38, 10 May 2024 (UTC)