How many amps does an electric mouse zapper use to kill a mouse? And can it kill you?

Question

Surprisingly, there is little on this simple question. We all know that it's the current (amps) that kill in an electric zap and NOT the voltage. So if my mouse trap uses two 1.5V AA batteries, how many amps are being used to kill the mouse? And is it enough to kill a person? (I've read it takes about 100mA to kill a person).

Answer 1

it's not entirely a simple case of amps verses current. you need volts to get the amps to flow. V=IR

but it's the amps that flowing through something critical that cause problems...



small currents can kill due to flows through heart, it really don't take much current through the heart muscle to make it contract, and it might/might not restart beating properly. (defibrillators use just this method to stop heart that is beating in the wrong pattern after stopping there's a fair chance such a stopped heart will once again start beating with an incorrect pattern, but there's also a chance it will "reboot" to the correct pattern. see the interesting little app at http://thevirtualheart.org/appletsindex.html)



larger amps can kill in the same way as passing a current through a resistor makes the resistor get hot. P=R*I*I. heats cells up . An extreme example is how the sap of a tree that's hit by lighting will often boil, and the sudden production of steam will often blow the tree up.



the mouse/bug zapper probably generates high voltage using something akin to a flyback convertor, which are commonly used to generate the HV that fires the sparks of a petrol car. . transformers operate on the change in current so if current flow through the primary of a step up transform is changed quickly the transformer output can be a burst of very high voltage. not much ampage though.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_converter

Answer 2

Mouse Zapper

Answer 3

This zapper generates quite high voltage to force current passing mouse body to be killed. It could also kill you if you put both hands to its high voltage terminals. 10mA passing through a human heart is enough for killing,but the power source should have high enough voltage like more than 200V to overcome dry skin resistance.

Another household device like fly and mosquito trap that produces 5000V to zap the fly. It has more killing power and a danger device compare to the mouse zapper.

Answer 4

An expensive unit may multiply the 3v into a 1000 or so, at the

cost of draining the batteries badly. Who is going to hold the

mouse down so you can apply the juice ? Nobody. Batteries

ain't cheep these days

Try some poison baits. I got a rat the other day with cayenne pepper

on a piece of fried fish. I put it inside the fish. He got about 10 feet.

Don't put it where the neighbor's dog or cat can get it= smells good.

Gud Luk, P