A commitment to safety involves a few things. One is make sure you have appropriate protective gear - e.g. I wear a full-face mask when desoldering components or powering up a circuit with big caps for the first time. And I have large-size safety glasses that go over my reading glasses that I can wear the rest of the time without being too bothered by the extra weight on my face.
And you can outfit your bench and/or shop against particular dangers - e.g. I set a fan to blow across my bench when soldering so I minimize the fumes I inhale, plus I have added a GFCI outlet at the head of the branch of outlets serving my bench, so if perchance I do something stupid and interpose my body between hot and ground, the mains will shut off faster than relying on a breaker.
But - the very best way to stay safe is to learn and apply good safety procedures. Most of these are behavioral in nature. All the personal protective gear in the world means nothing if you never wear it, for example. Awhile back on a different forum, to do with folks who enjoy
building or modifying electric guitar amplifiers, I posted a list of links for learning about safety in the home electronics workshop. I'm copying & pasting those links below. The vast majority of this advice comes from EEs and professional electronics repair technicians.
As an example: the comment above by
@Averagesupernova about possibly burning a seriously deep hole in your flesh, if you're wearing a ring or other metal jewelry while working on a circuit that can supply not only a hefty voltage but a corresponding current, is completely on target. Thus in the last of these links, from the PDF book on "Solid State Guitar Amplifiers," you'll see a suggestion to remove rings, metal jewelry, etc., before working on anything live. You might think you don't need to apply this particular piece of advice when working on a tiny solid-state circuit powered by a single 9V battery wired up on a breadboard, and you'd be correct; however, my own view is that the way to build safety habits is to practice them from the get-go so that they really do become habits; this seems better than finding excuses not to practice them. But they can never become
unthinking habits; you always need to be mindful. Especially with mains or high DC voltage, no matter how many safety procedures you put in place, you will always be vulnerable when working on live exposed circuits; the point is to minimize the risk, in part by awareness that it's always there.
Here's those links -
I'd be interested in other links or advice people have to share . . .
