Isolation transformers, use of.

[ppppenguin]

What are doing is creating your own mains supply, completely floating wrt what comes into your house. You are using a double wound TX to do so. You are also separating your local bench "earth" from mains earth and any extraneous earth such as water pipes. Hence under fault conditions dangerous potentials can exist between your "earth" and any other earthed metalwork. If you can guarantee your workshop to be an earth free zone this is a recognised way of working under certain specialised conditions. Otherwise it's dangerous.

I'm not saying that there is a panacea. Moreover, this topic is about using an isolation transformer, not general electrical safety.

Since what you are doing is not really using an isolating TX but creating your own local mains supply this raises various safety issues. Judging by previous threads in various forums there is widespread misunderstanding about how to create a safe working environment. Much of this misunderstanding concerns isolating TXs but (if you'll pardon the pun) it cannot really be considered in isolation from other aspects of safe working.