Static Electricity

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1madison

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Has anyone ever experienced static electricity from a carpet destoying sensitive electronic equipment such as conference call telephones and laptop computers. This has happened several times in a large commercial building's audio visual conference center,where the arc that was made upon touching the phone equipent or plugging in a LT computer burned out the vital parts in the equipment.Voltage and grounding both checked out OK.
Thanks for any input
 
Re: Static Electricity

I had this happen to me several times on an old Commodore 64 Computer. As I recall the problem was that the On/Off switch was right next to a port of some kind and while reaching for the switch I got close enough to discharge into the port. After a few repairs/replacements I learned to leave that switch on and control it from a power strip.

Bill
 
Re: Static Electricity

Sure, it happens all the time. Problem is with the office/room design, not electrical.

One problem is the carpet. The carpet needs to be anti-static, or conductive to the floor below.

Floor sealer needs to be conductive, so the anti-static carpet will work.

Last is HVAC. You need to maintain 50-to-70% humidity. More than likey it has no humidification and the air is very dry.

Good Day
 
Re: Static Electricity

For now, until the room's environment is corrected, get into the habit of "Discharging" yourself before touching any sensitive equiptment. Simply touch something else that is grounded Before you touch the sensitive equiptment. They sell grounding- wristbands that you can wear that will solve this problem also.

Dave
 
Re: Static Electricity

Static discharge is a major problem for electronic designers. The individual transistors are incredibly small, so it takes little to zap one. Protective circuitry is employed on IC inputs, but this miniature lightning can find a way to the unprotected circuitry inside the package. So the physical design of the enclosure is critical. This becomes more difficult as the enclosures are shrunk to the extreme as in a laptop. On a related problem, I have seen at least two modems zapped by a lightning surge with did not bother the telephone itself.

There are special grounding mats available for such situations if I remember corretly.

We did not have this problem with vacuum tubes. Can you imagine a laptop made with vacuum tubes?
 
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