That moment I figured out I'd been grounding myself wrong for 8 years

I've been doing bench work since 2016, mostly laptops and small boards. Last month I started getting shocks off a Dell Latitude that kept throwing weird USB errors, so I finally pulled out a multimeter and checked my grounding strap against the earth ground on the outlet. Turns out my strap was clipped to a painted screw on my wooden bench, which did basically nothing. A buddy who builds server racks pointed out I needed a dedicated ground point with bare metal, so I bolted a copper lug to the frame and ran a proper wire. Now the random lockups are gone, and I feel like an idiot for ignoring static for so long. Anyone else find out they'd been skipping a basic step for years, and what tipped you off?

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1 Comment

betty_scott1817d ago

Most people never even bother checking theirs, so you're ahead of the game.