static shock, need help
Jim
she touches anything. It can be in the house, the car, or a store when
shopping.
It really hurts her. :(
If she's on the couch and just sitting there and I reach to hand her
a glass of water we both get zapped!
It really gets her bad, I dont hardly have that problem, but sometimes
I get some shocks.
Wish there was something she could do. she says it halps a little if she
puts a pan of water on the wood stove for humity. It seems to be bad
right now in winter as we have a good fire going. Maybe makes the air
dryer in the house. But what do we do in the car, or when she's
shopping?
I told her she could strap a grounding strip on her wrist, and walk
around with a ground wire hooked up - But she's not buying that! :)
Hope someone knows of something - Jim - in the Ozarks
Ed Price
Jim:
You need to minimize her charging, and act to drain her charges too.
Assuming that ONLY your wife has this condition as a SERIOUS problem,
then it must be more a factor of HER than your shared environment.
Suggest she try different types of clothing to minimize triboelectric
charging. Avoid leather and rubber clothing combinations. Suggest she
remove suspicious synthetic underwear; plain cotton might be better. She
might be able to treat her existing clothing with an antistatic agent.
It may also be helpful to decrease her skin resistance by bathing more
often and using a moisturizer cream.
You are right to try to increase the humidity inside the house. Warming
up cold air will drasticly decrease the relative humidty. Humid air will
help to drain charges from objects. Install a powered foam belt
humidifier. That's a lot more capable than open pans of water.
Finally, the grounding concept is correct. You could get a commercial
ankle grounding strap. This provides a path from her ankle, through a
current-limiting resistor, to the bottom of her shoe. (She must be
wearing shoes, since she would already be grounding if she were
habitually barefoot.
Actually, you are not concerned so much with grounding as you are with
equalization of charges. You don't need to tether her to any fixed
ground point. Make her a little wand or baton, with both conductive ends
joined by a current-limiting resistor (try about 100K ohms to start, but
if she has a really huge surface area, she might need a 10K ohm to speed
the discharge time). She can use this to equalize charges before
touching other objects. (Now, some of the townfolks might start stories
about your wife thinking she's some fairy godmother, but that's THEIR
problem, right?)
Now, you might also want to get her a wrist strap (she could also wear
it on her ankle or waist or neck, be creative) with a "fuzz button"
patch. This would provide a disharge path from her skin through the
high-resistance fuzz. You would have to discipline yourself to touch her
fuzz button first whenever approaching her. Think of it as a "push to
start" button!
Finally, until you get this highly charged situation under control,
remember to keep her away from the still and the reloading bench.
Ed
jeff
I'm not sure how shocking things have gotten, but I do notice a big
seasonal difference out here in Colorado which made me notice a few things
that make a difference...
1. Feet shuffling. How does she walk around the house? Do you have carpet?
Check out the kind of shoes. Rubber souls (gym shoes)? Perhaps using some
other kind of house slipper could help. I tend to shuffle my feet around
more than my girlfriend, and I also tend to do most of the shocking.
Wearing socks instead of shoes seems to help me.
2. In the winter things are dryer, and the static electricity gets worse.
It's the only time of year that I start shocking stuff around the house.
Perhaps a humidifier would be good.
3. Do you use one of those anti-static dryer things, like Bounce® ? Once
we forgot to use one and for the next week we were shocking everything in
the house a great deal. Makes a difference.
hope that was of any help.
-jeff
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