To start off: I was explaining to my friend that I don’t have a grounding point in my house (plumbing is PVC, outlets are gcfi protected only, not allowed to drive a grounding rod into the ground, etc…) and that I’ve just been handling sensitive electronics with just luck and preparation (humidity, moisturizer, no synthetic clothing, etc…) all this time. He told me to just wire myself to a good, multimeter tested, grounding point in a car and that will discharge any built-up static electricity. I’m not smart enough to argue with him on this subject but that doesnt seem the safest. Would that work or should I just keep doing my method? My understanding is that chassis grounding is essentially replacing wires with the frame so the outcome would just be connecting myself to the negative terminal of a car battery.
Tldr: I’m explaining my lack of a grounding point at home for sensitive electronics and is advised by my friend to wire myself to a grounded point in a car to discharge built-up static electricity. However, I’m uncertain about the safety of this suggestion and questions whether my current method of handling electronics with precautions is sufficient.
Edit: lmao people are really getting hung up on the no grounded outlet part. Umm my best explanation I guess is that its an older house that had 2 prong outlets and was “updated” with gfci protected outlets afterwards think the breakers as well. My understanding is that its up to code but I’m not an electrician. As for the plumbing I’m sure there’s still copper somewhere but the majority has been updated to pvc over the years. Again it’s not my house I don’t want to go biting the hand that feeds me. Thank you though, haha
Edit #2: thank you all so much for the helpful advice, I really appreciate all of you!
Edit: I jumped over a detail in my memory. The ground pin goes to neutral in the breaker box and neutral is grounded. The key part is that the ground pin isn’t an isolated circuit that just goes to the dirt. I’ll leave the below so you can see what people were correctly arguing with me about.
The ground pin in a north American outlet, at least, isn’t actually grounded. It’s just a dedicated circuit that goes back to the neutral line in the circuit breaker box. It doesn’t go to the ground there, either. Not to mention you don’t get static sparks when touching dirt anyway because ground is a terrible conductor anyway - it works on a power delivery scale because it’s effectively infinitely big. These things only vaguely work for static reduction by being large metal structures that can sink the excess static. That’s why doorknobs and coat racks happily shock you.
No, the “ground” in a car is not actually a ground at all. It’s a chassis common power point. Ground is the entirely wrong term but people will argue it up and down because it has always been called ground. Mixups in function like this are exactly why I’ll argue to use the right terminology. Common supplies power by chassis. Ground sinks stray power away from the device/fingers (hence why I don’t argue against calling a house ground a ground).
I think that’s incorrect. The ground pin is a dedicated equipotential reference bonded to the earth via an acyclic wiring path which carries no current. It does go pretty directly to the ground rod via the breaker panel ground bus. Neutral happens to be connected to it at the entrance panel for fault clearing, but not really for any other reason.
Since all metallic chassis, pipes, ducts, etc are connected to it and it is available pretty much throughout a building, it is a logical place to connect ESD-prevention gear, even if the earth has little to do with that. (But, a grounding electrode system installed to code should have less than 25 ohm impedance to ideal earth - not exactly a “poor” conductor)
You are correct. I edited my comment with a note pointing out where I lapsed. Ground is grounded by way of bonding to neutral and neutral being grounded. It’s just not a dedicated grounding circuit going straight to a nail in the ground.
When I had my circuit breaker replaced and went to 200A service a few years ago, we had to have 2 ground rods put in (maybe we reused the old one, I can’t remember) plus a wire following our copper water supply lines until just past the meter. Inspector actually made them redo that last one because it stopped just shy of the meter. Maybe there are other ways of going it, but actual honest-to-goodness grounding is also a thing here.
You are correct. I edited my comment with a note pointing out where I lapsed. Ground is grounded by way of bonding to neutral and neutral being grounded. It’s just not a dedicated grounding circuit going straight to a nail in the ground.
FYI, on many Lemmy clients, there is a format option to do
strike throughs on text, to mark text which has been revised but isn’t being fully removed, to provide context.Except is special circumstances the ground connection on outlets does go to a separate ground bussbar inside the panel ( as well as acting as the chassis ground for the panel).
That bussbar is typically connected to the neutral, but code requires it to also be connected to an actual earth ground.
It serves the same purpose so they kept the existing name that hasn’t been literal for a very, very long time.
In schematics, we use different type of GND symbols depending on what kind it is (analog, digital, chassis, etc)
It doesn’t serve the same purpose. You ground in a car chassis to get power. You don’t get power from a ground in house wiring, you use ground for faults
You can use ground in a car to complete the circuit, such as when using jumper cables, but the frame is the ground and you aren’t getting power from the frame.
Maybe you are thinking of negative and positive wire markings being the opposite?
Completing the circuit is what I’m calling “getting power”. Breaki g either side, regardless of positive or negative, regardless of connecting to the posts or the frame, breaks the circuit and power is “lost”. Not to mention electrons flow from the negative terminal to the positive. “Getting power” is a casual term. A positive-common chassis wouldn’t provide power in a circuit any more than a negative-common chassis
Tl; dr - we’re all capacitors, discharging into a bigger capacity capacitor = grounding?
AFAIK, there might an error in the first part, at least in Europe, where you have 3 Phase AC coming to your home, the neutral line connects to ground in the main breaker box, not the other way round. For US, this shouldn’t be different.