Grounding yourself the easy way

[BingoFishy]

I'm probably being dumb, but couldn't you put an antistatic wrist strap in the third outlet hole to ground yourself? 

 

US outlet (ground prong on bottom) :

[Kobathor]

Why not just anything metal that's touching the ground?

[awesomes8wc3]

No, you have to insert a fork into the two top ones.

[W-L]

3 minutes ago, BingoFishy said:

I'm probably being dumb, but couldn't you put an antistatic wrist strap in the third outlet hole to ground yourself? 

US outlet (ground prong on bottom) :

You can but you should always use a resistor inline with the bracelet to ensure that if the ground prong is carrying a small current for whatever reason it doesn't pass through to you and have you potentially be the new ground. 

[trag1c]

9 minutes ago, W-L said:

You can but you should always use a resistor inline with the bracelet to ensure that if the ground prong is carrying a small current for whatever reason it doesn't pass through to you and have you potentially be the new ground. 

Not dismissing that advice as its good advice but if I remember correctly from my high school robotics course the chances of such occurrences are more or less nil?

[W-L]

1 minute ago, trag1c said:

Not dismissing that advice as its good advice but if I remember correctly from my high school robotics course the chances of such occurrences are more or less nil?

Not necessary since there are some situations which that can occur where you can become the shortest route to ground and receive maybe not a full jolt but a partial one if the ground wires were live trying to dissipate energy. 

[BingoFishy]

21 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

and when the fork glows orange and you power goes out, that's how you know its working

The power won't go out. Only maybe in that one room. 

 

Circuit breakers.

[trag1c]

6 minutes ago, W-L said:

Not necessary since there are some situations which that can occur where you can become the shortest route to ground and receive maybe not a full jolt but a partial one if the ground wires were live trying to dissipate energy. 

Good to know.

[stconquest]

I think we need an LTT video showing the dangers of static electricity to components in real world case scenarios.  Just set up some carpet area and run around in socks or something.  Keep touching sensitive parts and test them to see if they still work.

[kasugatei]

Using bottom one (ground) on the power socket along with 1M resistor inline should be good to go. BUT, always make sure that bottom one is indeed a ground point (because sometimes "electricians" are family members or friends which "understand" what they are doing, if you know what do I mean).

Also, in some cases some grounding bracelets already have 1M resistor inside (you can tell that by simply measuring resistance from the bracelet to the end of connecting cable.

[BuckGup]

People used to take a screw driver and shove it in the ground plug and coil a wire around the metal shaft then to their arm or leg. It worked perfectly but people found out the hard way when a house isn't wired properly you kill yourself. So now you see the wrist and ankel straps more. I sorta find it pointless when dealing with a PC. If you are doing micro work with tiny components then yes but an every day PC you are fine. I even put this to the test with a shocker I made which put out a painful amount of voltage from a negative ion generator. I attached it to a momentary switch so it was constantly shocking and I shocked this computer hundreds of times and things would happen. It would sometimes blue screen or just shut down but nothing. So we dumped a bottle of gatorade on it and then it died.

[QFA350]

I've built and taken apart many computers on my carpet floor without a ground strap for a long time and never have I damaged or killed something by doing that. I'm not saying you shouldn't use one I'm just saying your idea is a bit overkill. But then again, it all depends on your environment. 

[SplAdam]

Most PC chassis are grounded with reference to themselves, if you're just poking around you can keep one hand on the metal part of the chassis to avoid static damage to other parts from your body. Remember to try to avoid using magnetic screwdrivers around silicon, especially RAM and the CPU. 

[iamdarkyoshi]

If you don't want to stick metal things into outlets, the screw is also grounded. I generally just touch grounded metal every once in a while, such as the chassis of my soldering station, my PC, a USB cable plugged into said PC, etc.

[Huntsman]

You could... but not recommended as mistakes might be made when you poked the wrong hole

 

Even so you should always have a high value resistor (approx 1M) in series so that whatever static charge you were to dissipate into the ground will occur slowly instead of in one big surge that could fry whatever you intend to protect.