Protecting Equipment from ESD Damage
Do you and how do you protect your equipment from Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) damage? Have you damaged any equipment from ESD? Seen a few posts on protecting from power surge and dips, but nothing on protecting from our own ESD. This past winter in the normally humid NW we had some dry low humidity days and walking across the carpet to equipment can generate a significant charge. I had an incident where I touched my rack and it resulted in D/A going berserk resulting in fried ribbons in tweeters and amplifier fuse being taken out. My heart skipped a beat when I turned on my Simaudio Moon W-7 amp and nothing happened. Fortunate it was just the fuse. If you can feel the discharge that is between 2 and 3 thousand volts and on this day it was a strong discharge, likely lifting the entire ground plane, causing the PS Audio Perfectwave DAC to go nuclear (output noise full voltage provided at output). I since put a wire to a plate (copper terminal) that goes through 30M ohm of resistance to ground on my equipment rack. I touch the plate first before touching equipment. The 30M ohms of resistance limits the current so discharge is stretched out in time. So far so good, have not had any repeats of incident, and I don’t feel the shock. Have not heard this topic discussed, did not see a commercial solution other then putting an ESD strap on or touching one, which would look funky on rack and is impractical. So how do you deal with ESD and have you had equipment damaged from?
