Eli5 How does wearing a metal bracelet ground you against static discharge?
In: 1
It doesn’t. It has to be connected to the ground with a wire. Those bracelets that claim they ground you, but don’t have a lead coming off of them are scams.
I have seen a video were someone tested one of those spike bracelets, and found that the sharp points were making it discharge into the air. but because it’s not meant for that, it’s not reliable.
The answer is a bit complicated but ill give it a shot:
Electricity is measured in a few ways, but one of these is volts, volts is also what you can use to measure static electricity. You can think of static electricity as sentient gooey slime, it sticks all over you and likes to cover everything it can reach. Its favourite thing to coat is ground, followed closely by metal.
As you become more statically charged you get a thinker layer of goo until eventually it makes these small “jumps” to coat other stuff, these are static shocks that happen sometimes when you touch something metallic.
Now lets say you wear a piece of metal that absorbs this goo, it will work but only until its full, then you end up with even more goo because it filled up your metal trinket. In order to ground yourself you need to remove all this goo so you have 2 options: Touch ground or touch a big metal object.
So while there are anti-static bracelets, these usually have a wire coming off of them that will let you connect it to a larger piece of metal that keeps you permanently grounded.
TL:DR
A bracelet wont do anything to ground you, its way to small for that, you would need to connect a wire to it and connect that wire to a larger piece of metal or stick it in the ground.
Walking around grounded outside is, of course generally not always a great idea. So wearing a grounded metal bracelet say on a flat area of a golf course or park during a lightning storm, could make you the highest conducting circuit.
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