GFI is a good thing.
Going barefoot was just a normal part of being a kid in the southern latitude states; Georgia, Texas, and such.
It’s real and it has to do a lot with your magnesium consumption. In order for grounding to work you must be sufficient in minerals
Ever stepped om a goat head? You’ll rethink grounding if you have.
Ever stepped om a goat head? You’ll rethink grounding if you have.
That's where my mind was going with this. In the 1980's, we had a Grounding Engineer sent from Richardson HQ to our Central Office/Terminal due to excessive crosstalk and interference complaints. The man was genius! He took an old hand held transistor radio with the dial jammed over off of any transmitting channel and walked around the room like Sherlock Holmes/Colombo with a geiger counter. He found two ungrounded raised floor pedestals that were inserting interference into our station ground plane from an ATC RADAR facility a few hundred yards away from us for Dobbins ARB.
Years later at another location I had transferred to experienced a lightning strike crashed our DACCS (DXC) and kept it down for a day and a half. I removed 21 blown circuit boards, thousands of dollars a piece. The same Grounding Engineer found numerous individual problems with and imbalance between the power ground and the signal ground. They even ended up grounding the 12 foot chain link fence sections to the M/W tower pedestals and placed GFI shunts in every point the floor rebar touched a ground, so that any lightning strike would only go to ground. Years earlier, the night shift technician had seen ball lightning travel down the cable traces so the actual problem had been there for years.
We even lost a fiber optic backbone path when lightning hit a tree, jumped into a pull box in the ground and traveled to the next box, crystallizing the fiber when the metal O/W buttset lead was vaporized. The fiber techs found the lightning fulgurite from the tree to the pull box.
Grounding is very important and should be a primary concern with electronics.
People grounding is only so much new-age hogwash. People change ionic charges throughout a day with no effect other than zapping a friend with a handshake.
I was grounded many times during my formative years and hated it. That said I am probably A better person because of it.