Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
To be clear, neither of these things are intended to address EMI/RFI. Most consumer-grade UPSes directly pass the AC power through when not on battery, so any noise on the lines will also pass through pretty much untouched.
Surge suppressors are just MOVs (metal oxide varistors) and a circuit breaker. If the line voltage rises too high, the MOVs try to shunt the voltage. But if the EMI's peak voltage is below the MOV's trigger threshold, it will do nothing and the EMI will pass straight through.
Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
This. I had a huge problem with static shocking my desk in the dry winter air, causing my monitor to blank out for a few seconds. A small, quiet ultrasonic humidifier completely eliminated the problem.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Distilled water is somewhat expensive, and humidifiers chew through water in the winter (at least here). I quickly switched away from ultrasonic for that reason, 6-8 litres of distilled water per day for a medium sized apartment is not sustainable. Evaporative with tap water and biocides is the way to go.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
A reverse osmosis filter will provide plenty of water with nearly no minerals. They're available to install under the sink/counter for a few hundred bucks and provide clean drinking/cooking water and work fine with ultrasonic humidifiers without the issue of depositing minerals everywhere / clogging up the ultrasonic emitter. So its a lot cheaper than buying it plus you get great water.
Those aren't exactly common here, since municipal water is high quality and everyone drinks it as is. It is not like some parts of the world where the tap water is full of chlorine and barely drinkable (I ran into that when I went to Athens).
And if you have your own well, you generally do a cheaper filter targeted at whatever impurity you have (such as an iron filter), rather than a reverse osmosis filter.
With reverse osmosis the water also gets too pure for drinking and you need to add back minerals to it for safety, it is not healthy to drink ultra pure water for any prolonged period of time.
Man. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
---
It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
When I last looked, the evaporative methods were better than others. You don't need distilled water for it, tap will work. They do need cleaning and frequent disinfecting though due to the pad constantly sitting in the water. The prices of replacement pads are a bit expensive but it was cheaper than constantly buying distilled water.
There are a few brands out there but the Philips ones seemed better than the others and the prices were not as insane. I just disliked their marketing and buzzword filled content but otherwise they seem OK. Oh and you should know a lot of their stuff now are internet connected(disabling it will make you lose some functions but otherwise the device still works) and have touch buttons and screens etc. It's unfortunate but this seems to be where every device is heading.
I do agree with you that this seems overly complex. You can pretty much do it yourself if you'd like to take on a project. A fan and a constantly wet rag has the same function but is not as compact.
Thanks. I'll check out Philips. I wonder if third-party pads exist.
I prefer dumb, but I don't mind if it's smart. Especially if I can integrate the smarts into my Home Assistant rig.
I built a humidifier once. I just used the Instant Pot that was already on the countertop. I filled it with water, set it to "Keep warm", and it slowly evaporated the water and left minerals behind.
This worked fine (it was safe, if inefficient).
But monitoring the consumption of water and the improvement in humidity showed that to actually raise the humidity to a comfortable point would and do so throughout the house would use a lot of water.
And I want to do more with my time than fill humidifiers back up. :)
For truly dumb, Honeywell HCM350W/HCM350B https://amzn.to/4tSEAGy has just a multi-speed fan knob and a hidden UV lamp and nothing else. The 1.1 gallon tank gets through a couple of nights here, current outdoor humidity is 16% on an overcast day in the middle of "rainy" days (high altitude semi-arid). 6 non-brand wicks for $22 will last a long time: https://amzn.to/48EwKbb
Copy that, thanks. The third-party replacement bits look OK-priced to me, I like the idea of a UV light (which is at least simple and safe), and since it's dumb then it's certainly simple to automate with a switched outlet.
I'll try to pick one up before the cold weather comes back again. (Right now, we have the opposite problem for humidity here, in that we have too much of it.)
> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
Ferrite chokes easily fix this problem. Very useful to have a box of them in an office full of people.
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
This was happening to a colleague's monitor. As it happened frequently when either of us got up, I suspected it was the fabric of the chair, which was probably some kind of acrylic. I made slips for the ass part of the chair from 100% cotton, and to my amazement it fixed the problem.
It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.
I'm having the same problem, except it's crashing my dang PC. Actually, it's only crashing the GPU, but that's pretty indistinguishable from the whole PC crashing in practice.
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.
If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.
For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.
[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.
Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
Not an issue for the author but a rolling desk chair on one of those plastic mats made to protect a carpeted floor are the perfect storm for generating static. Also a fun fact that gas tanker trucks used to drag a chain for this reason.
This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.
Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time
I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.
I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.
This happened all over our office for a while after we got new monitors, it was the pneumatic jacks (?) in the chairs compressing triggering them, it took a while before anyone figured it out, IT eventually went round and put ferrite cores on all the cables for the monitors and that seemed to fix it.
Similar observation: sometimes when we get off the couch, on which we have a blanket made from artificial fibres, it causes our TV to go black for a couple of seconds. The TV is wall mounted and a metre from the end of the couch, and about 3.5’ from where we’re sitting.
My Mac Mini M2 sometimes blinks in November months. I've replaced my display cable recently with an HDMI to DVI cable with ferrite cores from monoprice, I'll see if it makes a difference this November.
I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.
I don't use microSD cards anymore, but they had been in my feature phone as well as my Raspberry Pi. I ran into so, so many problems with the Raspberry Pi related to storage. It would lock up at the drop of a hat. It would often have major trouble reading/writing the sdcard, especially at startup. My phone, for its part, would complain about a corrupted filesystem, or couldn't access files, immediately after I replaced the sdcard in its slot.
Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit.
These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.
I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?
Make sure that all your wall outlets in the area are actually grounded. Get an outlet tester at a hardware store and check. They cost about $10. Good first step. There are sometimes 3-prong outlets where the ground connection is not connected, especially in older buildings. This is an electrical code violation, so if there's a landlord involved, get them to fix it.
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop.
If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
77 comments
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
> It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector.
To be clear, neither of these things are intended to address EMI/RFI. Most consumer-grade UPSes directly pass the AC power through when not on battery, so any noise on the lines will also pass through pretty much untouched.
Surge suppressors are just MOVs (metal oxide varistors) and a circuit breaker. If the line voltage rises too high, the MOVs try to shunt the voltage. But if the EMI's peak voltage is below the MOV's trigger threshold, it will do nothing and the EMI will pass straight through.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
And if you have your own well, you generally do a cheaper filter targeted at whatever impurity you have (such as an iron filter), rather than a reverse osmosis filter.
With reverse osmosis the water also gets too pure for drinking and you need to add back minerals to it for safety, it is not healthy to drink ultra pure water for any prolonged period of time.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
---
It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
There are a few brands out there but the Philips ones seemed better than the others and the prices were not as insane. I just disliked their marketing and buzzword filled content but otherwise they seem OK. Oh and you should know a lot of their stuff now are internet connected(disabling it will make you lose some functions but otherwise the device still works) and have touch buttons and screens etc. It's unfortunate but this seems to be where every device is heading.
I do agree with you that this seems overly complex. You can pretty much do it yourself if you'd like to take on a project. A fan and a constantly wet rag has the same function but is not as compact.
I prefer dumb, but I don't mind if it's smart. Especially if I can integrate the smarts into my Home Assistant rig.
I built a humidifier once. I just used the Instant Pot that was already on the countertop. I filled it with water, set it to "Keep warm", and it slowly evaporated the water and left minerals behind.
This worked fine (it was safe, if inefficient).
But monitoring the consumption of water and the improvement in humidity showed that to actually raise the humidity to a comfortable point would and do so throughout the house would use a lot of water.
And I want to do more with my time than fill humidifiers back up. :)
I'll try to pick one up before the cold weather comes back again. (Right now, we have the opposite problem for humidity here, in that we have too much of it.)
How long do the wicks last for you?
> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
https://external-preview.redd.it/XKDz1OYC3I7A8BPUHzbzNPiysM-...
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA
https://youtube.com/shorts/R0OhD2Bc6FY
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.
For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.
[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
I suspected static electricity. The solution was a thin cotton pillow on the seat. Problem gone.
Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit.
These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.
I don't think my DP cables have any ferrite chokes built in...
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop. If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
I would not be surprised that touching such monitor will electrocute you.