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.
Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
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Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#42Happened to me too with a new chair. I suspected static electricity. The solution was a thin cotton pillow on the seat. Problem gone.
Nice, I made a cotton slip for my seat, which worked the same way I guess.
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 disso…
> 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 par…
Or use an evaporative humidifier.
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 quick…
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.
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#45Ferrite 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.
I miss the old days when the choke was built into the (analog VGA) cable.
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#46Make 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.…
Outlet testers only go so far. They can produce false assurance.
One of the things that people (well, idiots -- but idiots are also people) discover when replacing an old 2-prong outlet with a new 3-prong outlet from the big box store is that they've only got 2 wires to work with. There is no ground conductor is present.
So they do the wrong thing the wrong way, and connect the ground screw on the new outlet to the neutral wire. This satisfies them ("all of the outlet parts are wired up!"), and sometimes they even think about it hard enough to justify it as being Good Enough ("ground and neutral are connected together back at the panel anyway, so it doesn't matter!").
That's bad, mmkay? Nobody should do this. Ever. It is unsafe. But sometimes people do it anyway. It's a real problem that exists in the real world.
This problem is made worse because an outlet tester won't detect this fault -- at all.
And the badness doesn't stop there, but instead compounds: The tester doesn't just fail to detect the fault. Instead, the tester will (must) cheerfully report this condition as being perfectly cromulent and safe. That false assurance is problematic in and of itself.
So, yeah: Everyone should have an outlet tester. But everyone should also be aware that they aren't idiot-proof -- their results can be poisoned by idiots from the past.
---
Anyway, code. NEC 406.4(D)(2) allows replacing an ungrounded outlet with a GFCI outlet (with the ground screw disconnected and doing nothing at all). The outlet must be marked (that's why GFCI outlets include a sheet of stickers in the box that say "NO EQUIPMENT GROUND"), but it's code-compliant to do this.
So even if one pushes a landlord about an ungrounded 3-prong outlet on the wall, that doesn't mean that they're going to send someone out and tear into things to install a ground wire. It might instead mean that they put a GFCI outlet in, put a sticker on it, and call that good enough.
And, safety-wise: A GFCI used in this way actually is good enough.
But even though safe, it doesn't help at all with EMI/RFI/static issues and electronics, which the landlord doesn't have to care about. That part isn't their problem. :)
(406.4 also allows replacing existing 2-prong outlets with new 2-prong outlets, which are still being made in factories every day.)
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#47I'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.
I've had the same problem for a couple years - specifically the GPU crashing. Had a very hard time isolating the issue - seems like a mix of static + the EMI spike OP talks about (it happens most reliably when I stand up quickly from my desk chair). My guess is that, like OP, we're both getting interference in the our DP connections, and that that interference is in our cases causing the GPUs to crash. Haven't had a…
Mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Kw7wh9
It was happening more often when I had a Sapphire NITRO+ RX VEGA64, but the 6950 XT isn't immune.
other things not encapsulated in the parts list: My PC sits on the bottom shelf of a foodservice-style wire shelving rack. My motherboard's I/O shield is integrated and wasn't a perfect fit into the case.
The DP cable is, probably, in-spec. I usually buy Cable Matters or BlueRigger.
I do wonder if ferrite cores would help.
edit: The only similarity I notice in our builds is lower-end ASRock b650 motherboards.
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#48This 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.
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#49Any idea if ESD can damage the monitor over time?
Re: Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
#50Might 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 u…
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 disso…
Don't use ultrasonic humidifiers. You are spraying mold into your lungs, guaranteed.