You put it on your wrist and connect the ground clip to a source of ground in your house. Usually this is any bare metal pipe section (so by the adjustment connectors on radiators) - some people attach them to their PC case, but for this to be really effective it requires the board be powered up to a PSU, which is dangerous when installing components.
If you don't have a "cold water ground" (what sammorris has illustrated) or a connection to AC ground at your workstation an anti-static strap will be of absolutely no use. What an anti-static strap needs is a connection to "earth ground" to dissapate and static electricity buildup. I have used an old AC cord with the power prongs cut away and then plugged into a grounded outlet. BTW, before doing this you should check your outlet with a meter to make 100% sure that someone didn't miswire your house. That being said, I would tend to agree with sammorris about it being kind of a con. If you don't do things like shuffle across the rug, or comb your hair, or rub a balloon on your shirt, and just touch a grounded metallic surface prior to handling components, you should be just fine. I've been in electronics for over 30 years, and the only time I used them was during an ISO 9000 inspection because the procedures called for it. I've ruined more electronics with sweat dripping off my forehead than static electricity.
Will grounding (if it really is grounding myself) work by plugging the anti static wrist strap's mouth to a screw of an outlet? Thanks.
Again, if you're going to post something in a thread, don't post it in a private message. I'll see it here.
Screw of an outlet? Probably not. Sometimes the screws are nylon, sometimes the outlet box isn't properly grounded. Cold water pipe is a ground 95% of the time. (That is provided that it is metal and not plastic <G>)
NO. NOT HOT WATER!! Hot water pipes are usually run to a hot water heater, which is (more often than not) isolated from ground. This is why the ground is typically referred to as a "cold water" ground. It goes directly to ground.
i have never used one, and i prob never will. now i could swear i head that connecting it to a metal part of your case was good enough?
Depends how strong the ESD is. Since there's nowhere for it to go, all that does is weaken it, as it spreads the discharge throughout the case. Far better to use a cold water pipe as that discharges into the planet
NEVER CONNECT A GROUND STRAP TO AN ACTUAL GROUND! The ground should be connected to the bare metal of the system case itself. If you are connecting it to an earth ground, you are just connecting yourself to the biggest battery around (the earth). The ground strap is not meant to remove all electricity from you (if it was, it would stop your heart). The goal is to eliminate voltage differentials...and connecting it to the case is the best way to do this.
Well, most of the electronics manufacturing community disagrees with you. (Well, At least Solectron and Foxconn do, two of the world's largest CMs) Ever been to a CM (contract manufacturing) site? Guess where all of the antistatic mats are connected? Earth ground. (Yeah, I was over at our CM this week and I checked.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antistatic_mat
If the earth wasn't a suitable ground, it wouldn't be used as a ground for all sorts of things. There's so much earth out there, it can easily absorb everything we ground to it...
Oh yeah, ok I get this, but I don't touch the hot pipe on the water heater stand, I touch the cool ones, hope this is more explained.
