The winter season is upon us and I can once again freely engage in one of my favorite pasttimes in bed - making lots and lots of static electricity with my blanket! It sure is neat-o when the heater makes everything so dry and staticlike. But as I age and gain in maturity, I must ask this question. Is making this electric storm in bed in any way a fire hazard? Will my blanket burst into flames one of these nights?:eek:
It depends. Are you in the habit of storing open containers of ethyl ether or gasoline near your bed? Static sparks are not hot enough, long enough to ignite most materials, but flammable vapors, or even suspended powders can be set off with a small spark.
My blanket of choice for the show is 90% acrylic and 10% polyester. And it’s green. So I suppose it’s not really flammable enough, huh.
This is great news. I can’t wait to go to bed! 
As an inquisitive young child, I spent the better part of 14 years worth of Winters trying to do all sorts of neat “tricks” with static sparks. Never once did I succeed in catching anything on fire 
I got a microwave oven transformer that’ll do the trick. 2 kV at about 500 milliamps can do a lot of damage.
I ignite things with sparks all the time - mostly butane and propane, but chemically, it should work with methane, too.
The ludicrous lesson for the ultra-cautious is left as an exercise for the reader.
Finally, KP solves the riddle of spontaneous human self-combustion
Be afraid. Be very afraid! 
So no beans before bed for you, m’lad!
Just don’t take your computer to bed with you!
Take a fluorescent tube with you under the charged blanket.
Sometimes you can even make a standard lightbulb glow (use the clear kind, not the frosted kind.)
That’s nothing. I’ve got a tesla coil. But I was trying to keep this within the realm of human-produced charges.
The static voltages produced by human action can be considerable: in the neighborhood of 10-30 kV. Of course the total amount of charge is relatively small, so the currents are very tiny.