While watching a YouTube video two days ago, I was subjected to an advertisment for something called a grounding sheet, aka earthing sheet. I listened to it becasue I had nothing better to do at the moment. Each sentence in the ad astonished me more than the previous sentence.
For the unititated, this woo is a practice where you take a normal sheet and weave into it metal thread, usually silver. Then, get this, you plug the resulting sheet into the grounding hole of your household electrical outlet. But, hey, don’t let it be said the sellers of this inanity don’t care about safety. They advise you to buy one of their surge protectors, sold separately of course.
Evidently this has been a thing for a few decades now.
I’m stunned entire neighborhoods haven’t burned down due this stupidity yet.
Apparently a real area of research (at least, the Journal of Inflammation Research is a legit journal)
but that’s not saying much, that paper read a bit woo to me:
The disconnection from the Earth may be an important, insidious, and overlooked contribution to physiological dysfunction and to the alarming global rise in non-communicable, inflammatory-related chronic diseases. A lack of electrons can also de-saturate the electron transport chains in mitochondria, leading to chronic fatigue and slowing the cellular migrations and other essential activities of the cells of the immune system. […]As this report explains, it is a system requiring occasional recharging by conductive contact with the Earth’s surface – the “battery” for all planetary life – to be optimally effective.
Not really. Yes it has a wire like an electric blanket. But it only connects to the ground side of the power outlet so absent malfunction of the house wiring, there’s no electricity delivered to the blanket.
Plugging the blanket into the ground receptacle of the outlet simply allows the woo-waves to flow out of your body, into the blanket then safely down the drain of the house’s grounding system and into Mother Earth where they belong .
I suppose it’d be easier and cheaper just to go sit outside on the dirt or grass or rocks or something. Sitting on a concrete patio, sidewalk, roadway, etc., ought to work as well, since concrete with rebar is at least as conductive as the rock the Earth is made of. But of course since concrete is man-made and rocks are natural, that won’t work. Not at all. Woo-waves are very much distorted and ruined by contact with man-made stuff. Except for specially designed woo management devices such as these blankets.
I suppose there could be some minimal utility in such a thing. People working on delicate electronics often ground themselves to prevent a static spark from messing things up.
But you’d probably have to be working barefoot for this to work…
This is true. It’s unlikely that you could build up enough static charge to produce a discharge, but in dry winter weather it’s possible, and it really could destroy delicate electronics such as a memory chip. I have a grounding wrist strap for just such a precaution, from back in the days when I was more enthusiastic about doing computer work.
However, I never thought of it as a preventer of “inflammatory-related chronic diseases” or adding more health-giving electrons to my body. Maybe I should wear it while sitting at the computer in my typical sedentary way and plug the other end into a nearby wall socket and let the electrons flow for maximum health benefit. I bet it could really energize a sedentary lifestyle!
I suppose this is related to the gaming insult that a “try hard” should “touch grass” some time. This way you can “touch grass” without having to leave Mom’s basement!
And here I was thinking it was an attempt at making a Faraday cage to protect you from EMI, EMF, BHA, BHT, MSG and Illuminati mind control rays while you slept.
The numbers are all over the place, since resistance also depends on voltage, distance, whether it’s AC or DC, and (if AC) the frequency. IEEE Std. 80 says it’s roughly 1000 Ω. There’s also the HBM that’s used for ESD susceptibility testing, wherein the human body is modeled by a (charged) 100 pF capacitor in series with a 1500 Ω resistor.
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