Oof. A missing equipment ground (the third pin on your outlet or its wiring) will not cause these issues. In fact, it’s legal to have an ungrounded three pin outlet in a retrofit situation as long as it’s GFCI protected and labeled.
I bet there’s a missing or poor neutral. If your neutral wiring has problems, then you are operating at anywhere between 0 and 240 VAC depending on what else is going on, e.g. whether the AC is running or the lights are on. Additionally, if you do have any sort of ground and that ground is (improperly) tied to neutral in more than one place, then you may have substantial current flow through “ground”, i.e. the actual Earth, your pipes, your steel building structure, your body, etc.
Get a true RMS voltmeter, (safely!) connect between hot and neutral, and switch lights and AC on and off. Repeat with the meter between neutral and ground.
And consider replacing the circuit breaker on the circuit you’re using with a GFCI breaker. Several common screwups will cause it to trip.
The author appears to be in Vancouver BC Canada.
In US/Canada, it is safe and code compliant to have floating ground in a GFCI protected outlet. The GFCI provides the safety benefit that ground is supposed to provide. Obviously having both GFCI and ground is better, but having only the former is allowed. Occasionally, ground serves additional purposes beyond safety, but that doesn’t apply for a computer power supply.
Additionally, in US/Canada, it is unsafe (and against code) to wire a new outlet directly to water pipe. Ground-neutral bond is required at the main service panel because the “ground” (soil, water pipe, etc) isn’t a good enough electricity ground. The ground wire in the outlet must be wired to the main panel (directly, or through subpanels), where 3 things are connected together: neutral bus, ground bus, and the “ground” (soil, water pipe, etc).
All in all, the author didn’t find the root cause of the problem. And in trying to fix the problem, the author introduced more bugs.
It probably depends on local codes, but:
>and the outlet was correctly grounded using my water heater as ground, according to my outlet tester.
I don't think that grounding to a water heater (please read as to water plumbing) is correct.
A developer is surprised that improper electrical infrastructure causes systemic computer malfunctions. Surprised enough to write an article about it.
I feel like this just perfectly summarizes my early years in the tech field, back when I was a screwdriver jockey and spent my afternoons diving under desks. "Why yes, person who gets paid more than twice what I do- spilling a chai latte on your laptop keyboard does mean that it has to go away to a computer hospital for a bit, and no, I cannot magically go back in time and make a copy of all of your important files on an external hard drive for you."
To the author: no hard feelings- I love devs. But just like you might be surprised at the person struggling to write a simple be five-line bash script, sometimes the hardware-oriented folks are surprised at what doesn't occur as an obvious issue to others.
Interesting, most notebooks are not connected to ground. Maybe ground connection came from peripherals (USB Hub/monitor etc.) ?
> Again, the same pattern came up: the wrist-rest was only uncomfortable when running on AC power.
Guy's getting lightly electrocuted...
Uhm I find the conclusion here quite unsatisfactory. Like I have plugged in many things without grounding and never had issues like this. It sounds to me like there were more issues that are now masked by working grounding.
In the ex-USSR there was usually no grounding at all. All plugs had just 2 pins. Even if the socket is new, the wiring most often isn't.
Everything works mostly normal, except that you can have 110 (220/2 via capaciator bisection) volts with large impedance on "supposedly grounded" metal surfaces to give you minor shocks/uncomfortable feeling.
I'm confused by this. My laptop jack's have 2 pins + and -. No earth. I've taken apart power bricks, and they aren't wired to earth either, So how (on earth) would earth be impacting the laptop?
Plus if the lack of earth is showing as a problem, that suggests an issue elsewhere as all being well earth shouldn't be getting used.
I remember many years ago I had a computer where, sometimes, programs crashed when trying to launch them. They segfaulted for no apparent reason. If I rebooted the computer, they may work. It usually happened with big programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. I once noticed that I didn't had to reboot the computer to make them work: just emptying the caches (/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches). In fact, the md5sum of the binaries giving troubles, before and after emptying the caches, were different: one random byte had a different value. I never knew what caused the problems, I always thought it was either an unsupported device or a faulty component, however things like memtest never reported any issue.
When I got a new computer and was about to dispose that one (finally!) somebody told me it could be related to electricity problems. I then had that computer plugged to a different outlet during its last week and, apparently, I got no issues; however, issues didn't always happen, so I never knew if that was the cause or not.
Wow, I did not expect this to hit the front page.
Lots of excellent questions. If you'd like to get notified when I write an extended version of this post with more details, sign up to my mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/idzoGv
I noticed that with my two 2012/2013 MacBook laptops overall several european countries, in different homes: that "twitchy" feeling on the metal case of the laptop when plugged without grounding.
Do all of these houses have serious electrical issues?
The house in which I live now does that to my old MacBook Airs if I convert my Macs's chargers' hybird CEE 7/7 plug (two poles + grounding) to a flat two-pole europlug (no ground).
I can reliably reproduce the issue in several houses, over several countries.
But if the plug is grounded, everything seems normal.
What's going on?
I'm here since six months, with shitloads of electrical things ongoing (including the whole swimming pool machinery). And everything appears to be working fine.
Should I be worried?
I mean: I can reliably reproduce what TFA describes. My old MacBook Airs do that all the time if there's no ground.
It looks like something was intermittently arcing and causing both the voltage fluctations and creating lots of EMI that disturbed the electronics. I agree with the others here that it doesn't seem the problem has been fully fixed, and a "lost neutral" could be the ultimate problem. Unfortunately these days it's rare to have incandescent lamps which will very clearly show a lost neutral by brightening as the voltage goes up, and a lot of electronics have universal input SMPS which will be fine with 85-250VAC.
I have a similar electrical issue at my house as well. I plug my laptop over I USB-C into my AC-DC converter, which comes with a two-prong US power cable, which is connected to a two-prong US-EU adapter, into a power strip connected to the wall (EU outlet). My laptop wrist rest is also "spicy" (most noticeable if my girlfriend touches my arm when I'm typing, we will both get shocked). So I obviously have a grounding issue but I'm at a loss because the equipment doesn't have anywhere to attach a ground rail to. Any suggestions?
Reading this gave me flashbacks to the time when I tried figuring out why my laptop keyboard was typing letters by itself randomly. Turns out the always-on-usb feature of the laptop was causing some short circuiting: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-P-Y-and-Z-series-Laptops...
> To rule out if it was a coding error, I tried to decompress the gzip file with bash via gzip -dc file. bash threw a strange error, “can’t seek file descriptor” when trying to read the file. This error is emitted from bash.c here.
Unless I am reading this wrong, the error would have been emitted by gzip, not bash. There is no redirection or anything here, bash is not even aware of that file.
> Aside: At this point, my laptop was bordering on unusable, even on battery power.
How would grounding an outlet affect a laptop running on battery?
TL;DR grounding issues.
Nice read of all the debugging and resolution steps.
Grounding to the water heater? Isn’t acceptable practice to bond the ground wire to the cold water pipe?
> A quick check with a $10.00 outlet tester confirmed that there was a grounding issue. The tester confirmed that there was no ground.
> send in an electrician this time. They asked lots of questions, and then recommended that my air conditioner stay on a different outlet because there were two circuits. I tried this for a few days, but the issues still reappeared.
Either something is missing or both the author and the electrician are absolutely insane. There is a grounding issue, which could mean anything from a broken outlet to incompetent wiring throughout the house, and they aren't thinking about fixing it immediately? Let's try a workaround for a few days? I have no words.