Fix monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity in chair

Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.

These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.

The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...

Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.

Make 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. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop. If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.

Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.

There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.

The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.

Might 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 use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.

Ferrite 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.

This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.

It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA

This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.

Remember the "degauss" button? I had no idea what it did, but the sound it made sure was satisfying.

https://youtube.com/shorts/R0OhD2Bc6FY

I'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.

Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time

Happened to me too with a new chair.

I suspected static electricity. The solution was a thin cotton pillow on the seat. Problem gone.

I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.

Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.

I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.

I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.

I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.

Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.

If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.

For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.

[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.

I had that with cheapo mechanical keyboard, on particularly dry office days I could hover my hand over it to make it crash and restart

This happens to me when I brush off my mousepad too fast with my palm. It will also cause my wireless headset to "reboot".

I thought it was me bumping my table. But now you have me wondering if it's charge buildup.

I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?

The sound card on my windows computer dies if i turn the desk fan i have off! I should try it

I freaking hate my Ikea chair. Thing shocks me every time I get up from it and then touch it.

Sounds like very cheap monitor which had lot of cost cutting done on side of protections of inputs.

I would not be surprised that touching such monitor will electrocute you.

Shorten the display cable.