Quote:
Originally Posted by cobrakiwi
The video in post 95,
I think this shows the risk at the fuel pump, it makes no difference if your fuel neck is grounded to the cars ground side or not.
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Remember, the goal is to keep the
potential of the different objects involved in fueling all the same, because any one particular object can develop a charge that is different than another from a million different ways. You do that by bonding each component to one another so no particular object is isolated. That means all metal pieces (even the fuel cap since we're talking theory) are wired together and your hand never leaves the pump handle, and the pump nozzle is always in contact with the filler neck. If any are, or become, isolated from the others then you have the potential for a static buildup that arcs over to a neighboring object of different potential. That's really happening all the time in your life, you just don't know it because it's at level that is low. But it's really no different, in theory at least, from a bolt of lightning that comes down and blows an office building apart. A static electricity fueling accident is pretty rare, as is a grain silo explosion, but if you can lessen the threat by just running a little wire, it's hard not to do it. I remember about 35 years ago we had one particular employee who could not use our dinosaur computer system without first putting on a wrist strap that was grounded to the keyboard. If he tried to use the keyboard without grounding himself he locked up that particular dumb terminal. That's the only person I have ever seen where that happened, but it happened repeatedly and I saw it with my own eyes time after time. We even had him strip down to make sure it wasn't his shoes or clothes or something causing it. But nope, it was him. You probably couldn't do that today. I hadn't thought of that in decades.
