Tis the Season for Subaru Static Shocks

If you live in a Dry Climate and own a Subaru, tis the Season to learn how not to be shocked when you leave your car.

I've been on a quest over recent days to solve this, and here's what I've found. Static Guard does work, and you can make "Static Guard", by mixing a teaspoon of liquid fabric-softener into a quart of water. Spray this lightly on your seat, and Presto, no more shocks for a few days to a few weeks.

To prevent sparks entirely, we must somehow stop the charge separation process between You and the Seat. This can be done by:

  • Changing your shoe soles to another type (try leather) * Raising the humidity in the car. * Installing a balanced-polarity ionizer fan (try the static eliminator # MI9957, from C&H Sales)
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    * Wearing metal-coated shoe soles (try alum. foil, but it's slippery) * Change seat covers to Cloth. The type of Fabric Subaru uses is much of the problem. Leather seated Subarus don't suffer this issue (as much)

Much more info here, good reading, some of the article is posted below.

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HUMANS AND SPARKS The Cause, Stopping the Pain, and "Electric People"

"Static electric" sparks can be irritating and their cause sometimes seems mysterious. Most people have encountered painful car-door sparks, as well as those wintertime sparks from doorknobs and large metal objects. What causes these? What can be done to stop them?

As children, most of us learn the trick of scuffing our shoes across the carpet in order to charge our bodies. Then we go to search for victims to "zap" with our electric fingers. Sparks from rug-scuffing are familiar. If you scuff your feet on the carpet, you expect to be zapped by the next doorknob you touch. But why do our bodies sometimes become charged from simply walking around?

ELECTRIFYING CAUSES Actually, no friction or rug-scuffing is required in order to electrically charge your body. The need for friction is a widespread misconception. While it's true that the friction will increase the charge-separation process, friction isn't the cause. Whenever two different insulating surfaces touch together, opposite charges found within the two surfaces become separated. Simply walking across certain rugs or plastic flooring will cause your shoe soles to touch the dissimilar material of the rug. This is enough to separate the negatives from the positives and create imbalanced electric charges on the bottoms of your shoes.

"Static" electricity ( more correctly called "net electric charge" ) appears whenever the normal quantities of positive and negative electricity in a substance are not perfectly equal. Remember that everything is made of atoms, and atoms in turn are made of positive and negative electric charges. In other words, your body is just a collection of positive and negative electrical particles. Normally the positives cancel out the negatives, and everything behaves electrically "neutral." No mysterious sparking. But if you ever end up with more negative than positive, or with more positive than negative, then you have a charge-imbalance on your body. You will get zapped the next time you touch a large metal object.

Exactly how can this imbalance occur? Whenever we walk, the soles of our shoes steal some negative charge from the floor. We leave behind electrified positive footprints, and our bodies aquire an overall imbalance of negatives. (Or sometimes vice versa with the negative and positive, since polarity is determined by the type of shoe soles and the type of rug.) After many footsteps, our bodies attain a high level of electric charge and a high voltage. Body-voltage can easily rise to several thousand volts, and the next time you touch someone else... ZAP!, the imbalanced charge gets shared between you and the other person. The spark is painful because it's extremely hot. It drills into your skin like a white-hot needle, creating a microscopic burned area.

SOME CURES The simplest cure: before touching a doorknob, a car door, etc., first touch it with a metal car key. The fiercely hot spark will blast the tip of the metal key rather than blasting your sensitive fingertip, and it will painlessly discharge your body's charge. (Grip your keys firmly so no spark appears between the keys and your skin.) Once you've been discharged, you can safely grab the doorknob. However, if you walk around some more, or if you sit upon a plastic car seat, you'll again need to use the keys discharge yourself.

As with the car keys, the problem can also be prevented by discharging your excess body-charge in some way that doesn't cause pain. This can be done by:

  • Grabbing the metal car door as you climb out of the car. * FIRMLY Holding your car keys, a coin, or a metal pen, touch it to grounded metal objects. * Knocking your knuckles against doorknobs (fewer nerve endings, less pain.)

The sparking problem is usually found in low-humidity locations, such as in air-conditioned office buildings. High humidity prevents the charge-separation which causes sparks. Raising the humidity in the environment stops the sparking. High humidity makes the surfaces of shoes and rugs slightly conductive, so the separated charges can instantly flow back together. Usually all of the "static electricity" will vanish when the RH is above 60%.

Or, if we spray the floor with antistatic liquid, this can do the same thing as raising the humidity. Antistatic liquids aren't magical, they simply make surfaces slightly conductive so the charge-separation cannot occur. Make your own antistatic spray by mixing a teaspoon of liquid fabric-softener into a quart of water.

Simple solution: whenever sparking is possible, carry a metal object such as a pen or a set of keys. Hold them firmly and use them to touch any large metal objects. If the spark is blasting the end of your car keys, then it isn't burning a hole in your finger. And right after the spark has occurred, you can grab that metal without a problem.

For car-door sparks: if you touch the metal shell of the car as you climb from your seat, there will be no high-voltage buildup and no painful spark. This is good news for the passengers in your car who might not be carrying any keys or coins.

Another solution: always knock your knuckles against doorknobs before grabbing the knob. This won't stop the spark, but the spark is less painful when it bores into your knuckle rather than into your delicate fingertips. If you whack your knuckles hard, you barely feel the spark at all. After all, you're EXPECTING the small pain of your knuckle impact, and you are controlling the impact, so the pain of the spark isn't uncontrolled and unexpected. For some reason, unexpected sparks hurt far more than the ones you produce intentionally.

If you REALLY hate sparks, you might consider wearing a metal sewing thimble upon one finger at all times. Touch the thimble to the doorknob (or to other metal objects) and you'll feel no huge "zap." The spark will still occur, but the pain is gone. Note that the metal of the thimble MUST touch your skin, otherwise you won't stop the spark. If you want to experiment with thimbles in the ends of gloves or mittens, put the thimbles INSIDE the fingers of the gloves.

If you keep getting zapped at work, or if you keep crashing your computer, consider wearing a wrist strap with a wire connected to an electrical "ground." These are inexpensive on ebay.com, typically less than $10, just search for keyword "electrostatic" and you'll find some. While you wear a grounded wrist-strap, your body cannot charge up at all.

CAR DOORS The cause of car-door sparking is well known: contact-electrification between insulating surfaces, followed by separation of those surfaces. But what does this mean? Well, *YOU* are one surface, and THE CAR SEAT is the other. When you sit on a plastic car seat in dry weather, the contact between your clothes and the seat's surface causes the electrical charges within atoms of the material to transfer between the surfaces. This is our old friend "frictional" or "contact" charging. One surface ends up with more negative charges than positive, and has a negative charge-imbalance. The other surface has fewer negatives than positives, so it has a positive imbalance. This is nearly same thing as rubbing a balloon upon your hair: both surfaces become electrically charged. But rather than rubbing just your hair, instead you're rubbing your entire back, but, and legs upon the car seat surface.

However, nothing happens as long as you remain seated. Just keep yourself in one place and you won't get zapped.. As long as the surfaces remain near each other, the positives and negatives cancel out, and no overall "electricity" appears and no sparks are possible. But when you open the car door and step outside, you take just one polarity of charge along with you, while the car seat has the opposite polarity. At the same time, the charged-up car seat causes the whole car to become charged (by a process called "Faraday's Icepail Effect.") As you step out of the car, the voltage between your body and the car becomes huge, up to 10,000 or even 20,000 volts. Your shoes are probably insulating, so the charge has no opportunity to leak into the earth. You reach out to close the car door and ZAP!, the opposite polarities rejoin by leaping through the air while giving you a tiny, deep burn on your fingertip!

How to prevent this? One possibility: change the surface materials. Identify and avoid the specific clothing which makes the problem worse. These materials are usually wool sweaters and pants, certain manmade fabrics, plastic raincoats, etc. Or, replace your cheap plastic car seatcovers with cloth (stains easily!) or with leather (expensive dead animals.) Another method: mix up some anti-static solution and spray your car seats. This solution remains slightly damp for weeks, which halts the contact-charging process. The formula: a teaspoon of fabric softener mixed in one quart of water. This tends to work well at first, but after days it wears off and needs a re-coating. Another sillier method: always drive barefooted, so the charge will leak away when you step outside the car. Not good in winter! You could cover your car seats with a conductor such as aluminum foil, which screws up the contact-charging effect. Have a tailor make some custom clothing out of black conductive carbon cloth? Or you could eliminate the problem by eliminating your clothes. Skin is fairly conductive, so it doesn't create charge-separation when held against plastic. Driving while nude might cure the sparking problem (unless you are a very hairy person!)

A less frivilous method: the car-keys trick I mentioned earlier. Develop the habit of holding your car keys as you leave the car, then grip the keys firmly and touch the metal car door with the tip of the key. The spark will still jump, but it will not be painful, since it blasts a little hole in the tip of the key instead of in your finger. Or simply grasp the car door as you climb out, and this will drain off the charge-imbalance faster than it can build up on your body.

Enjoy!

Reply to
Mr. T
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Another solution is to hold a metal portion of the car door while your your feet are in the car. While you move your feet to the ground, maintain your hand's contact with the door. This will avoid a shock.

Reply to
Tom Reingold

Yep, this what I retrain myself to do every winter.

Carl

Reply to
Carl 1 Lucky Texan

I am in a VERY dry part of the country on the edge of the Mojave desert in the Las Vegas NV area. I have never had a problem, summer or winter, with static and the leather seats in my Forester.

Reply to
QX

Just mix a spoonful of fabric softener with a few ounces of water and spray seats & carpets. No odor, no shocks. Might have to repeat a couple of times before the dry season's over.

Reply to
CompUser

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