How You Can Avoid Static Electricity in Your Home

When you think about people being able to control electricity, a couple of things come to mind. The first would be science fiction and the second would be Magneto from X-Men and his purple helmet. However, stuff like this is starting to come into the real world. Debbie Wolf lives near Brighton in the south of England and she is one of the growing number of ‘SLIders’. An SLIder is a person who believes they can interact and interfere with electrical appliances, anything from cookiers to panel heaters.

The ability that Debbie claims she has is named Street Light Interference syndrome (SLI) and she has been very famous because of it. In Japan Debbie has been compared to comic book heroines and characters from the BBC show ‘Heroes’. For a person who believes they have SLI, Debbie has chosen a rather risky profession. She works in the Royal Susses Country Hospital, fortunately, no electrical equipment has gone wrong so far.

Although it’s a nice idea to think of someone with those sort of powers, the idea of it must be questioned. Does SLI exist or is it simply coincidences that lead people to believe they have a power. As with the majority of things, there is a possible explanation.

One aspect of maintaining a suitable room climate is the moisture content of the air. Most homes these days have central heating and double glazing. This combination as well as heaters and oil filled radiators often leads to the air inside homes getting very dry. Having dry air at home can cause lots of health problems, however, dry air can also increase the levels of static electricity within your home.

The process of maintaining the air conditions at home can be compared to that of a computer data centre. At very large data centres, a great deal of heat is created, this heat drys out the dry and therefore increases the amount of static electricity. This static can cause great deals of damage to the circuits within the computers. To combat this, humidifiers are used to increase the humidity and reducing the static electricity. This can be the same in your home, a normal level of humidity would reduce the amount of staticelectricity. So in the end, all Debbie needs is a humidifier, she may also find some health benefits too. The reason why Debbie doesn’t damage any hospital equipment is because they are most likely already using humidifiers to protect equipment like industrial heaters aren’t caused any damage.

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