I've said this before but ESD is way more of an issue if you live in a dry climate.
While this is certainly true, do NOT assume because you live near the Louisiana swamps, Mississippi bayous, or Florida Everglades that ESD cannot affect you. Air conditioning works by "conditioning" the air by extracting the moisture out of the air. Almost all homes in those high humidity areas have air conditioning because it gets scorching hot there too.
And for sure, regardless where live, if your home is heated in the winter with a "forced air furnace", it can become extremely dry in your home. Especially in colder areas where the heaters run for extended periods. Your skin dries out, wood furniture and floors can crack. And static can easily build up.
My first electronics tech schools where in very muggy Biloxi, Mississippi. That is where I learned digital electronics (I started out with analog and vacuum tubes - yeah, I'm old) and studied "micro miniature electronics" techniques. This is where we were taught all about static electricity, how it is created, how it becomes ESD and the "
microscopic" destructive effects on ESD sensitive devices.
Point being, while it was 100°F and 100% humidity outside, our climate controlled labs were maintained at 65°F and 50% humidity but we still had to use anti-static floor mats and keep ourselves "at the same potentials" as our equipment grounds to ensure there were no static build-ups in our bodies that might be discharged through the equipment we were working on.
Homes are much worse than professionally equipped technical repair facilities for many reasons. Most homes don't go through regular facility grounding certifications. Many are carpeted and/or use area rugs made from synthetic materials that easily generate static. Most homes don't have climate control systems that can pump moisture into the air when needed.
I went to high school in the very dry desert climate of Tucson, maintained air traffic control radio systems for 4+ years in Phoenix, Arizona and another 6 years in the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico and yes, static was a serious problem all year long. I now live 1/2 mile from the Missouri River in Eastern Nebraska, and static can still be a problem. I lived 4 years in the wet and tepid UK and static was still a concern there in our environmentally controlled equipment labs - because the HVAC systems dried out the air. So we had humidifiers tied to the HVAC to maintain 50 - 60% inside the computer rooms.
So do not assume you must live in a dry climate area to be affected by ESD.
And yes, most modern digital electronics are designed with ESD "
mitigation" (not prevention) in mind. That is, your fancy new motherboard cannot prevent ESD, it can only
help prevent damage to the sensitive devices mounted to it.
BUT that motherboard can only do that if it can shunt those 1000s of volts of static to some place safe. This is why just picking up a CPU, RAM, graphics card, or motherboard without taking the necessary ESD precautions can still zap those devices. The static may have no place to go but destructively through those sensitive devices - without you even knowing there was a static discharge.
For anyone who says they have never experienced ESD, I say hogwash! They are only fooling themselves because we, as a human beings, would never know if a destructive static discharge occurred.
A couple facts to consider:
1. Some super high density devices (like many CPU and GPU processors and memory devices that operate with voltages of less than a couple volts) can be damaged by excessive voltages as little as 10V!
2. The threshold of human awareness varies greatly from the most sensitive being around 3000V (Princess and the Pea types) up to 30,000V for calloused, hard labored hands.
3. While the average ESD event has the potential of about 15,000V, the time it takes for the arc to travel from fingertip to device can easily be less than 1ns (1 nanosecond or 1 billionth of 1 second!). Which even for that Princess, is way too fast for humans to see.
So while the risks may be low in your particular environment, do not assume the risks do not exist. You can build up destructive charges just by squirming in your chair! And since it really is easy to prevent destructive potentials from building up in your body (keeping a finger planted on the bare metal of your computer case interior is normally enough) why risk it? If you get into the habit of always taking the necessary precautions EVERY time you open your case or handle a sensitive device, you will be prepared should you find yourself working on a computer next time you are in Las Vegas or Phoenix.
) , well will once this heat start kicking in more often, kids here saying she don't like it either lmao.
Heck even paper towels would be a better choice but not by much