Static electricity Killin me.

Wow, lots of responses! I've just started grounding myself on a heater vent next to my equipment. The culprit is the dry winter air here in colorado. It's pretty dry here. When I was young, my friend and I used to walk around in our socks, shuffling our feet on the carpet to build up electricity so that we could unexpectantly shock one another, usually on the nose or ear. Hurt like hell!

Sgr, thanks for the tip! I'll have to try that with my cables! I was never a believer in raising my cables off the floor but maybe it would be wise to look into that also!

B_limo First the fact you are getting shocked means you have a well grounded system. But most people don't realize that when you feel a shock it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20K volts. Good zaps have been measured to 70k. It's all voltage with no current. That being said it over time will cause some damage. Keep touching that heater vent first and if you don't like the feel of the shock hold a coin and touch it to the heater vent.

"over time will cause some damage.

Static electricity damaged the input chip in my Levinson tranport.

I did what Theo recommends...ran a length of lamp cord from ground connection on back of surge protector to side of wood equipment table. Just touch the bare wire end before touching the equipment.

There was an old post on A'gon a while back where the ground wire was connected to a brass door knob mounted on a small wood panel. Dressed things up a bit. The writer included instructions on putting a resistor in the circuit, as I recall. This reduced/eliminated the "pain" of the shock when you grounded yourself to the knob.

I actually killed my wall thermostat w/static elec once and had this problem w/my stereo in cold, dry Virginia. I solved it by grabbing one leg of my metal rack before touching a component.