In these days of Plague Lockdown I am wearing only T-shirts1.
Said shirts are usually black, and have neat "mashup" artwork2 on them. The one I have on right now is a mashup of the Knights of Ni3 and Nine Inch Nails album cover "With Teeth". It has the NiN logo replaced with "Ni" and a silhouette of a Shadowy Figure wearing the iconic antlered helmet, and the caption [With Antlers]4.
Naturally I sometimes go through more than one shirt a day, so Wash Day can see me staggering round carrying piles of shirts one might expect from a much larger workforce than just me.
The new washer, bought last year during the post-wedding hiatus on this blog, has been mastered enough to get the clothes clean. Usually. It is a modern "conservation-of-resources" machine and I recently forgot to reset the water levels and washed a bunch of stuff in an eggcup of water and was so enraged afterwards I reset the controls to "Water Level Max" and hit the "Deep Fill" button for the now imperative re-wash5 on the principle I was owed some extra water to get the concentrated soap residue out of the load left there after an hour's gentle misting in the washer. I digress.
But the dryer, set to cook the shirts until they are dry, builds up a ferocious static charge that has each of my shirts coming out of the dryer in a burst of Weird Science pyrotechnics, and covered in all the white lint they can suck out of the universe. Not only that, my extensive and luxurious body hair gets stood on end and it tickles.
Then I get a bloody great shock.
Why doesn't this charge get grounded to earth by the frame of the machine?
I've researched this and the common wisdom is "use static sheets" (no thank you, I just spent an hour washing all sorts of chemicals out of the clothes or spritz the clothes with water and run the machine again to dampen everything (no thanks, I just paid for the energy to get the damp out you oblivious fools).
Electrical engineers blither on about capacitance of the human body blahblahblitherdrool but miss the essential point the as-bewildered-as-I fellow zapped-and-sick-of-it and asking why the static doesn't ground out through the dryer frame? In my case it is worse; my dryer has a steel body.
Now I have had that dryer in bits more times than I care to recall and I have a couple of ideas as to why the bloody static isn't going into the ground - or out of it into the clothes, I'm unclear as to which way the static-electricitons have to flow to equalize the charge. I always assumed it was electrons, but since electrons aren't being added to the load they must be being locally relocated between the clothes6 . So what we, i.e. I need is some way for these charges to move about, possibly into and out of the path to ground.
The drum is conductive, so why don't the charges move about locally? Dunno7
The drum itself isn't grounded, despite the Great Internet Collective Wisdom to the contrary. The drum is rotating on a pair of bearings made of some sort of dry felt, driven by a rubber belt8. Perhaps some of the charge can be carried by the belt to the motor pulley, to be grounded there, but the drum itself is not grounded and it isn't the sort of surface that static builds up on so it all has to stay in the shirts.
Plus, the casing of the dryer is enameled [made of hardened molten glass, basically.
This is an insulator, but paradoxically
is the sort of surface that can hold a static charge. Whether it does or not is open to experiemnt as the glass is backed onto steel so could be forming a capacitor. Whether that is an important factor is not immediately apparent, but
is one of the sorts of reasons why models differ from reality - the Universe uses all the stuff, models ignore the small stuff. I digress again.
I see two ways forward on project Stop My Fbleeping Shirts Sticking Together And Attracting Lint And Giving Me Shocks
a) Spray water on the clothes to encourage electrons to migrate back where they belong etc etc. Not happening in this universe
2) Connect the frame of the machine to a cable ending in a soft metalic ribbon or tinsel-like brush touching the drum.
Unfortunately, this won't help electrons move about in the clothespile. Short of screwing short lengths of chain to the drum interior to form a conducting path10, I'm stumped.
There used to be a thing called a Zerostat Pistol that purported to neutralize static charge on LPs by firing a stream of charge at the platter, then sucking a stream of reverse charge back. Sounds stupid, but I had friends who swore it worked and I know it could stun spiders and reset digital watches 'cos I did both of those. Some sort of piezoelectric gubbins inside.
This is what I need for the clothes, possibly in a semi-portable cannon calibre.
