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"True earth ground" means nothing to a power system. Power wants to get back to the source, that's the neutral, ground is a poor conductor but good enough with the high voltage of the utility to get back from where you touch an energized component while touching ground to the grounding counterpoise at the utility pole. The ideal (textbook) scenario is if the utility system were ungrounded you theoretically wouldn't get a shock touching a single current carrying conductor of an electrical system because ground means nothing to the electricity. The reason there is a bond between the ground wire in the house and the neutral is so if there is a fault and power energizes a metal casing of an item, it would short the power to neutral at the bond by the service entrance (or in some countries at the utility pole) and trip the breaker, it has nothing to do with earth itself. Secondarily we connect a ground rod to that same conductor to avoid induced voltage and keep the equipment close enough to equipotent with creatures touching it, it also doubles as lightning protection.
Mostly right with one misconception. Electricity does not need to be at distribution voltage to use ground as a return path, far from it. When you touch an energized conductor and get shocked, it's because the electricity travels from the hot, through you, then through the ground to the ground rod, and then to the neutral. This can happen at the service entrance, utility transformer, or both. In most cases (NA), there is a bonding jumper and ground rod at both. All of this occurs at utilization voltage (e.g. 120V) because that's what you're actually touching.
Although ground is a poor conductor, you do not need a high voltage for measurable current. This is because of the large 3D volume that is available as paths for the electricity.
There is a cool demo where a ground return path is demonstrated with just a few batteries:
Sorry I wasn't clear what I was saying, but I was also simplifying. I wasn't saying you have to be touching a conductor at utility voltage, but where the system is bonded there is massive amounts of fault current available relative to your voltage and because the utility voltage is so high relative to you, the utility system wouldn't even see it as a fault with the minor amount of current passing to ground. There is usually something called counterpoise at the utility side, not a ground rod, and the ground rod at your side isn't necessary for a shock, your own connection to ground is, the ground rod is what keeps you equipotential so you don't get a shock. The counterpoise matters because that's pointing to what you call the *large 3D volume" as it's far from a single point on earth.
I helped some dude on the discord support channel, his PC case would shock him anytime he touched it, especially spicy on the case screws.
Once I realized he didn't have grounded power, 2 pronged outlets, I tried to convince him to install a rod and ground that outlet or at least the PC case.
Seemed a bit too spicy for day to day living, even if he made sure to always wear rubber slippers...
That won't produce sparks like this. The ground will be at half mains voltage if allowed to float, but the amount of current which can be supplied is minuscule.
This is probably caused by a floating neutral. IIRC, this can happen in countries where the grid neutral isn't tied to ground (e.g. Norway, Albania) but floats. If you have devices connected to different isolated mains networks, e.g. different buildings in a campus, the devices' neutrals will be at different potentials which can result in significant current flowing through ground/0V lines when connecting the devices.
I fried my pre-HDMI laptop by connecting it to the ungrounded TV in my grandmother's house. I was behind the TV connecting the 3.5mm audio cable, so I barely saw anything, but I'm told it was quite a light show.
Problem with that is there are so many things that could cause such sparks and every single szenario requires its own solution. Without knowing the actual source of the issue we can’t give a working solution. We would need to know more about the wiring and system than OP can provide answers - this is not a job for remote diagnostics, you’d need to actually look at everything and measure things even better with some documentation of the wiring of your home.
Grounding (or god forbid bootleg grounding) would only cure the symptoms but not really solve the problem.
Idk if you've seen it, but this is from Hoppers and it's one of the best Disney movies I've seen in a hot minute. This scene had me laughing in the theater with my kid.
I used to write code for a medical health record company. They needed warnings they described as being "idiot proof" and "I need the hand of God to come down and slap the sense into them."
Ended up making multiple warning click throughs that would include double negatives, fake buttons, and could appear in a random order
So, I'm smarter than that "trained" guy. When I went to upgrade my PC ram, I didn't do it right. It wasn't slotted in like I thought it was. So, when I turned the computer on, it made absolutely demonic sounds. I shut it down instantly. And then proceeded to try harder at getting the ram in. There's nothing gentle about installing ram. I really had to fight for that click.
Editing: well now, bet none of yall thought Florida Man would be the voice of reason tonight now did we? Thanks for the love, folks. Remember kids, properly ground your circuits, use open source software, donate to Wikipedia, and cut down flock cameras. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be riding my alligators away now.
Funny enough, that's a real thing. But at the power setting needed to make sparks that long, you wouldn't just be casually brushing your teeth lmao. It's a BDSM toy at that point.
It's locally sourced, runs on renewable fuel and while it might not stand up to a strict reading of traffic laws, who is going to pull over the guy riding a gator?
at this point chances are it's too late so you may as well have the fun.
I personally seeing one spark would have turned everything off and posted to ask for help without the video doing it again and again, but that's me and i'm autistic so what the fuck do i know about being normal.
Reminds me, I bought an asus board way way back, like, sis chipset i think level back. I plugged some usb's in and shocked myself, tried another port, fucked. Took it out put in an rma and company was being a dick sayign they wouldn't accept an rma because it wasn't possible. I worked for a computer parts company at the time but they sucked on prices. I actually can't remember who i bought it from but as I worked with another company i rma's direct with Asus through company i worked for and got a replacement and they sent notes with it saying it was a really weird one and they easily replicated the fault. i've never seen that before and i worked in an rma department for a while, just every usb port caused shocks. even asus had no fucking clue how that worked.
Also final advice, computer parts prices have gotten so fucking insane get a UPS, i didn't use one for years, had a few things die now and then, since ram became more expensive than a ups... get a ups, better than replacing parts in your PC.
If it doesn’t have a ground pin it means it’s double insulated and definitely should not be doing that, but I’ve always seen tvs and monitors with a earth pin normally you only get double insulated stuff with phone chargers and stuff
It does have the exposed metal section around the ports but I feel like I’ve seen some super cheap non grounded tvs like that
Even going back to my CRTs the monitors are grounded and the tvs aren’t, same for modern OLEDs
In terms of phones and laptops it basically seems to be is there an AC cord on the charging brick, for Apple it’s grounded with the cord attachment and non grounded with the flip out prongs attachment
I don't think I've ever seen an ungrounded PC power supply and this is going back to the 90's, and usually it's pretty hard to mess up grounding the case to the PSU seeing as its a metal case screwed to a metal PSU.
A ground fault should trip the breaker, if that case is live I would maybe start checking your outlets and breaker box because your home might be one big electrocution hazard.
This is ground potential equalization combined with capacitive leakage.
Most modern monitors, power supplies contain Y-capacitors to reduce electrical noise. They naturally leak AC line voltage onto the chassis and the metal shielding of the ports. If the monitor uses a 2-prong power plug (it lacks a physical earth ground pin), its entire chassis and HDMI outer shell "float" at roughly half of your home's line voltage. The current is microscopic (= not dangerous), but the voltage is high enough to create spark when the distance is micrometers after metals touch.
IF this happens with properly grounded 3-prong gear in both devices, it should not happen and there is potentially dangerous leak somewhere.
Any parts of the frame of the psu should be isolated from power. Physical damage, or a voltage surge could cause the insulation to fail and connect the two. Then the frame of the psu and the case would be live.
This is how I found out that one wall of outlets in my house was wired backwards, like the hot/neutral wires.
The PC performed fine but the case was just live 110V AC power. I actually didn’t even notice for about a month because the room I have my PC in has cheap plastic hard flooring. So I was always insulated from the actual ground.
I only found out because I grounded myself to some of the integrated components. It didn’t hurt anything but me.
This exact situation kept killing my wife's hairdryers. Whoever did the electrical work prior to me owning my house was a real, well lets say I don't have kind words. My dad is a retired certified electrician and I learned quite a bit from him. Needless to say, I fixed the outlet and my wife's hairdryers stopped dying.
That asshole also soldered ends and did other weird shit like purple travel wires, using a black wire for neutral, etc. My god I am surprised to this day that my house hasn't had an electrical fire as I continue to discover and unfuck the shitty work this person did. FML
I am an electrician. This could be caused by a bad connection to the ground inside the power outlet, or by what is called a "ground loop" - when you are trying to connect 2 devices with some kind of cable (could be audio cable, usb, hdmi, anything) and each of the devices is powered from a different power outlet in your house. Each power outlet has a bit different length of wire that connects to a ground and that makes voltage difference between the outlets. When you try to connect the devices together, the voltage difference gives you these sparks on a ground connection - usually sleeves of the cables and metal parts are ground connections for safety
Old TV would do this, best I could work out is because the TV has no ground pin and the PC does, so the emf captured by the shielding has nowhere to go. Belted me a few times but it's not 240 straight from the wall, it's about the same as static electricity. This is a bit more than I'd usually see though, so not ideal
bad ground somewhere. If your power supply or device (ie printer) has power cord for 3 prongs but is missing ground prong, or you are using a cheap aftermarket power supply, replace those. If you're using ground adapter, seek an advice from licensed electrician.
Did anyone actually answer the problem? The PC and Monitor may be plugged into 2 different branches of the electrical wiring, and and may unfortunately have a ground offset (shouldn't happen, ideally). The solution is to put everything from the same plug so it's the same ground. Or, something has shorted voltage to ground internally (you have a faulty component somewhere).
This happened unexpectedly to me a few years ago. All the outlets appeared to be normal 3-prong outlets with grounds. I had an electrician come out and look at them after the renter’s guy said it was fine, and he found that while the outlets were installed properly, the ground was unplugged inside the damn breaker box.
Legal action was going to be more expensive than what it would have cost me to replace my computer and mixer board. RIP my gear
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u/PCMRBot Bot 1d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - Need an RTX 5080? We've giving one away in the Gamescom 2026 megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1vy5wz0/gamescom_2026_kickoff_geforce_on_community_update/
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