Hi, I'm Dave from StaticWorx.
You recognize this?
It's the five pound probe we use
to test static-control floors and other things.
The reason we're talking about it right now is when we
evaluate a static-control floor what we normally look at,
if you talk to most people is they want to know
what the electrical resistance is from one point to another,
they want to know what the electrical resistance is
from point to ground.
They want to know what the electrical resistance is
from a person to ground,
and then they want to know how much voltage
the floor can generate when it's walked on.
Does that cover everything?
Far from it,
and unfortunately the more people I've talked to
over the last year,
I've come to realize no one is checking their floors
to find out the most important thing:
is the product grounded?
Are the ESD chairs that you might be using,
are they grounded?
Are your carts grounded?
Carts have conductive wheels.
So we're using a five pound weight
with two and a half inches in diameter of contact area.
Take a look at this caster,
look how a little contact area it actually has.
I put a dime on this caster,
I'm only actually touching roughly half the dime.
So over the years, different technologies in ESD flooring,
have evolved.
I'm going to show you just a few of them
because some of them were our floors,
some of them were other people's floors,
but the understanding was as long as we grounded people,
as long as their heel strap
would make contact with conductive points on the floor,
we were good to go,
as long as the floor did not generate charge
on a person who may walk on that floor.
Look at this floor, this floor
the only thing that's conductive here are these chips.
I can put a dime and not touch a chip, I can put two dimes,
I could probably put three dimes,
if I happened to have another one,
but look at my caster,
I can put my caster on there
and it's not touching any conductive material.
So if I'm relying on that floor to ground a chair,
to ground that wire cart with the trays on it,
when you're moving circuit boards,
this isn't going to get it done,
and you're not going to know that
because you didn't test for it.
So this kind of a floor evolved to this type of a floor.
It's a little more attractive, the speckles are smaller,
but I can still put a dime on there in certain spots
and I have to play with it,
but I can find spots where there's no conductive points.
When we tested this technology,
we found that it failed 84% of the time,
that means with the carts that we tested it with
84% of the time,
it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do,
at least with one caster.
That led to looking at the old technology, which is,
also a very reliable technology of veins.
I can put a dime any place on these floors with the veins,
and it's always going to make contact
with conductive materials.
But if I want to use chips instead of veins,
I can now do that.
This new version of GroundLock,
it's a interlocking floor,
there is no way I can put anything on here
that's the size of the dime
without touching several conductive points.
So if you want to look at this,
maybe just from a statistical perspective,
think of the floor as it's only doing 50% of its job.
If you're worried about grounding people
and keeping people from charging,
the other 50% of the job of a floor
is to allow you the mobility
to be able to move products around on carts,
maybe on automatic guided vehicles,
and different types of material handling trays
that the floor becomes the ground.
So you need to know whether that floor
is doing what it's supposed to do.
So there's a couple of ways you can do this.
One of them is you can repeat the test that we did.
You can read the article,
we just published in In Compliance.
We can loan you meters,
if you're working with us with our floors,
we can tell you how to do these tests,
but they're required,
you just have to look a little bit further,
look at the ANSI 4.1 requirements.
You need the floor and whatever fixtures are on it,
to provide a path to a groundable point,
that's less than 10 to the ninth (10E9).
Some of these things I just showed you,
I'm not getting into the meter and all that,
they don't do that.
So call us, have us send you a sample,
do a mock-up, get your meters out,
but start asking more questions
than whether or not the floor is just grounding
the people in my building.