Question: My wife is very interested in maintaining her health and increasing her body strength by eating healthy foods, embracing a healthy lifestyle and regular exercise.
Recently, she has become interested in a relatively new health movement called “Grounding.” She just purchased bed sheets online that have metallic fibers woven into the fabric and an electrical cord that connects the sheets to the ground plug on an electrical wall outlet.
I’m completely OK with eating healthy and exercise but curling up under wired sheets that are plugged into the wall makes me a little nervous.
I know this is not the typical type of handyman question readers ask you, but I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.
Your Handyman: Yes, your question is not the typical handyman question but is a very interesting electrical question!
I also am aware of this Grounding health movement that seeks to support a person’s overall wellness by helping the human body connect to the Earth’s natural energy via the ground wire in a home’s electrical system.
I do personally think there is something very healthy about kicking my shoes off and walking around the yard or beach barefoot, and it does seem like it helps to connect me to the earth in some sense.
However, connecting a person’s body to any part of their home’s electrical service just doesn’t seem like a great idea to me.
A typical home in the United States built in the past 40 years or so, has three wires that provide alternating current (AC) electrical power to your wall outlets, lighting and appliances; black, white and bare copper.
The black wire is live or hot; the white wire is neutral, providing a return pathway for the alternating current; and the bare copper wire is the ground wire that is usually connected to a copper stake pounded into the ground outside your home near your circuit breaker panel.
The black and white wires connect to the power lines either above your street on power poles or buried below your street in conduit, and they connect all the way back to the large barrel-like transformer found on the top of a power pole or sitting inside an enclosure above ground.
However, in many circuit breaker panels and sub panels, the ground wire is also bonded to the neutral wire, and in appliances like an electric clothes dryer, the electrical service connection sometimes also bonds the neutral wire to the ground wire.
In some situations, a person can receive an electrical shock from the neutral wire and voltage also can be measured on the neutral wire in some cases.
So, if you sleep on metallic-fiber sheets connected to your wall outlet’s ground — either through a grounded plug or by attaching to the faceplate screw — both the sheets and your body become grounded.
Since the equipment ground connects to the neutral wire at your home’s electrical panel, which ultimately traces back to the utility transformer, you’re effectively connected to the neutral side of the electrical system.
But back to your question: I don’t think the grounded sheets are a great idea, but I am by no means an expert at electricity.
My suggestion would be to check with the manufacturer or distributor of the grounding sheets and ask if their products are UL Listed.
You probably have seen the UL logo on consumer electrical appliances, which designates that the device is scientifically tested for safety and that it complies with modern electrical codes.
If it is not UL listed, I suggest that your wife unplug the sheets, kick off her shoes and seek grounding by going for a barefoot walk in the yard.
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Question: Our water heater has been making an incredible amount of noise recently, and it seems to be getting louder even though we have a water softener. It almost sounds like someone is hitting the water heater tank with a hammer.
My husband and I have recently become empty nesters, and we never had all this noise from the water heater when our kids were living at home.
What can be done to return peace and quiet to our home?
Your Handyman: A noisy water heater can be very annoying and probably isn’t all that great for the water heater itself.
All this noise is caused by minerals from our incredibly hard Santa Barbara water that settles over time into the bottom of the water heater tank, making a mineral pancake of sorts.
When the heat turns on, bubbles form under this layer of crud and the noise is created as these bubbles struggle to rise up and break through this layer.
Even though you have a water softener, there are enough minerals left in the water to cause this effect.
The reason that this is now happening in your home is that you are using much less hot water since your children moved out, and there is less opportunity for these minerals to get flushed out of the tank with normal use.
The typical suburban home has a 40- or 50-gallon water heater that is sized to provide hot water for four to six people and with only two people now in your household the tank is about 50% oversized.
The solution is to flush the tank a couple of times a year to reduce the mineral buildup and also try to use more hot water in your daily life.
Whenever you turn on water to wash your hands or rinse out the sink, turn on only the hot water valve instead of using cold water and set your clothes washer to the warm or hot setting when possible.
This will run more water through the water heater tank, which will help to flush out minerals and, combined with periodic flushing, your water heater will return to doing its important job in silence.
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