Induced voltage on my desk? Sharing an experience..

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Thatweirdinputlag
Posts: 305
Joined: 27 Aug 2021, 14:09

Induced voltage on my desk? Sharing an experience..

Post by Thatweirdinputlag » 28 Dec 2021, 05:11

I mainly never post, I only lurk and comment for the most part but I felt the need to share this.

So basically as the title says, I have induced voltage that is resonating throughout my entire desk. I came to this find when I was fiddling around with the Multimeter that i recently bought to try to check out the voltages on the electrical sockets that are powering my setup. Everything seem'd to be okay until my bare foot accidentally touched the metal frame "Compressed wooden tabletop attached to a metal frame, thats my desk which is pretty common" when that happened I was actually testing the voltage difference between my body and the ground, and the reading spiked from around 1.8v close to 25v. The reading would also spike if i touch the wooden tabletop.

Now, to be fair, I do have a lot of stuff around on my desk, 3 Hue play bars, Modem, Alexa echo, audio interface, Monitor "mounted on the desk not the wall". And I know a lot of you would say well why do you have all these things if you're concerned about input lag, WELL, short story is, i've had input lag when I had a much simpler setup with nothing on but a monitor, PC case and K&M. So at least I get to be slow while my setup looks decent lol. Nevertheless, I did try to unplug everything that was not necessary for a whole day and nothing changed.

The interesting part comes when I tried to find a way to ground that table, so it wouldn't have an electric field of some sort, and it was kind of hard since the Metal frame itself is painted! It did work at the end, I found a metal screw that was not painted and I attached a crocodile clip that is connected to a wire then straight through to a grounding part of the electric socket and voilá now the frame itself has close to 0 potential between the ground and itself!

When I turned my pc on, my mouse felt feather-like, I have the Logitech G Pro X Superlight and its already 60 grams, but moving it never felt like this ever. What is more interesting is the 20 seconds when I was playing that i felt like I was part of my character in-game, everything was so responsive, I was able to spray transfer into a player bunnyhopping away behind a box and get him with a headshot and I knew before killing him that he would die with a headshot. For some reason, the spray was literally the easiest thing to control and I didnt have to double bullet burst or stop to wait for my crosshair to reset. Using the abilities were too responsive that i literally prematurely used an ability because of how fast it got triggered, usually i have to switch to the ability, wait for a bit and then carry on with the next task otherwise it will give me the "beep sound" of it not being ready to be cast. The game was Valorant if anyone is interested to know what i am talking about.

Sad part of this story is that I was never able to get to that level of responsiveness again, them 20 seconds of bliss, the good part is that even though the input lag and low responsiveness came back, it might be not as bad as before, or maybe i'm just in denial. For now, i'll keep testing things out since I got an EMF meter and see where this leads.

Things that might be useful to know:
- During this experiment, everything on my desk was on, nothing unplugged.
- Desk is from IKEA the brand is "BEKANT" its a really big corner desk.
- Only way to bring the desk to 0 Voltage potential is by disconnecting everything that is hooked on it.
- I had input lag on my older desk too, No metal frame, just compressed wood all over.
- The router alone "ISP issued" can put close to 6-7 volt potential on the table top if it was on.
- The desk is not touching the wall or the sockets themselves, but has 2 power strip attached to the wooden part upside-down with double-sided tape. 1 for the junk on the desk, and 1 purely for the monitor as of now since I don't need have more things that need direct power.
- Each power strip is connected to a different electrical socket. The power cable coming from the PC has a socket of its own too, but ultimately all the sockets in the room are connected to one breaker in the main panel.
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