I know that the answer is yes, I should, but outlets near the setup are not grounded (even though they look like they are) and I don’t want to have wires running though my living room.

The real question is what are potential problems ? Occasional system reboots? Permanent damage to PSU? Permanent damage to other components?

Without a ground there is nowhere for a surge to go, permanent damage is much more likely. Surge protectors or a UPS will not protect against surges at all without a ground.

There’s also no ground so the chassis may have enough voltage on it to cause a shock if you touch it. This could also damage components as they are not grounded and touching things can introduce high voltage from static electricity which will have nowhere to go.

Additionally if you have ethernet connected to it the system may end up grounding itself through the ethernet cable, if the device at the other side does have a ground, which could cause issues.

So it basically just means you have a much higher chance of damaging the parts, or injuring someone touching things.

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 82 users / day
  • 311 users / week
  • 986 users / month
  • 3.73K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.91K Posts
  • 79.3K Comments
  • Modlog