Personal and components safety in a home lab

Hi folks,

I will start making some hobby projects in a home lab of mine... of course, away from the controlled environment of a well set-up lab, I have a couple doubts about safety:

- The whole floor in my home is carpet, a nice source for static i guess. I have a little ESD mat on my working desk and an anti ESD armband connected to it. Is it enough? Should I take further considerations? I work pretty often with FPGAs and other similar sensitive components.

- In order not to be fried by unfriendly currents I have a RCD in my main plug, a safety power strip and I do not connect anything to AC coming from the net but my DC supply. Again, should I take further considerations?

In my opinion, those are the two main safety concerns (plus a fire extinguisher, class ABC) to take, any other ideas?

Thank you very much in advance

You have not said what you work on. Beware of switched mode power supplies, often there are heat sinks with 1.4 X the incoming mains voltage on them and a very low impedance back to the mains. If you work on this sort of kit a 1:1 mains isolation transformer could be a life saver.
Frank

chuckey said:

You have not said what you work on. Beware of switched mode power supplies, often there are heat sinks with 1.4 X the incoming mains voltage on them and a very low impedance back to the mains. If you work on this sort of kit a 1:1 mains isolation transformer could be a life saver.
Frank

Click to expand...

I have a switched DC supply. Could it be something like this or is there any other (more economic) alternative?

https://www.amazon.de/Trenntransfor...0ESA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346269088&sr=8-1

I work on a pretty wide range of applications, from FPGA design for DSP and robotics to experiments with solar panels or radio stuff... My main concern is not to forget something important about personal safety or being able to easily damage the components due to the domestic environment.