Hello all, I was in the military when they discovered that they had early failure rates due to ESD. The discharges were zapping equipment and they would not fail immediately but sooner than they should. They did intensive research with the industry and then the whole electronic industry came out with what ESDS was. Electro static discharge sensitive equipment. They produced guidelines for us when we worked on the test benches. The person named Steve at the very beginning was right on the money. Your test mat should be hooked to a TESTED outlet that is grounded. You can purchase a outlet tester at home depot. Then you hook the ground to the center plate of the outlet box. If you have a test bench the bench also needs to be grounded. If you have it properly grounded then you can ground to the bench. In ABSOLUTELY no circumstance should you ever ground to a pipe. Ground for your electrical system will probably be at a different level than a pipe or even a stake you drive in. Most electrical if no all have a stake to ground all the system to the same place so there is no different potential. The mat and the wrist band to have the 200 megohm resistance as Steve said. I have been in electronics for 30 years and this should be common knowledge but alas some people say don't confuse me with the facts my mind is made up. Jeremy just go see for yourself at the esd org site and get over the plumbers and idiots opinions. Your safe with that grounding strap it provides you and your equipment with protection if you wire it as Steve described. Chris