Gloves for working with batteries and electronics

[pickworthi]

I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos of battery building and electronic circuit building to try and educate myself on best practice (and just learn in general). I see that most presenters who seem to know what they are doing wear some sort of glove. There seem to be two types used mainly:
- Nitrile gloves, which seem to be quite widely used
- What look like cotton gloves, but could be coated

I have a box of nitrile gloves. I use them, but I don't like them because they really make my hands sweat. And they tear quite easily. Main use for me is circuit/wiring work (so soldering mainly), and soon to be battery building (spot welding). All "low" DC voltage - not mains AC.

My question is about the "cotton" type gloves. I've dug around a bit and found these as an example:
https://www.safetygloves.co.uk/ejendals-tegera-805-esd-anti-static-gloves.html

What do the pros on this forum think about these? Any recommendations?
Thanks

 

[fechter]

If you are staying below about 72v you really don't need "high voltage" gloves or need to worry about getting zapped.

When pack building, I wear leather gloves. The nickel strips have a razor sharp edge and will cut right through nitrile gloves. You also want some protection against arc-flash (KFF) in case you accidentally short out the pack. Always cover the battery terminals you aren't working on with tape or some kind of insulation.

 

[pickworthi]

When pack building, I wear leather gloves. ....

Thanks for the response.
I'm guessing you use really soft/thin leather gloves? Just wondering how pliable they need to be when soldering balance wires for example. Good point about the nickel being sharp. It seems that good practice is to round off all nickel strip corners before welding as well, but the edges remain sharp enough.

 

[fechter]

My gloves are fairly thin/pliable. For soldering I just take the gloves off.

 

[Hummina Shadeeba]

I wear just one glove that has no possibility of ripping leaving a sweaty inlet. and glasses

 

[markz]

Do you wear and bling bling on the fingers?

If so tape over the ring or wear gloves no matter what.

 

[wheelbender6]

Along that line, what about wearing a grounding cuff on the wrist while working on e-bikes? Does it provide any protection to electronic components from static electricity during maintenance?
-We wore the grounding cuffs on our wrists at work while programming and marking chips.

 

[pickworthi]

Wot?
(This was in response to a weird post - which has now gone.)

 

[dogman dan]

The rule I learned to follow, after a good KFF, was to never have both terminals exposed at the same time. This applied only to soldering discharge or balance wires to packs.

But that never saved me from putting the wrong polarity connector on a wire, then connecting up to get a KFF.

 

[pickworthi]

But that never saved me from putting the wrong polarity connector on a wire, then connecting up to get a KFF.

There was a show a while back on UK TV called Scrapheap Challenge. Your reply made me think of it, since whenever a team connected a gearbox to whatever contraption they were building, they always got it to rotate the wrong way

Since I also have some dyslexic issues when it comes to polarity, I have adopted a police of testing any connector with a multi meter before using it. In the short time I've been making up cables, it has caught one mistake already.

Also, really good point on covering terminals not being worked on. I've watched loads of YouTube videos of people building batteries, and only seen two people doing this. Stuff just moves around as if by magic on my workbench