Re: Can solar flares from the sun cause increased static electricty on earth.

The factor which most strongly influences the abundance of static electricity is atmospheric humidity. Slightly damp surfaces become better conductors of electricity; this allows static electricity to dissipate quickly. I'm not sure, but it's also likely that the water vapor in the air is more easily ionized than nitrogen or oxygen; this would also cause static charge to dissipate.

I was unable to find weather data for your area for the week you mentioned, but I would suspect that the humidity was unusually low, leading to more static discharges. You live in a rather dry area to begin with, so the effects of humidity changes should be large. I know that where I grew up in Hawaii, even the driest days were too humid to allow static discharges.

I would be extremely surprised if solar flares had a significant influence on static electricity. You have not proposed a mechanism which would explain such a connection, and I can't think of one myself.

I can't rule out a connection between solar flares and static, but you need to provide convincing observations of the connection. Your subjective observations are easily skewed by your own opinions and biases. It should be easy to get records of solar activity -- NOAA's solar X-ray flux plot is one possibility; ACE solar wind data is another. The hard part is measuring the static electricity activity. One simple possibility is to scuff your shoes for a fixed period of time, then measure how long you must wait before you no longer get shocked when touching a faucet handle or light switch. However, it's difficult to follow a consistent procedure with this technique (you need the same shoes, the same clothes, the same carpet, every day), and you must subject yourself to several static shocks every day for months, which isn't much fun. A better way might be to measure the length of the longest spark which can be thrown by a Van de Graaf generator or similar static-electricity-generating machine to a grounded electrode.

Once you have two plots of solar activity and static activity, you can compute the statistical correlation between them. A statistics book should tell you how to deduce whether this correlation is likely to be the result of chance or not.

One last note: if solar flares were causing changes in static electricity, wouldn't they affect the entire planet, and not just your neighborhood? I didn't notice any unusual static behavior during the time you described.