A few weeks later I needed some scrap for something, grabbed the piece closest on hand, pushed it into the blade and immediately triggered the wet wood alert and the blade spun down slowly. I knew that the wood wasn't wet, so started the saw up again and pushed it straight back into the blade only with more force, triggering it straight away.
Second time was due to cutting a lot of pitch heavy pine over an extended period of time - it built up on the cartridge and after a blade change that I didn't check the clearance on, it bridged the brake with the blade (i assume) and triggered on start up. (It comes with a tool to check this clearance after a blade change - I of course did not follow the instructions).
At that point, it's just another dumb saw that will chop your finger off, but it won't trigger the cartridge, and you can make what ever cuts you need.
The way it tries to determine if it's wet wood / a body part is the capacitance change. Slightly different profile which they can use to make an educated guess (obviously erring on the side of caution).
This is why for some time they would give you a free cartridge if yours triggered on flesh - they wanted the data on there from real-life flesh contact to improve their calculations.
And
2) correct.
You can manually disable the auto—trigger mode in those situations though (bypass mode).
It also doesn’t like anything conductive - so anything coated with Mylar, any kind of conductive dust or debris, etc. is also a crapshoot.
Very much edge cases though, unless you’re dealing with a lot of randos. A workshop I used to share had a wall covered with sawstop ‘trophies’, due to people doing weird stuff.
