Real Life EMF Experiences?

ilander asks: "I've been looking to buy my first home recently and found one that seemed perfect. The one downside is that there are power lines directly overhead (in the yard) as well as a high tension power line tower in the empty lot in back, less than 200 feet away from the house. So does anyone have any personal experience working/living near power lines? Aside from the possible health risks, which may or not exist (depending on who you ask), will I run into any problems with my monitors and TVs? What about DSL, cable and my 802.11b network? How about digital satellite reception? Any help is appreciated!"

Comments

Kokomo Hum

[MacBrave]

Residents of Kokomo, Indiana have complained of a hum for years. Supposed causes ranged from power lines, to defective machinery, to just stress.

Mysterious Kokomo Hum

I grew up near Kokomo and still have relatives that live there. However none of them have ever complained of the hum.

At the old house

[MImeKillEr]

Our first house was in close proximity to overhead powerlines. They were less than 200 ft away. More like less than 50.

The three years we lived there, we didn't notice anything strange health-wise.

I recall seeing some people do the following (not sure if this is indicative of possible health issues):

1.Take a florescent light bulb - like the overhead lights in most garages and offices. Make sure its dark out.

2. Stand under the powerline.

3. Grab the light fixture with both hands - one at either contact point (the metal ring around the outside, not the pins).

4. See if the light glows.

The theory (I guess) was that this indicated power/voltage/whatever was 'bleeding' from the powerlines. The folks who did this swore this was proof that the area wasn't safe to live in.

YMMV.

Re:Real-Life EMF Experiences?

[Pieroxy]

I remember some news in france a while ago, where a little village was suing EDF (French version of PG&E, but belong to the government) because they came up with a statistics that leukemia rates were just 1200% higher than anywhere else in France... Scary. Of course, it might just have been a hoax.

Ready to bet your life on the fact that it was? I am not. Let's say there is a 10% chance that these guys were right. Would I risk my life and the ones of my family just because the house in question is a little nicer than another one? No thanks.

I basically think you've got to reorder your priorities. Mine is order this way: Life first. House second. TV/Computer third.

Real life induced charge

[chrisatslashdot]

I worked my way through college installing sprinkler systems for lawns and landscapes. We used a 16' metal trailer with an expanded steel deck, a steel pipe rack, and several metal lockers. On one job we parked the trailer under high voltage powerlines and got a sizeable shock if we touched the trailer with damp boots or sweaty hands.

I have also head of people filling a 55 gallon drum with coils of copper wire and stealing power from high-tension wires.

Re:Real life induced charge

[bill_mcgonigle]

I have also head of people filling a 55 gallon drum with coils of copper wire and stealing power from high-tension wires.

Very clever - I'd heard of 'clothes lines' but not drums full of coils. If they were burried with just the ends exposed they'd be pretty hard to track down.

So, what kind of electricity do you get out of such a drum? Is it clean enough to run through an inverter onto your home grid? Heh, in a reverse-metered state you could sell it back to the electric company (install a solar panel for cover).

Electric fence?

[TheSHAD0W]

It was a particularly cold night in winter and I was walking out to open the gate to the yard; there'd been a sleet and the fence was coated with ice. Except... When I walked up to the lock, I noticed that one length of chain between the gate and post was free of ice. When I touched it, it was noticeably warm.

I went back to get my meter, unhooked the chain, and measured the voltage between the gate and post; it measured a wonderful 2.7 volts. Silly me, I then switched the meter to measure current. What as I thinking, using a cheap multimeter across enough current to heat up a heavy metal chain? Luckily I only blew its fuse.

I called the power company and told them about the stray voltage problem; within a few days they'd established a new ground and my fence is now down to 1/2 volt.

Re:Electric fence?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a wireless ISP. One of our installations operates between two FM stations and an AM station. It's the kinda place where if you want to go more than 15 feet up a tower you've gotta be wearing a metal hazard suit and wearing an RF monitor it's an even bet about who gets your balls first, the RF or OSHA.

One visit to the place I noticed someone had laced heavy copper wire around the entire perimeter of the fence and added a copper ground rod near the gate.. Scratched my head, did my thing. On the way out, asked one of the NOAA guys we share the tower with about the wire and about who the paranoid mofo that did it was. He went to his truck and grabbed some polaroids he had taken over the last winter. Trees coated with ice, snow plastered everywhere including stuck to the sides of the gear shack.

Then he pulled out a pic of the tower across the way, and pointed out the difference. One fence coated with ice, one fence not.

I've had real life EMP experience, though..

[pedro]

A few months ago, during a rather spectacular thunderstorm, we a lightning strike _very_ close to our house.
Most of our NIC cards' and our router's ports got toasted, while leaving the internal circuitry of our computers utterly untouched.. they ran flawlessly both before, through, and after the incident. No reboots, no power glitches.. nada. The cards passed diags fine; the router would boot up ok, too.. except..
None of the lights indicating CAT5 connectivity lit up. Some component substitutions eventually revealed that all of the rj45 interfaces had been smoked.
A final, glaring clue that the lightning bolt's EMP was indeed the culprit was the fact that a 30" tv that had been on in the room at the time now exhibits _severe_ orange and green casts all the way out to the corners of the crt at right angles to each other. The mask is now MAG-MO-TIZED in a major way.
I'm gonna need a really muscular degausser. :)

Re:I've had real life EMP experience, though..

[rco3]

Guess again, chief. A lightning stroke is a piss-pot of current flowing down the equivalent of a big-assed antenna. The effects of this include, as you said, current flowing all over the place from direct injection. However, the effects also include large radiated magnetic and electric fields.

Do you know what happens when a conductor sits in a moving magnetic field? Current. Depending on how close you are, possibly lots of current.

I, personally, have participated over the last year and a half in experiments involving measuring the currents induced in power lines by nearby (50 m, 30 m, 15 m, 7 m) lightning strokes. It's there. It's real. The electric and magnetic fields are real, too. Not only that...

but we've seen evidence (good evidence) of X-rays and gamma rays associated with lightning.

If you're going to make strong, definite comments like, "No, you didn't have an EMP experience" you should probably make sure you have a solid understanding of the subject. Unlike this one, for example.

Yes, I AM a lightning scientist.

Re:I've had real life EMP experience, though..

[rco3]

Well, that's one of the things we're studying. We have a section of power line set up - not energized or attached to the grid - which we strike directly and indirectly, i.e. very close to the line. We trigger lightning with rockets so that we can exert SOME control over where it hits.

Florida Power and Light want to know how bad their lines (and their customers' houses) get damaged by nearby strikes. They've been paying us to find out. It's extraordinarily cool, actually. We launch rockets trailing a wire into a thundercloud, and trigger lightning. For the indirect stuff we have a rocket launcher mounted on an old, tired FPL bucket truck that we can drive around and park wherever we want to launch.

The upshot is that nearby strikes don't induce as much current as direct ones inject, but it's enough to screw stuff up. It usually is induced in the power distribution, not in the house.

Oh, and let me apologize for getting snippy. I've been at the school ALL freakin' day, trying to get the thesis (yes, lightning) finished this semester, and I haven't eaten. I get mean when I'm hungry.

Life examples

[GiMP]

I don't know what the science is, but I know the following:

My aunt, uncle, and cousins lived next to (what I believe was) a cellular-phone tower. My aunt died of breast cancer, my cousin developed a beign tumor on his chest, and my uncle now has cancer (I believe testicular).

Then again, it could be coincidence.

from the free electricity dept...

[Big-mad-Gregor]

This may be an urban legend but it was recounted to me by my university lecturer.

A while ago here in blighty there was a court case which involved a gentleman who lived under a power line. The gentleman in question was accused of stealing electricity from the power company and they were trying to prosecute.

He had facilitated the alleged theft by placing one half of a step down transformer in the loft(attic)of his home and fed the output into his electricity supply. He had been gleaning free electricity like this for years.

The court case was dropped when the court explained to the power company that to succesfully prosecute they would have to admit that electro-magnetic radiation was entering the house and therefore existed at points beyond the transmission line previously claimed as safe.

If the power company had pursued the case then it would have opened a flood-gate of suits relating to cancer etc.