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Pirate Electrician Supplied Power To 1,500 Homes
fridaynightsmoke writes "A former electrical engineer for utility EDF has been prosecuted for illegally supplying power to some 1,500 homes in north London. Derek Brown, 45, was arrested in 2008 after being seen tampering with the electric grid in a manhole. He specialized in connecting separate supplies to houses that were split into apartments. One landlord involved, Haresh Parmar, was jailed for 9 months for stealing £30,000 worth of electricity for 22 of his apartments. Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service."
- The easy way: Vamp the cables before they go into the meter. Carefully poke needles into them, solder cable to the needles. Careful not to draw too much current, or they get hot - but British power is 230V, so a little current goes a long way. There is a risk of a meter reader noticing, but if you have a remotely-monitored smart-meter then this is an option. Popular with intensive pot-growers - not to avoid the fee, but because a house that suddenly spikes by several kilowatts and stays there will raise a suspicion notice at the utility, and may result in police going around to see if someone is operating hundreds of day-bulbs.
- The hard way: Find a cable someone else has paid for and splice in. Good targets are outbuildings. If your garage is next to theirs, a little breaking-and-entering is all you need.
- The insane way: Tap into the actual mains distribution cables under the roads or on utility poles. I think this is what he was doing. High effort, high risk of detection, high risk of electrocution. Only a real electrician could do this, like the person of the article. Allows access to great amounts of power, for running large buildings.
Fourth way, if you live near high voltage cables run cables beneath to tap of electricity by induction. People have been prosecuted in the UK for doing this.
The electric company meters the supply upstream of the domestic supplies so they have an idea if someone is drawing electricity illegally as all the individual readings should add up to the global reading minus losses.
definitely measurable...
http://www.doobybrain.com/2008/02/03/electromagnetic-fields-cause-fluorescent-bulbs-to-glow/
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
I mean, sure, you could prosecute them for trespass or something if you move your stuff onto their property/airspace, but if it's all on your own land, it's just EM waves flowing through the air. If the land owner has to put up with the radiation they didn't ask for, who is to say that they can't use it to induce a current?
Anyhow, I figure you might be trollin' seeing as how you'd have to get really close to get any measurable power via induction, but it is an interesting question in any case...
Those are good questions. Firstly, when you draw power using induction you are actually creating a load on the power supply. It's more-or-less the same as if you had spliced into the cable, but easier to hide and less likely to kill you. Secondly, building and using a coil for this purpose is a very deliberate theft of service with physical evidence (a coil, and usually a cable running to the thief's house). So yes, you can definately prosecute for this, even if there was no tresspassing.
As for distance, if you have a sufficiently large coil on the ground under powerlines then that is close enough to draw power.
This is actually a very common method to defraud electricity providers, particularly in informal settlements (squatter camps) where coils are easy to conceal.
if you live near high voltage cables run cables beneath to tap of electricity by induction
BUSTED: Mythbusters did it.
You don't get nearly enough power.
video here
How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
What do you mean "how"? "How can you succesfully prosecute a case like that": As any other case, collect evidence that there was an intent to do something naughty and take it from there; shouldn't be too hard - big inductors and appliances using the power generated is all that is needed. If you mean "Why is this even reasonable?", then consider that energy is never destroyed or created. To demonstrate the effect of tapping energy by induction, try to measure the power consumption on the input side of a transformer when the output is loaded to when it is unloaded.
I mean, sure, you could prosecute them for trespass or something if you move your stuff onto their property/airspace, but if it's all on your own land, it's just EM waves flowing through the air. If the land owner has to put up with the radiation they didn't ask for, who is to say that they can't use it to induce a current?
Trespassing is not necessary. You can tap usable amounts of power from a radio- or tv mast if you put up the right kind of aerial. As I noted above, this can have an impact on the power use of the transmitter, but on top of that, if an unqualified person starts handling serious amounts of electrical power, they may cause serious accidents - houses may burn down as a result, innocent people may get electrocuted because things are not set up properly etc.
How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
By making a law against it beforehand.
This is what happened in Germany. There was a case in 1899 where someone tapped a power line and was prosecuted for theft, but the court had to throw it out since "theft" was defined in terms of the taking of material objects, which electricity was not. So in 1900, a new law was created specifically for this situation.
If the land owner has to put up with the radiation they didn't ask for, who is to say that they can't use it to induce a current?
The legislative?
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
You've been modded funny, but there are actually a few examples where bullshit artists have taken the system to court and lost precisely because if they were to win, the resulting mess would be far more than any sane government would want to contemplate. IANAL, but AFAICT most judges take a fairly dim view of people trying to twist an interpretation of the law in a fashion that would be of great detriment to society.
Remember that induction reciprocates. If you have a transformer without a secondary winding, or with a mild bulk resistor in the EM field -- like happens around high voltage AC transmission lines, then the transformer runs at some nominal loss that you can't do much about. As soon as you add a secondary winding and load it, the primary winding current increases! So the "leakage" by itself doesn't mean that they are losing as much power as they would if you had an actual secondary winding there, with a load. Ground, even wet ground, and buildings, even with metal in them, are very poor transformer secondaries. Something purpose-designed -- doesn't have to be.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I think it's partially BS. An induction loop that provides useful power (enough to run a house) at a distance of 100 yards to the AC transmission line must be coupling to a big-scale high voltage line -- I'd presume something above 100kV. AFAIK, in those lines, change in losses due to changes in something as trivial as air humidity beats whatever consumption a house would have, by orders of magnitude. I doubt they would be able to measure whatever this man did. Now it's true that he did increase the load on their line, but the instantaneous power transmitted by such lines is such that one house's worth of load is below the capability of typical industrial measurement systems. So it's true that he was stealing power, but I doubt they came to him due to "extra load in their circuit". Besides, such lines are costly to maintain, so I presume it's rare that you would run such a line without normal loads attached to it. I'd think that leakage measurements with disconnected loads are rare: idling a big transmission line wastes lots of money.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Have you actually ever visited a third world country?
I live in Brazil where sales tax is around 25% for food, for "luxury" items it could reach 70% of the final price. In order to dock at a Brazilian harbor, a ship has to fill over 140 different documents with a total of over 900 different questions.
In other words, you are absolutely correct. High taxes and over regulation are, basically, the cause of many countries being poor.
They showed the coils of bailing wire didn't work with specific PG&E transmission lines to 'power a house'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sales taxes are demonstrably regressive; the poorest pay the highest percent of income because they necessarily *spend* the highest percent of their income.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere