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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.
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.