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Ohio Supreme Court Drawn Into Magnetic Homes Case
The Ohio Supreme Court will decide if a builder will have to replace magnetized parts of two couples' homes, even though they signed a limited warranty which did not specifically cover replacing positively- or negatively-charged building materials. After moving into the homes the couples found that something was not quite right. Their TV screens were distorted. Cordless phones ran into interference. Computer hard drives were corrupted. Soon after, it was discovered that steel joists in the homes had become magnetized."
Just rent a large degaussing coil.
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... just how strong the magnetic field is, for it to affect the hard drive of a computer at any likely distance. It seems like metal objects would be flying through the air and sticking to the floor. Also, I have to wonder how a static magnetic field would affect most phones. Seems there would have to be an alternating field of some sort to do so. Finally, any links to the 'numbers' (field strength, gauss, whatever the proper term is)?
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"After moving into the homes the couples found that something was not quite right. Their TV screens were distorted. Cordless phones ran into interference. Computer hard drives were corrupted." And, their tinfoil hats were stuck to the ceiling.
I'm not certain that the company *should* win. But should and will are two different beasts.
According to TFA "By signing the contracts, the buyers agreed to waive claims for repairs except those specifically mentioned in a separate document, which was available for inspection at a separate location and not before or at the time they bought the houses." The main point is that the restrictions were not available for review where the contract was being provided and signed. Hiding the restrictions on a contract prior to its acceptance? Smells really funky to me, and were I in their shoes, I wouldn't have signed it in the first place.
When I have signed contracts to purchase things, I have had to sign waivers limiting liability. Those waivers certainly covered reasonable expectations and disclaimed certain possible defects. This is a terrible problem for both sides, because it is just completely unexpected. I have never before heard of a steel beam's magnetization causing such difficulty. TFA is pretty slim on the real effects they are experiencing. I wonder if this is just one of those pseudo-scientific problems (magnetism = evil?) or if it is a real problem, or if it's just my reading comprehension. It would be interesting to see what the field measurements actually looked like. You'd need a very strong magnet to affect a TV from any significant distance.
At least with smaller pieces of metal you can whack them a few times to re-randomize the magnetic domains. I don't know if that actually works for something large enough to support a building (you might have to hit it hard enough to damage it or the structure it supports). Depending on the alignment of the magnetic field it might be possible to form an electromagnet to cancel its field ("degauss" it). Or the structural members can be replaced and removed (I've done this in my house). Most of these options are pretty expensive (except for the first one where you hit it a lot with a hammer).
It seems unfair for me, as a homebuyer, to get stuck dealing with a house which was built with nonstandard components (in the form of a magnetic structural support). From the builder's perspective it seems like this would be something that they would have to eat and then go after the material seller for their losses, if they can prove when the magnetization occurred.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
...get what you pay for.
When homebuyers decide to get a house within their budget instead of stretching for extra rooms by going cheap on construction, they'll get better quality. Building a 2000 sq ft house on a 1500 sq ft budget means, necessarily, cutting some corners. If you don't realize that, you either aren't paying attention or you are deluding yourself.
The quality on some of these new houses is really atrocious. I've seen cabinets fall apart after 10-12 years, decks rotting after 15, drywall that won't even hold a painting. I saw a dishwasher held to a cabinet by a pair of wood screws.
Have you ever tried to kill a harddrive with a magnet? It basically requires passing a rare earth magnet closely over the platters several times before the data is reliably damaged and if they had that kind of magnetic fields it would cause much bigger problems. And while I don't know to much about the properties EM radiation, I believe that magnetic fields don't interfere with radio waves.
My guess is that its the steel beams themselves are causing interference with the phones, that they incidentally had hdd failures (they have lived there for like 6 years), and the the steel beams have slight magnetic field because a small amount of current is passing through them (electricians like to ground to steel beams instead of running a ground line back to power box and putting to ground their) and they blame that weak magnetic field for their problems.
This is all purely speculation because they don't give any real details about the field.
If its just a couple of beams, it can be degaussed using a arc-welded and a few wraps of the arc-welds cables around the beam. There is a more to the procedure but the tools are easy to obtain. Did this in the Navy, wrap a submarine in about 300 turns of cable and run a few thousand amps through them.
Modern TVs aren't influenced by magnetic fields anymore. Static magnetic fields don't cause cell phone interference. And hard drives have such high magnetization that erasing them is extremely hard.
The people who claim they are affected are just mixing things that, to their uneducated minds, are the same thing. Static magneticity, radio waves, same difference, right?
It reads like a bunch of BS. Do they still have CRTs in their TVs? In typical 2-story U.S. homes, there's structural steel in a few isolated places -- a beam or two in the basement, perhaps another beam and a column in the garage. That would, at best, cause some changes in color. It'd need to be substantial to cause geometric distortion of the image itself. You can have typical home speakers a few feet away from a color CRT and there's no effect. That structural steel would need to be magnetized quite well to see the effects they claim.
Hard drives won't be affected by any remnant magnetization of structural steel that's a byproduct of production, shipping and storage in varied conditions. Same goes for wireless devices -- static fields do nothing much to them. I'll read their case and perhaps pay them a visit, I need to see it to believe it.
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I've got a bulk tape eraser. Which is an electro-magnet. Tried to erase a few laptop and 3.5 hdds with it. I could pick the drives up by it holding onto the scant bits of ferrous metal in them but was unable to blank any of them. I tried one drive for 3 minutes and it still booted an OS just fine. If they had beams that could corrupt their drives their keys, belts, zippers, furniture and every damn thing in the house with metal would be stuck to that wall before that drive got nailed. It's just normal lifetime use/failure of the drive.
No kidding. My dad has been remodeling his house and in the process discovered the rather astonishing electrical circuits involved. One of which circles the entire house. And seemingly random splicings that could have burned the house down years ago.
Not to mention things like the chimney lacking reinforcing in case of earthquakes.
I didn't say buy and old house and leave it as it is. The price of the house plus a full interior remodel can be similar to building new. I live in a 109 year old house, first thing I did was replace the electrical with a two story house with open attic and basement it's pretty straight forward. Had electrical well above code in a weekend on a 3k square foot home. Cat 6, rg6 and speaker wiring in another couple weekends nearly up to full structured wiring specs (speakers were matched length straight runs). Hell I had fiber out the the garage in another weekend and a ditch witch rental. Figure a thousand in wire etc (those new ground fault bits are expensive).
No sir I dont like it.
Slashdot summary does not agree with the original article, which says the Supreme Court will only decide whether the couple has the right to sue (a matter of law). Only later might the question move to whether magnetized joists have caused any trouble, a matter of fact.
most dishwashers mount by 2 wood screws.
Hard to sue the builders when it's a corp formed just to build the one development then closed down there are no assets. Things have gotten better with them requiring an insurance company to cover that warranty.
No sir I dont like it.
Why do you suppose the court was attracted to this case? It seems like it could be very polarizing.
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Dangerous electrical wiring has been replaced in most places (the ones where the leads run uninsulated in the spaces in the walls divided by the wooden beams). Insulation is likewise easily fixed either on the exterior or the interior. It's also been noticed lately that new, fully insulated houses might be worse for your health than those with "holes in the wall". The air gets stagnant and mold develops much easier in these super insulated houses. I just replaced ALL my windows with double pane, LoE3 glass for ~$5000 done by a professional and that alone helps a lot. The siding has insulation and the attic has been finished so all of that (floor and rafters) has insulation. Sure there is still heat pouring out here and there but it's not too bad and as I said, keeps the air from getting stagnant.
Also, most wiring issues (disconnected ground, polarity reversal) can easily be fixed usually at the socket that's misbehaving. Grounding shouldn't be an issue if the wiring has been done since the mid-60s but for really old houses you just need to re-run electricity (a $2000-$5000 job for a professional).
Extra cable and CAT5 runs (installed it last summer) behind my siding to the basement to every room. It's invisible, you just need a drill. I installed a 220V line to get a AC unit and it cools the whole house. I could've gotten it with the heating system (if you use forced air, uses the same ducts). AC is not really necessary in a lot of places, you just need to circulate air and that helps a lot, you could use the basement as a heat sink as well.
Get an inspector before you buy though, it'll cost you $100-200 but they can point out a lot of potential issues. My house had a CO leaking heater furnace (the heating elements were rusted through) something you can't see with the naked eye.
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Obviously they don't have a "magnetic beam" problem. They might have some electrical wiring problem. Those are easy to find.
Only once have I seen a real "magnet problem". I was trying to get a flux-gate compass to work in a mobile robot at Stanford, and was getting bogus results. So I got an ordinary needle compass, and observed that it didn't point north. I walked around with the compass plotting directions, and the center of the problem was a small building about a block away. When I went into the building, I saw "High Magnetic Field" warning signs, and found out there was a superconducting magnet in there. A big one. Even there, it was only one gauss just outside the lab.
The dishwasher is just an appliance, not a structural item. How many screws hold the washing machine, clothes drier, fridge, or tank water heater in place?
The two screws are just there to keep the thing from tipping forward annoyingly when the racks are all the way out. They're perfectly adequate for this role (actually, one screw in the right spot would be adequate -- three points define a plane...).
I've seen children swing from cabinet doors, teenagers slam them with wild abandon, and homeowners who don't know how to tighten a screw when things get wonky with time. I've seen top dollar decks rot from general lack of maintenance. And I've seen folks who are unqualified to hang anything on any wall, because the first thing they do is reach for a hammer and a nail, and when that doesn't work, they find a bigger hammer.
My house has some drywall that is 50 or 60 years old, just 3/8" thick, and brittle. It holds stuff just fine, provided that appropriate fasteners are used in appropriate ways. It's not rocket surgery.
Some people try to take care of their things. Some people don't think they have time to figure out how. The former group is proud of their collection of tools and earned experience. The latter bemoans every failure as being someone else's problem without ever considering if there were something they could have done differently.
*shrug*
Kid-proof tablet..