Is Dirty Electricity For Reals?

Factual Questions
1

I find myself wanting to overhaul a set of bedrooms in the top floor of a tri-level house. Although the floor plan is interesting enough, the result is the house is basically made of stairs. Now, stairs are loads of fun to run up and down especially in the dark. But what I like even more is doing creative house wiring! So I was thinking, “Hey, why not feed electricity to the 3 upstairs rooms & 2 bathrooms from a 100amp sub panel!” Naturally, the panel would be upstairs, so that accessing breakers would not require any stair navigation [critiques on this thought are welcome, but not really the subject of the thread. Short version : I want to accommodate radiant floor heating and a couple offices].

While researching where to stick the sub panel, I learned the walk-in closet is NOT acceptable (damn!). But that’s not a problem because I can find an acceptable location. But what I also read about is a phenomenon known as dirty electricity. Essentially the problem is EM radiation coming from wires, outlets, and especially breaker boxes. Sites describing the issue go into the perils of sleeping near EMR sources, and of course there are all sorts of gadgets you can buy that will mitigate it.

Is that bullshit? Is it an actual thing, the consequences of which are overblown? Or is it an actual thing that is very likely the root cause of most chronic health problems in the industrial world? Do I need to be thinking about shielding or otherwise engineering a safer wiring system, perhaps to include Faraday cages surrounding the rooms?

2

Yes. Complete bullshit.

3

100% bullshit. Pure woo.

4

Ok, longer answer.

Back around the late 1960s / early 1970s, some insurance folks figured out that people who live next to power lines don’t live as long as people who don’t. Insurance folks get paid big bucks to figure stuff like this out since it affects their rates and payouts and is basically their entire business.

For a long time, nobody except insurance folks really cared much. Then in the late 1970s, a study came out linking power lines to childhood leukemia. That study has since been discredited, but the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak. People were starting to worry about power lines.

In the 1980s (when I happened to be in college to get my EE degree) things really went nuts. Everyone was in a panic over the dangers of power lines. Soon, self-proclaimed “experts” were walking all over the place with field strength meters, proclaiming what areas were “safe” and what areas were “dangerous”. But then what was a “safe” number and what was a “dangerous” number? There hadn’t been any significant studies about the safety of power lines, so nobody really knew. The numbers that the “experts” were using were in most cases rectally generated (i.e. they pulled them out of their ass).

Being a young EE student, this topic did of course interest me, and one of my professors was one of the early researchers into the subject. He did point out that the lifespan difference noticed by the insurance folks was real, but that it did not necessarily imply cause and effect. It could just be that folks who choose to live healthier lifestyles also choose not to live next to power lines.

All kinds of money started being poured into research. Cell phones at the time were big expensive bricks that were for rich folks and were featured on Miami Vice as a luxury item. But in the 90s, cell phones got cheap to where common folks could afford them, and people made the obvious connection that if invisible fields from power lines could be dangerous, then invisible fields from cell phones could be dangerous too.

Fast forward a few decades, and now tons and tons and tons of research has been done, and no one has yet found any connection between power lines and anything bad, and no one has yet found any connection between cell phones and anything bad.

It’s starting to look like my professor was right. People who live next to power lines don’t live as long simply because people who choose to live a healthier lifestyle also choose not to live next to power lines.

Once in a while you’ll find a study that finds some link between power lines or cell phones and something bad, and often these aren’t obviously biased studies (i.e. they aren’t funded by the National Coalition Against Evil Cell Phones). But that’s the way science works. Sometimes a study will find something, and that makes the news. Then you do follow-up studies. If the follow-up studies also find something, then you have a result. But if the follow-up studies don’t find anything, then that doesn’t make the news. “CELL PHONES KILL” is an attention grabbing headline. “Study finds nothing” isn’t. So news articles tend to be a little skewed.

While some studies have found links to bad things, none of these has yet held up to peer review and follow-up studies. After several decades of very hard searching and bizillions of dollars in research, not only has no one found anything bad, no one has even been able to come up with a convincing theory of how power lines or cell phones could cause something bad.

It’s hard to prove a negative, but if we have looked this hard and haven’t been able to find anything bad, then it really seems like there’s nothing to all of this.

So yes, complete bullshit. Don’t worry about it.

5

Though sadly, as so many people are so willing to believe woo, houses next to power lines are still devalued compared to nearly identical home in identical neighborhoods not next to high tension lines.

6

Well, I think that’s mostly due to people thinking them unsightly. I personally kind of like them, but most people would rather not look at them.

7

What ecg said. :slight_smile:

I chuckle when people talk about the “dangers” of electromagnetic (EM) radiation. Because EM radiation is all around you, all the time. If you want to try to be free of it, you will need to live in a faraday cage, in complete darkness and with no electrical devices. (Even then, there will still be some EM radiation.)

For the most part, EM radiation only becomes a concern when it is ionizing. The overhead Sun is much more deadly than the overhead power line.

8

Yes it’s not a huge mystery that poverty and poor health are related.

9

This isn’t intended as criticism of your post, but I want to quibble a little about the idea that it’s all about choice. As someone else pointed out, houses close to power lines are often cheaper, even compared to equivalent houses in a neighborhood, so there’s a link between the economic status of the occupants and the proximity to the power lines. Socio-economic factors also influence where local governments accept the construction of new power lines, or what kind of development is zoned. On average people living close to power lines are poorer than those who don’t, and poverty is linked to all sorts of negative health outcomes and not all the causal paths can be interrupted through personal choice.

10

Such fears have been around as long as, well, electricity

“She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on.”

"She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson’s or Everybody’s, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.”

11

If your electricity does get dirty, it can be cleaned with ordinary soap and water.

12

I had a ‘stupidvisor’ at one job who held certain beliefs, including the one that ‘electricity unless turned off at the panel, or having something plugged in would leak into the room’ which, while is true at a quantum level, is crap. [he also said that to cross the Bering Strait into the Arctic Circle, one needs to keep the constellation of The Southern Cross over their left shoulder. Um. OK. ]

13

There is such a thing as dirty electricity, but you’re not likely to find it in a house’s wall wiring. AC electricity is supposed to be a pure sine wave, and DC electricity is not supposed to have any changing component at all, but sometimes, with cheap electronics, you can get a waveform that’s very far from that (such as a USB charger that produces a sine wave that ranges between 0 and 10 volts, instead of a constant DC 5 V). This can be harmful to devices plugged into such a source, but not generally harmful to humans (though the sort of corner-cutting sloppiness that leads to these issues can also lead to other problems that can be dangerous to humans). You’re not likely to see this in a house, though, because the power company produces good sine waves for the supply to your house, and that’s converted to house voltage by simple, reliable transformers, and a simple transformer will turn a good sine wave into another good sine wave.

14

Secondary to your dirty electricity question, my house is 3 floors+basement and there is a 100A sub-panel in the 2nd floor laundry room for the 2nd and 3rd floors and it is VERY convenient when I’m do electrical work in the house.

15

House wiring has the hot and neutral wire running in the same cable so they cancel each other out. At one time electric blankets had a single wire running throughout the blanket and it was possible to have a field around the wire. Whether or not this did anything I don’t know. But the industry changed the design so the wires weave back and forth in pairs to cancel any fields.

16

I remember when that became a thing. And then I came up with an idea: sell an electric blanket that is powered by DC (by rectifying & filtering the AC), market it as a “no AC fields blanket,” and make it triple the price as a normal one.

17

Just be sure to turn it off before you clean it or you could be electrocuted.

At the height of the 5G thing I had a Facebook debate with a girl who was wibbling on about the dangers of EMR from 5G. I pointed out that her Facebook page was full of photos of her out in the sun in a bikini.

That ended the discussion although I suspect not because she realised she was wrong but because she blocked me for pointing out something that was far too inconvenient.

18

It’s also a function of this. Texas sharpshooter fallacy - Wikipedia

19

Dirty power can also mean poor voltage regulation from the utility. That’s usually caused by inadequate generation facilities and highly variable loads, such as you find in the California deserts with cool nights and monstrously hot days. I’ve seen HVAC techs probe 208-volt services that are dipping below 180-volts during peak air conditioning times, which is well out of spec. Sometimes there’s also differences of a couple volts between the three different phases too. That shouldn’t affect most household appliances, but it certainly does start to affect motors, air conditioners, refrigerators, and transformers meant for specific input voltage.

20

Yea, there’s a whole field of science that addresses power quality. I’m pretty sure, though, that it’s less of an issue today vs. twenty or thirty years ago. Today a lot of things are powered with SMPSs, and (for the most part) they don’t care a whole lot about the amplitude & frequency of the incoming waveform. Motors are a notable exception.