Renting an apartment right next to a power transformer station

True, the “radiation” is not significantly dangerous.

BUT OTOH, substations have been known to catch fire in a rather amazing way.

There could be some noise issues, going by in the middle of the nite and listening might be a good idea, or just not getting an apartment whose windows open up on it.

Which electron are you referring to, the one to the east or to the west[1]?


  1. This is a joke about significant figures. You don’t typically need 14 figures after the decimal point in GPS coordinates :slightly_smiling_face:. ↩︎

That kind of stuff is a myth. But not everyone believes it is a myth. You should “try” your landlord. If s/he believes in EMF radiation you might can talk them into lowering your rent a little bit.

I’ve heard that the effect is essentially all economic: Places near power lines are cheaper, and so the people who live there are poorer, and there are lots of reasons why poorer people have shorter lifespans.

Though you can imagine a self-reinforcing phenomenon as well. Places near powerlines are cheaper because they’re kinda ugly. There’s a sorting effect where poorer and less-healthy people move there. Studies come out observing this phenomenon. Now there’s the perception that powerlines are not just ugly but also unhealthy. The economic forces become even stronger and thus the sorting effect as well. Repeat as necessary.

Interesting idea.

But a “newly-built apartment complex” doesn’t have some ditzy person as the “landlord”. It’s owned by a big corporation and the office staff (who probably work for a separate apartment management company) have zero discretion on what the computer tells them the rent will be. Your choices are reduced to “yes” and “no”.

You can’t get power from overhead lines. You can get good voltage from HV overhead transmission lines, and a tiny amount of current, but not enough to get charged for. There may have been some story about getting power from copper next to underground lines.

Regarding substations: any EM field outside the substations causes wasted power, and the systems are designed to minimize it

Laughing my quarks off :joy:

Just curious, do you remember what those reasons were?

The usual politics. Cities don’t want their unequal practices documented, and poor people can’t fund research grants. In principle independent university programs could support something like this but they tend to be deferential to the cities where they’re located. So with no support for the research, the research remains undone.

Again, this was twenty years ago, plus or minus, and is just my ex’s view, relayed from my memory. If the situation has changed, or if my recollection is faulty, I’d welcome more current reporting.

There is an ongoing case in Denmark where cows behave strange after a large transformer station opened.
I couldn’t find anything in English, but here is a Google-translate version.

Hope it works.

What I’m picking up from this thread is that the rumored dangers of EMF are…Unbelievable.

:blush:

Aha! So you’re the reason I keep seeing ads for this crap all over he SD::grin:

Yeah. Don’t move there.

You obviously over worry about these things. Why add to your to your daily concerns?

Don’t do it.

Wisdom.

There’s been a lot of work on the relationship between income inequality and health, enough for a 2002 literature survey in a leading economics publication as well as a more recent epidemiological literature review. I understand that studies indicating that very moderate drinking had health benefits confused cause and effect in an analogous way: sick people are more likely to skip drinking alcohol altogether, so there was a bogus correlation between better health and having 1 drink a day vs zero drinks a day.

For fun, some numbers on inductive power transfer in this situation:

The three big killers are the large distance, low frequency, and multi-phase cancellation. Let’s assume these are distribution lines heading into a neighborhood so that they’re as low to the ground as we might hope – say 20 ft overhead – and with loads that corresponds to 100 amps of current in the lines. (The current will vary, but the power company’s goal will be to keep this as low as possible.) The multiple phases present will tend to cancel any inductive transfer, but with fortuitous geometries we can maybe scrape out a 10% residual effect. A 1-m2 single-turn copper loop oriented optimally will thus get 0.8 mV of peak induced electromotive force. More turns in the loop means more voltage, but the gauge of wire will always determine the maximum current due to the wire resistance also going up per turn. 30 awg wire would be cheap to add turns, but you’ll be capped at 0.6 mA peak current during the AC cycle. For 12 awg wire (as might be lying around in the scenario as envisioned), you’ll be capped at 40 mA. But even a crazy 1000 turns of 12 awg wire in our square-meter loop gets you to only 0.8 V, so you would be better off selling that 350 lbs of copper for $1000 and calling it a day.

If we really want to stick it to the man and do something with this, let’s try to turn on a single red LED for “free”. Let’s not bother smoothing out the AC and just let the LED flicker, so long as we can stay above the 2-V drop across the LED and be able to supply 20 mA for enough of the AC cycle. At a minimum we need 2500 turns just to get above 2 V. Additional turns are then needed to overcome the resistive losses in the wire, With 12 gauge wire, that brings us to 5000 turns, or nearly 20 km of wire costing about $5k. But we’ll at least have a (sort of) lighted LED, as long as the distribution lines overhead stay at high enough current.

The practical way to improve inductive power transfer is with proximity and frequency, both of which this setup lacks. 100+ kHz is standard for consumer inductive chargers, and these also obviously do well in the proximity department.

Yes, this is the right answer.

On the bright side, new build construction is not likely to have mold or fungal issues.

I got into an argument on NextDoor a few years ago with a guy who was adamant that wireless meter readers caused high blood pressure. I told him he was ridiculous (in not much nicer terms), and pointed out that the WiFi network he was using to connect his computer to make his post was emitting signals many, many thousands of times more powerful. But, he just called me a shill for the power company…