how to make me feeler better about sleeping near main electrical box

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jeanw

Feeling the Heat
Sep 23, 2008
389
ky
Cant do a Faraday cage? what about a sheet of LEAD...lead in front of the bedroom mounted main 200 amp service box ? looking like a pic frame? Dirty elecric. Talked Hubby into getting main electric pole moved to near street and buried service installed...
we presently sleep in Living room... technically used to be a bedroom. FORMER DA's owners tore out wall to make bigger LR....
Ha ha we did similar. in old former home we did similar same but made the small bedroom into a bigger Bedroom for us. Tore down wall and made us 1/2 bath, bigger closet too
I refuse to use wireless for my computer....now need a tin hat too.....
same way threw out nice cordless phone system... Do use remote for Little logitech Squeezebox RADIO though....
no boobtube tv for me....
Old prepaid cp stay in my purse. Mostly goes dead cause I barely use it. dont want it near my poor brain....
Yeah I know about comp screens being bad too
PLEASE SErious answers only..... wisecrackers go stand in the corner. LOL
thanks yall
 
No wisecracks but I DON'T worry about magnetic fields from 60 Hz wiring OR microwaves from cell phones (which are quite different). IMO no reliable, repeatable scientific evidence in either case.

The magnetic fields from 60 Hz are mostly negated by the two wires that complete the circuit being close together, as in house wiring. That is the current in each wire is equal and opposite in direction, and cancel out the magnetic fields. Most concern is due to high voltage utility wires where they separate the wires on the pole for insulation/safety. This canceling out makes the field very small once you are farther from the wires than they are apart, so a few inches for Romex. As for shielding the little 60 Hz field that is left....very difficult. Lead or burial in soil will NOT do it. Of course, the 'two wires near each other' thing is not true in your breaker box, where the hot and neutral wires can be a few inches apart. I expect the field would extend proportionally further away than from wall wiring.

As for the cellphones, wifi and wireless phone...different animal. Like food in the microwave, they penetrate a ways, but not too far into tissue. In other words, most heats your scalp (very slightly) but not your brain. The brain generates a ton of heat by itself, so has a lot of blood flow to both feed it and to keep it cool. Maybe 20-30 watts equivalent heating and cooling. What is a fraction of a watt from a cell phone going to do, with blood flow carrying the heat away? Studies I have seen show that this (small) heating effect is greatest by far for smart phones and cell phones held to the ear (smart being slightly worse). This is about power and distance. Cell phones need to be powerful to reach the phone tower a half mile away, and then they are right on your ear. Wireless phones and wifi circuits are a tenth as powerful, because they don't need to reach the same range. And the wifi in your laptop is a couple feet from your head, rather than a couple inches, making the heating effect a hundredth as powerful again. So, if you are worried about it, all you need to do is use those earbuds with a mike on your cell phone, and carry the phone in your pocket or purse. That reduces your exposure 90% or more, and everything else you listed is very minor.

So, to repeat, I am talking about minimizing exposure, b/c that is what you asked about. Studies have NOT shown any increase in cancer due to cell phone use (which would be localized near the right or left ear depending on user habits) at all. Nor do very thorough studies on animals that use bigger doses and durations.

If you worry about cancer, and where it comes from its caused by other stuff. A century ago, the biggest cancer was stomach cancer, which fell off once refrigerators became popular...before that most meat was cured, and the huge amount of curatives ingested caused stomach cancer. Lung cancer is caused by smoking, and follows smoking rates. Liver cancer is caused by liver damage from alcohol, occupation exposure to chemicals (like dry cleaning fluid) and viruses like hepatitis. Cervical cancer is caused by HPV, and there's a vaccine. Skin cancer is caused by the sun, etc.

Right now, a lot of the other cancers are decreasing in frequency. Most of those others were probably caused by indoor and outdoor air pollution of different kinds, reduced over the last couple decades by the EPA. The biggest culprit was benzene in gasoline, which has been reduced by 75% or more in the last 20 years (but is not yet gone). Indoor VOCs like formaldehyde in furniture were probably pretty bad too, now much reduced. Some foods contain carcinogenic toxins in small amounts...but we're getting into the weeds. Pesticide residue in foods....no good evidence for cancer...and some organic foods have higher toxin levels than regular.

It appears that (age corrected) cancer rates we see in the US today are about 2-3X higher than people experienced centuries ago, and will likely decline back to that as we identify pollutants and remove them by regulation. But again, no careful, repeated electromagnetic field studies have seen an effect.
 
I personally think you may be going overboard here. The bottom line is that EVERYONE is going to die sooner or later. Medical advances have allowed the average age to go higher every year. It also has given names for what we die from, How many people simply die from old age any more?

When your number is up, it's up. We had a local guy on vacation in Florida playing golf on a clear sunny day struck & killed by lightning, not much you could have done to prevent that.

As far as a lead shield goes, couldn't lead to poisoning?
 
No wisecracks but I DON'T worry about magnetic fields from 60 Hz wiring OR microwaves from cell phones (which are quite different). IMO no reliable, repeatable scientific evidence in either case.
As a EE, I think @woodgeek makes good points. Certainly the 60Hz is harmless, because of the fields cancelling each other out.

I'm less complacent about cell phones. Though I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, the economic impact of a demonstrable harmful effect from cell phones would be ... yuge.
 
I bequeath unto you one tinfoil hat.
 
You could swap out your linens for the lead-lined sheets they use in the xray rooms. I'll go sit in the corner now.
 
If you really think this is an issue, contrary to most well reasoned authorities, then its time for a faraday cage. If built properly it protects you from stray radio frequency waves of all types. Given that the electrical panel is in the room you will need to segregate the room from the panel. Ideally you really should probably move into the town in West Virginia where the NSA has severe restrictions on electrical equipment as it screws up their ease dropping. No cell phones and no radios
 
The best way to get rid of 60 Hz would be to shift the whole house to 12V DC appliances....which would require complete rewiring and a big 12V supply (fed by the grid) at a remote shed.
 
thanks yall but Ive heard it all...Im a skeptic from way back. Take all I hear and read with grain of salt...count my many blessings, too
yeah money wasted on this house could have went toward solar.. been reading about that since the 1970s. been subscribing to Poplar Science too prob that long

yeah Ill take that tin foil hat....
I listen to alternative radio only well mostly and nothing would surprise me....and read a lot long before the internet .DEF not boobtube for a long time
Like one talk show host said "placate the people" and another "Americans will accept anything if done incrementally... Well in my opinion most people will do the same
I even met a young girtl last year say"well you gotta die of something" prob heard it from her mother or other relatives... what an attitude...
so every morning when wake up I say"wow made another day".....
Appreciate yall comments
Blessings to all
 
I'll not discount your concerns. I believe that there are lot of environmental threats that may impact our health.
That said, I think you need to realize that there are many others than EM (e.g. radon, cosmic radiation, chemical contaminants, bears, etc.). Dealing with the long list of potential threats can best be done by understanding the relative risk that each presents, especially in comparison to the many voluntary risks that we take on everyday: driving a car, climbing a ladder, eating poorly, etc.

If you put things in context you'll realize:
1) that worrying about it probably causes more harm than ignoring it.
2) If you just have to do something, concentrate on the the actual high risk activities (like driving) that can be made safer by maybe buying a better car, traveling at certain times, taking certain routes, etc.
 
High marks on condescension, but not much else.
The stress and time wasted on radiated EMF from a 60 Hz household electrical panel is more likely to harm your health. What woodgeek quoted in his first post is Gauss's Law, also supported by Coulomb's Law. These are not unsupported theories, but laws of physics.
 
My standard building approach where I put 1/2" of foil faced ISO board foam with foil tape on the interior walls to reduce the impact of stud conductivity does seem to substantially reduce cell and wifi signals. I don't intentionally ground it. Luckily I have large windows that don't have foil on them except one room which has blackout cellular blinds that incorporate a interior foil liner to cut the light transmission down. It would be interesting to see how much signal attenuation would be obtained. with that combination.

Another odd building technique I ran into years ago to deal with one problem might have some applicability. Apparently in years with poor natural food supplies, black bears would tear holes in walls of peoples homes to raid the kitchen in northern Canada. They can go right through siding and chip board (plywood takes them a bit longer). The approach in one area in Northern Ontario was to put 1/2" hardware cloth on the exterior walls under the siding, the theory was when the bear was raking its claws through the siding that the claws would catch on the hardware cloth. I expect if the cloth was grounded it may also reduce external signals making it into the home. Of course given how smart the bears were I expect they just switched to smashing the windows out where there wasn't hardware cloth. (my solution would be to move somewhere where bears are not regarded as household pests!)