“Dirty Electricity” from Variable Pool Pump
celebrate4
| Posted in General Questions on
This is mandated by law for all new pool pumps as of July 2021. My landlord says he will place this several yards from the wall of the house, since a tenant may sleep against that wall and there is no other place in room to put bed. If this pool pump had a wire going to an electric box on that same wall it is still going to transmit a dirty electricity field with spiked transients from the inverter inside the pump motor? Please be specific in your answer. Yes it does or doesn’t does not specify the “it”.. Thanks for any input!
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Replies
What is mandated by law?
I do not think would want the pool pump next to my bedroom because they make noise that could keep me awake.
In my opinion DE is as real as alien abductions, Big Foot and Dracula. Since a negative cannot be proven that makes them equally likely.
If electric field do harm humans one would think those with the highest exposures would have the worst symptoms. The people that spent 8 hour in the electric room of a submarine or a power plant would receive 500 average lifetimes of exposure in a single shift and people survive this since the 1920 without any apparent ill effects.
Walta
Actually my neighbor workd around electric for power company and he does have health issues, but so do most people these days and who knows what the straw is that breaks the camel's back. Body and nervous system always have to adapt to new technologies. They need in vitro and animal not cohort studies on DE. There are four kinds of frequency energy pollution associated with electricity...the magnetic field, the electric current itself, so called dirty electricity (google oscilloscope image of same), and RF which can be carried by the spikes of DE, at least from my understanding. There are devices and tweaks but they take advanced measuring devices and a building biologist to mitigate and this can be simple or complex depending on sources etc. I will actually be calling one of these here in Florida shortly, and for anyone interested here on this forum will report back an answer to my question
Multispeed or Variable speed pump are being mandated in 2021, so the single speeds are being phased out. Variable speed pumps are usually MUCH quieter than a single speed pump, so as long as it's not running full speed, you probably won't be able to hear it.
We lived for years with pool equipment in our old house, no issues from EMF even with that single speed pump.
Thanks everyone for the feedback. I will ask a building biologist over the phone.
An electrical engineer is a better person to ask about the electric field stuff, so let me explain a little:
Electricity has the electric current, and a magnetic field. These two things are linked and that's one of the laws of physics. That's it, just two things.
There are NO separate things called "Dirty Electricity" or RF (Radio Frequency). That's bad science.
What actually happens is that any and all other signals, be they RF or lower frequencies, get superimposed on the sinewave of the AC power and that looks like "noise". All it is is energy in other frequency bands, there is nothing special about it. An oscilliscope image showing a noisy sinewave isn't showing anything but a sinewave containing energy in other frequencies besides the fundamental. To really see this, you need a spectrum analyzer image, or a 'scope that can run an FFT to show you the energy content by frequency and not just in units of time the way an oscilliscope does.
Magnetic fields can sometimes interact with biology, that's true. Electricity can too, but it has to be CONDUCTED, meaning the living thing has to come in contact with a live wire.
If you are worried about radiated fields from a pump, or anything else, ask that those wires be enclosed in STEEL conduit. The steel acts as a shield to containt the magnetic and electric fields within it, similar to a faraday cage. Using thin-wall steel conduit (known as EMT in the trades) isn't particularly expensive, and will provide very effective shielding. I actually specify the use of metallic conduit between motor drives and motors for exactly this reason on all of my designs. You can easily see (actually "hear") the difference by using an old AM radio held near the wiring. Any noise will be heard as different static patterns or tones/howls in the AM radio.
Don't worry about grounding CAUSING problems. Ground wires themselves don't do or cause anything dangerous. There are very specific codes for grounding everything electrical in the area of swimming pools, and these codes are rigidly enforced so you won't find any flexibility there. The grounding requirements are for life safety to ensure that no one comes in contact with any live electrical things in or around the pool.
Bill
The best that can be said about most build biologists is that they mean well.
>I will ask a building biologist over the phone.
Be aware that "building biology" has a well deserved bad reputation for delivering multiple layers of BS. Hopefully they won't charge for the call, but be skeptical about anything they tell you, no matter how well-intended or sincere.
I spent a decent chunk of my career measuring magnetic & electrical field emissions from 10Hz to 5GHz from various types of equipment. At the power levels we're talking about from an inverter driven pool pump I'd still sleep comfortably with the inverter under my bed, as long as it didn't make much audible noise. From several yards away the radiated emissions from a <500 watt inverter will be less exposure to the user/sleeper than the inverter driving your computer display's backlighting or your smart phone, or in some instances the emissions from the electric alarm clock on the bedside table.
How many yards away do you need to be to feel comfortable watching your TV?
VFDs which I assume are involved in a variable speed pool pump turn ac into DC, then back into AC again at varying frequencies. Instead of 60 hz[cycles per second] they will run the motor at, for instance, 5-200 Hz. Poorly designed ones can be 'noisy' in the sense of causing radio interference. Since it is a household appliance, there should be UL or some other specs that limit that compared to industrial things I am used to.
It should not be an issue health wise.
High voltage transmission lines are very different from household AC. Household AC has virtually no field outside of a few inches.
High voltage transmission lines can sometime light up a fluorescent bulb held underneath. But that is 700 thousand volts, not 120 or 240.
A really really bad VFD can make bulbs vibrate like a bad dimmer does.
Otherwise they are harmless
>"Since it is a household appliance, there should be UL or some other specs that limit that compared to industrial things I am used to."
In the US, it's the FCC that regulates this, but it's not very well enforced, unfortunately. RF noise isn't a health issue though, it just interferes with other electrical devices, especially radios. The energy levels radiated as noise are typically far to low to be of any concern to living things.
BTW, common transmission voltages in the US are 115-138kv, 230kv, 345kv, 500kv, and 765kv. 345kv and below are FAR more common than the higher voltages.
Bill
Thanks to the contributors that have experience in measuring EM fields for their comments.
WRT noise, hopefully the variable speed pump is quieter than the one it replaces, but I suspect that it's like living near a train track: you shortly get used to familiar noises and tune it out. Certainly, less noise is better.
The DE i measured with existing sources other than the not yet purchased pool pump is found in hot spots, including a stand up computer station near a router. I suppose one could say this is subjective annoyance, but the field in a few places extends out more than 2 feet and one over 3 feet. The sleeping area of course would be of most concern as well as computer work station. The answer in those cases is not to move the pool pump but to move head of bed a distance from wall. The ac variable is on other side of closet and field is strong in closet but does not affect the rest of the wall..same sleeping wall referred to. I will move computer work station to another spot because seems to cause headache, though who really knows these days what causes what. Not a big deal to move it. Thanks again for reassurance. The sound vibrations in home are really bad including infrasound and high frequency, from many sources both outside and inside but one pattern on each is constant. Measured at 3 am and the infrasound part was louder outside front door. Power station 3 miles away only thing i could think of as breakers were all turned off by me before i measured on phone app. Well that is a whole other stressor in this corner house. The pattern of sound is 24/7.
You can reduce audible noise by having the pump and/or drive mounted on a stand that is not anchored to the wall of the house. Rigidly attaching these things to a wooden wall will transmit that sound, and probably also cause resonances within the wall which will be annoying. If the installers instead mount the offending devices on a stand made of something like unistrut, and anchor that only to the masonry foundation, you'll have much less audible sound within the home. If that's not possible, see if they can mount the offending equipment to a piece of 3/4" plywood, then attache that plywood to the wall only at the extreme corners and use rubber vibration isolators at each corner. This will be much less effective than the seperate mount not attached to the wall itself though. None of this is particularly expensive or time consuming to do.
If you want to block sounds from things like roads and industrial buildings a few miles away, that gets a lot more complicated and means modifying your walls and windows. This stuff is a lot less cheap, and a lot more time consuming too. It can be very effective when done correctly though.
Bill
> "...the infrasound part was louder outside front door. Power station 3 miles away only thing i could think of as breakers were all turned off by me before i measured on phone app."
Are you talking about measuring infrasound? It's important not to conflate sound waves with electromagnetic radiation waves. They're not interchangeable (you mention having turned off the electric breakers). One is sort of 'mechanical' and requires a medium, the other can travel through space.
https://science.nasa.gov/ems/02_anatomy
and
https://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/waves/u10l1c.cfm#emmech
I imagine it's possible that a power plant could generate infrasound through the mechanical process of generating electricity (a point of discussion for some re wind farms), but that shouldn't be conflated with the EM waves themselves generated by electromagnetic fields.
Do you live in a city? Near an air-port? Subway? etc.
I don't see a reason to fear infrasound unless it's extremely loud (same as any sound). Are you experiencing discomfort? I kinda like that deep rumble below by ear range (heavy waterfall, base note on large djembe, jet at takeoff, Saturn V that time I went to the moon, etc.)
I can relate to environmental paranoia: for me it's air-quality and heavy-metal dust (lead). The harmful effects of 'bad air' (and lead) are pretty well documented. And we do know that certain forms and intensities of energies/waves/radiation can be harmful, but it's also important not to think that just because something has the potential to be harmful, that any iteration and dosage of it is (i.e. x-ray machine vs living in a house with electricity—not the same thing. Heck the sun doles out known and quantifiable harmful rays to us consistently).
The lesson to myself: living in a house with lead paint is not the same as snorting a line of lead dust. weird thing to say though.
>"The lesson to myself: living in a house with lead paint is not the same as snorting a line of lead dust. weird thing to say though."
That's a good analogy :-)
There is a lot of bad science out there, and a lot of it is put out there by people trying to make money by scaring people. I don't think that's a good thing. I've head the "Dirty Electricity" stuff before. Sound is a pressure wave, and it's dangerous at HIGH levels, but you'll typically know right away if it's present because your body will feel sick. Back when I worked in a recording studio, I remember we could feel that if we got in the right (or wrong, depending on how you looked at it) spot around a stack of bass boxes. I had a site at work that had a 900kw generator that did the same thing if you stood in the right spot between our building and the neighboring building -- the concrete walls reflected the sound and there was a spot where it was very uncomfortable to be as a result.
Major power plants don't typically put out much noise though. One of the reasons is that they typically use steam turbines, and they are very well balanced. Machines typically make more noise as they get out of balance or are otherwise operating somewhere other than their optimal set of parameters. Electric companies want those power plants to last a long time so that they can make money, so they tend to maintain the equipment pretty well. We actually have one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the world not far from me (~50 miles or so), and I've been there before. Noise isn't too bad until you're inside the plant, and even inside it's not super loud. You do get a feeling of Big Power though, similar to the vibrations you can feel near a big waterfall like Niagra Falls. It's not uncomfortable, but you can tell it's there.
Always be careful what you are reading when looking at this "look at this BAD thing right in your own home!" type of stuff online, ESPECIALLY if they're trying to sell you something to "fix" it. A good example is the magic little box you plug in to save money on your electric bill. Don't waste your money. This is a power factor correction device, a very small one, and residential electric service doesn't bill for power factor. In commerical buildings this is something to think about (but only if done properly, not little plug-in devices), but in residential settings it really doesn't make any difference.
Bill