Refrigerator EMF?
celebrate4
| Posted in GBA Pro Help on
My daughter just moved to a place where the refrigerator back is on the other side of a wall, and only about 4 to 5 feet from the foot of the bed. I think there is also a TV on that wall (behind which is the fridge)
1) Is that distance enough, EMF-wise?
2) Will having a TV (the new kind) mitigate or enhance the EMF from the back of the fridge?
3) Is there a device which can fix the EMF coming from the fridge, and where to place it if there is?
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Replies
Donna,
Most medical researchers have concluded that there is no evidence that the electro-magnetic emissions from ordinary household appliances like refrigerators or TVs cause any health problems in humans.
There's no answer to #1, (even if you presumed there actually IS a dose/response based on field strength, which is a controversial unproven thesis at field strengths seen in homes, which are many orders of magnitude lower than those experienced inside power generating stations.)
But on number 2, TVs and refrigerators are both sources EMFs, and are in no way coupled, they neither mitigate or enhance the other. They both have emissions, but are at different frequencies, intensities and phases.
On #3, there is no device capable of canceling low frequency EMFs. It's possible to shield very low EMFs to a predicable level at some distance/geometry from the source using exotic alloys, but from a practical point of view unless you have an extremely large budget and a known target level of EMF deemed acceptable to work from, there is no such thing as an EMF-free room.
FWIW: In my career as an electrical engineer I have successfully mitigated EMFlevels across a large frequency and field strengths, some of which includes powerline frequency issues within buildings, others at micro-wave frequency with potential for interfering with other electronics on the same printed circuit boards. Most of the stuff I see on the web on how to deal with low and extremely low frequency EMFs within homes it pure BS from practitioners with about a fifth-graders level of comprehension of the problem. Don't get sucked into thinking it's a problem that needs to be dealt with, ESPECIALLY without actually measuring it, and don't accept any proposed or purchased "solutions" without measuring the before & after. There are a lot of misguided (at best) and downright fraudulent "information" out there in the cyber-sphere around the subject. ( I sleep well at night, with my head 2' away from a clock radio plugged into the power grid, a clock radio with a cheap lossy iron-core transformer in it's power supply. )
The worst building-level EMF I've ever measured were due to an illegitimate neutral wiring connections in a small factory building, which created sufficient field levels to cause jitter on the the image on a computer's CRT display on the other side of the wall whenever one bank of fluorescent lighting was turned on. Fixing the wiring error fixed the jitter on the CRT, but the EMF being produced by the CRT itself measured at the user-distance was still an order of magnitude higher than the fields created by the wiring error measured anywhere in the building, except at distances a handful of inches from the power wiring itself. It was the nearly-but-not-quite synchronous phase of the magnetic fields of the deflection yoke on the CRT with the powerline frequency that made the image jitter. Had the CRT been running at exactly at the 60Hz powerline frequency the image would have been stable, and nobody would have cared.