CHAPTER 5

The previous chapter concentrated on the electrical problems of the bedroom, but that does not mean you should ignore the rest of the house, particularly if you spend a lot of time at home or have young children.

        As Table 3 shows (p.29), while much of the apparatus we use at home does not produce very powerful fields, it is clear that many common appliances can expose us to magnetic fields of more than 1 milli-Gauss (100 nanoTesla) when we are at a normal distance from them. This field strength has become a fairly widely accepted 'safe' level for prolonged exposure; it is what we experience when at home or at work. Some equipment produces very much stronger fields (for instance electric razors or hair dryers}, but as the user will not normally be exposed for more than a few minutes a day, the dose of electromagnetic radiation is small.

        Some people may still worry that regular use of an electric razor could cause a small but statistically significant increase in the chance of developing skin cancers, and similar thoughts arise with some other devices. If this is a concern, then perhaps we need to question whether there is an acceptable substitute (e.g. shaving soap and razor blade) with no risk of electro-stress. If we are honest we have to admit that a lot of electrical gadgets are not really necessary (particularly obvious examples are electric carving knives or toothbrushes) and sometimes they are not even much more convenient than the manual alternative. Not only will discarding such unnecessary items reduce our electro-stress levels, it will also reduce power consumption (good for our electricity bills and even better for the environment). If we resist electrical gimmicks that come our way in the future, we will also contain overall household expenditure.

        A dramatic example is the remote control television. No-one (unless they are disabled, bed-ridden or infirm) can claim that they need one of these. It is a monument to laziness! Its potential for causing electro-stress is high, since the whole point of such a set is that it is never turned off - it is always either on standby or in use. A television gives off a strong field, but provided you watch TV in moderation,
sit at a safe distance from it and turn it off when it is not in use, you should not be too strongly affected.  If a remote-controlled set is in a place where you spend much time, like the kitchen, the living room, or the bedroom, and you may often be quite close to it, the total Electrostress  is likely to be very high.

        Even worse in many ways, it has been calculated that the remote control sets in a single country require a whole power station to be run just to provide their standby current! There is no doubt that if everyone questioned whether they bought and used electrical devices because they really needed them or just because they were fashionable, prestigious or fun, then our whole environment could be improved.

        It is not even safe to assume that your ordinary television without a remote control is off when you think it is. A great many sets remain live, giving off surprisingly powerful fields even when they are switched off. Fields generated by such a set located on the ground floor can often (In my experience) still be at a high enough level in the bedroom on the floor above to cause sleep disturbance. To be on the safe side, any televisions should be unplugged, not just switched off when not in use.

Accepting all of this, few of us would want to regress to a world totally without electricity, and this is certainly not on the cards. The real need is to understand the true nature of the electrical devices in our homes (which may be hazardous and which not) so that we may be able to make sensible decisions about them.

        The possible problems with televisions are similar to those of computer monitors, with the exception of the different distances generally involved. Someone watching television even for several hours at a time, but sitting at a sensible distance (10 or 12ft, or 3 to 4m for a typical domestic set} is not likely to suffer a very high electromagnetic dose. The situation can be very different with young children, who always seem to want to get close to anything, and the deaf, who tend to get close to avoid inconveniencing everyone else in the room. They are particularly likely to suffer from electro-stress.

        Children are particularly sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, as they are to many other environmental hazards, and will react long before an adult. Wise parents will try to limit viewing even at 'correct' distances. Perhaps without realising it, most people have seen some effects of electrostress when children become tense, over-stimulated and aggressive after a long session in front of the box, even watching something as innocuous as story-time or a soap opera!

        Apart from changing the viewing position and rationing (or banning) it and always unplugging sets when not in use, there is little else one can do about television at present. Low radiation sets are promised, but are not widely available. When they are common in the High Street they will, like low-radiation computer monitors, offer at least a partial solution.

        Video recorders can also emit strong fields when the power is on, which it usually will be if you regularly set yours to record programmes when you are out or asleep. As with televisiod to reset the clock when you turn it back on, but there is a ns, the only practical advice is to unplug your video when it is not in use (you will neeprice for everything!).

In the kitchen, the fields from an ordinary electric oven fall off rapidly with distance and little effect will be evident from about 3ft. Food mixers, blenders and other hand-held equipment can give a high reading, but as they are normally only used for short periods, the resulting dose need not concern us too much. In general, only the person who spends most of every day cooking in an all-electric kitchen or who is particularly electrically sensitive, is likely to have anything to worry about.

        There is one exception to this: the microwave oven. Normal ovens use radiant electric elements to produce heat that then passes to the food by conduction and convection, as with any other traditional fuel. A microwave oven employs a device called a magnetron which produces strong magnetic fields with very short wavelengths (high frequency). These agitate the molecules in the food at very high speed. It is this that produces enough energy in the food to cause it to heat up. The obvious hazard is that anything suitable that the microwaves can reach (including the cook) will also be heated up. This is why it is particularly important to be sure that a microwave oven is properly shielded. They are of course designed with this in mind and the walls, the door and the window with its inset metal mesh all absorb and block microwaves, so that they are almost all kept within the oven. Because it is never possible to shield anything completely, the continuing debate is exactly how much energy may 'safely' be allowed to escape.

        The official view is that the emissions from ovens on the market are all below the safe level, but this begs two questions: firstly, different countries have very different ideas about what level is safe. Their standards keep on changing. Secondly, whatever the emission levels may be when the ovens leave the factory, it is impossible to control what happens to them after that. If door seals become dirty, or if the door or the hinges are distorted, microwave emissions will probably rise, but, as these are not visible there is no ready way for the user to know about this.

        Some years ago a study in Germany of 101 ovens in domestic use illustrated both of these points very well. Almost all of the ovens were emitting more than the makers' design quota, but only one was over the then current German limit. However, every single oven would have failed to meet the standards in force in the U.S.S.R. at the time. The crucial, but (of course) unanswered, question was whose safety limit was correct.
Britain tends to have fairly relaxed standards. Although any supplier should be able to test an oven, very few people have such checks carried out. All in all, the situation does seem to suggest grounds for concern; the more so since microwave radiation has been linked with tumours of various types and genetic damage.

        Fresh concerns have been highlighted by some recent research into the effects of exposure to microwave radiation on the DNA in rat brains1. After as little as two hours' exposure to microwaves at precisely the frequency used in most microwave ovens there was a 20% increase in breaks in the DNA strands in the animals' brains. These breaks persisted for several hours after the experiment and one question is clearly whether such damage would become permanent after repeated exposure. Worse still, these experiments were conducted at a power level which falls within the safety guidelines current in Britain and some other countries.

        Quite apart from this, even a microwave oven in perfect condition will emit extremely strong low frequency magnetic fields while it is operating (well over the ImG limit at a considerable distance). The potential electro-stress level is very high. Again, the concept of dose is important. Most households run the microwave oven only for short periods daily, particularly if it is used mainly for reheating ready meals rather than cooking from scratch. If this is so, the total dose received is probably not worth worrying about. The situation is very different for someone who works in a pub or restaurant using a microwave oven for long periods or even for someone who regularly uses their domestic microwave oven to cook meals from raw ingredients. In such cases, excessive exposure is quite a possibility.

        If you feel you need to use a microwave at home, the advice must be to have it checked regularly for microwave leakage and to use it as little as possible anyway. It can produce electro-stress even when working correctly.

        The difference in attitude to the use of gas for cooking and the use of microwave ovens is remarkable. When Britain changed over from town gas (produced from coal) to natural gas from the North Sea, there was great concern over the fact that natural gas had little or no odour and so leaks would not be so rapidly apparent. To overcome this, an additive with a strong smell was introduced into the supply. This was obviously a wise precaution and has doubtless saved some lives. Why then is there apparently no concern about shielding microwave ovens? No-one seriously questions the fact that regular exposure to excess microwave radiation leaking from a faulty oven will be injurious to health. It is even harder to detect than odourless gas which, at least, may make a noise as it escapes. Yet not only are ovens not fitted or supplied with detectors (which would be cheap if produced in such bulk), but the public are left in ignorance of the need for checks. These are really desirable not just once a year, but weekly or even continuously. Even if someone does know of the risks they will not find it very easy to buy a meter.

        There is also the question of how microwave cooking affects the food produced. Does the process bring about electrical disturbances at the molecular level which alter the nature of the food in a permanent and potentially harmful way? Opinions vary, though the findings of the presence of higher levels of free radicals in some microwave cooked food suggest cause for concern {see Chapter 8 p.67).

        Many dowsers and others claim that the food deteriorates, arguing that this is only logical if you consider that exposure of living beings to microwave radiation is known to cause tumours to develop. Some people find food cooked in this way to be less digestible than that produced by older methods. Conventionally trained nutritionists will tell you that, on the contrary, the briefer cooking time must mean that heat sensitive nutrients are less damaged, so the result must be better for us. Oldfield and Coghill describe the results of Kirlian photography which seems to show that microwave cooked food, while not the best, was better than that cooked in some conventional ways.2 Pending a more definitive study it is a matter of weighing the pros and cons and making a personal choice. (For more about microwaves themselves, refer to Chapter 8}
 

Many houses still depend on electric storage heaters. These turn on at periods when electricity is cheapest and the heat generated by the electrical elements is stored in special thermal bricks contained in the case. This heat can then be released slowly during the daytime, maintaining a level of background heat in the dwelling. It is unfortunate that the main period of cheap rate electricity is during the night so the fields from these heaters (which can be quite high) are being generated at the very time when people are asleep and at their most vulnerable.

        Another popular form of electric heating that is becoming popular in North America and Europe is underfloor or ceiling heating. This uses the same principle as an electric blanket with a criss-cross of wires used to generate the necessary warmth. While very efficient from a thermal point of view, these arrangements can give out significant fields (as much as lOmG from ceiling heating as shown in Table 4, p.27). Since this is generated both day and night, anyone living in a building with such heating will almost certainly suffer long-term exposure to a field level that is well above the advisable threshold limit of 3mG.

        Skirting heaters are a type of electrical convection heater looking like a large skirting board. Again, their attraction lies in thermal efficiency. You will see from Table 3 (p.29) that the field levels are not particularly high once you are a few feet away from the heaters. The problem is that as they are typically fitted all around the walls the heaters and their associated wiring will produce a day long effect similar to a ring circuit for anyone spending time near them.

Telephones can also cause us problems because of the powerful magnets used in the ear-piece and microphone. The field strength applied to the brain when you hold a handset to your ear is several hundreds of gauss; so if you spend a lot of time on the phone you will receive a high dose of electromagnetic radiation. Indeed some people do notice that they become very stressed, tired or tense if they use the phone a lot, even if the calls themselves are pleasant and enjoyable.

        For every executive or salesmen with a cell-phone there seem to be several young people plugged into the earpieces of a stereo cassette player! Quite apart from the proven risk to their hearing of the high volumes which they seem to find necessary for enjoyment of their music, they are also exposed to binaural magnetic fields for hours at a time. The field strengths are less than those of telephones, but the total electromagnetic dose received by a typical user may well be higher.

        Something else found in many modern homes that can cause electro-stress is the personal computer. Exactly the same considerations apply as with the commercial units, which are discussed in Chapter 7. You    should pay particular attention to the comments about safe distances and fixed keyboards (much more common on home computers — especially those for games). It is particularly vita! that you should consider the much higher vulnerability of children to electro-stress if they are using a personal computer a lot.

        These special cases aside, it is the total electromagnetic environment that needs to be evaluated in the home. The location of mains cables, particularly those serving the oven, immersion heater and electric shower and any others that carry heavy currents, should be considered. The area close to the mains distribution board and consumer unit (fuse box), may also be suspect. Do not neglect the bedroom immediately above this point. In many houses the distribution board is on a wall vertically below a bedroom and it is uncanny how many times I have found that the person sleeping there has the head of their bed up against that very wail! if, as often happens, that person also has a sleep problem, then moving the bed is a high priority. In the end, if you are worried there is no substitute for an electromagnetic survey of the house. You can get a very good idea of the situation by testing it yourself using the methods described for bedrooms in Chapter 4. Alternatively you may want to Find someone to carry out a professional assessment.

        Because the electrical supply will be required all day, demand switches (see Chapter 9) are not likely to help and shielding is difficult, although installing earthed conduits around problem cables will help if there are severe problems in particular areas. Don't forget, however, that people do not tend to stay in areas of high radiation for long periods. But, if a survey shows that your favourite armchair is in a bad place, you should clearly move it.

The way in which we light our homes can also significantly affect the overall electromagnetic environment. The type and layout of the wiring supplying the lights is clearly important, but this subject is dealt with elsewhere. What is also clear, if you look again at Table 4 (p.38), is that the type of lighting chosen can have a very significant effect.

        Conventional incandescent light bulbs (simply a hot wire glowing brightly in a vacuum) are definitely the safest choice, as they produce very small fields. When you are more than a few inches from them the effect will be negligible. Incandescent bulbs are usually available with clear or 'pearl' glass and there are also some so-called 'daylight' bulbs which are the same rounded shape but which use different colours in the glass to change the light produced to something nearer to sunlight. Some sorts of strip lights (long, straight and tubular in shape, but only a foot or so long) used in such places as over bathroom mirrors and under kitchen wall units are also incandescent and the same general comments apply, [f you have any doubts, an incandescent light always has two characteristics: you can usually see the brightly glowing wire inside when it is turned on and (provided it is not attached to a dimmer switch) it lights up instantly with no flickering or delay. It will also get hot very rapidly.

        Fluorescent lights are most familiar to us as the tubes very widely used for factories, offices and shops, but they are quite often to be found at home, particularly in kitchens and bathrooms. They work quite differently from incandescent bulbs, using an electrical discharge to cause a special coating on the inside of the tube to glow. There is a slight delay and usually a typical flickering when these lights are switched on. Although they are usually long straight tubes several feet long you can also obtain circular ones for domestic use.

        Fluorescent tubes are popular for a number of reasons that outweigh their higher initial cost. They last longer (6000 hours or more as opposed to 1000 hours for a light bulb). They consume less electricity for a given light output and finally, the type of light that they give out can be tailored for particular uses. While some of these are purely cosmetic, such as the pink types used by some butchers to make their meat look more appetising, there are also 'daylight' types producing different colour spectra that are said to be better to work under for prolonged periods.

        Despite the claims which are made, many people find working under fluorescent lights to be unpleasant, leading to excessive fatigue, eye strain and headaches. Dr.John Ott, an American scientist who has studied the effects of different types of light and illumination sources on people is of the firm opinion that there is a cause and effect relationship between bad behaviour in school classrooms and illumination by fluorescent tubes.

        There are reasons why this may be so. As Table 4 (p.38) shows, a fluorescent tube in the ceiling (typically 60 to 80 watts output} will have a much greater magnetic field effect on you than the \ mG limit of an ordinary light bulb.

        Another factor concerns the output of positive ions (see later and the glossary). Most electrical apparatus tends to ionise the air around it with a positive charge and positive ions have a generally de-energising effect on people exposed to them. Fluorescent fittings are unfortunately very good at producing such ions.

        You may have heard about so-called 'full-spectrum' lights. These are quite different from 'daylight' fluorescent tubes. Firstly, the tube (which is fatter than even the older type of conventional tube) has a unique coating which does give a light output remarkably close to full sunlight. It is so close that it can help people suffering from SAD (seasonal affective disorder). This is a severe depressive condition that badly affects some people in the winter months and has been linked to deprivation of sunlight. Sufferers have been successfully treated simply by sitting in front of a bank of these tubes for an hour or two every day. Secondly, they operate at a much higher frequency than a standard tube (because of this some need their own fittings and cannot simply be plugged in to your existing equipment). This frequency change appears to overcome the problems associated with the sub-perceptual flicker that badly affects some people. By contrast conventional daylight tubes are only normal fluorescent lights with a better colour rendition than the standard types.

        Finally you should know about the latest energy-saving lights, designed to fit a standard light fitting. While they do indeed consume very little power, they are in fact miniature fluorescent tubes and so all the comments on their larger cousins also apply to them. If you have any doubts about identification, they are generally quite bulky and heavy — some are cylindrical, some are made of several thin tubes side by side. They will also flicker slightly on lighting, just like a large tube. Obviously everything said about full-size tubes applies to them as well. Since they are quite likely to be used in table lamps, reading lamps and so on, there is a higher risk of getting undesirably close to them and they may cause even more problems.

NOTES
1.      Reported in Electromagnetics &. VDU News 1995, vol.6, nos.1-2.
2.      Oldfield. H. &. Coghill, R.,   Dark Side of the Brain: Element Books (1988).
Click on Following Chapters to Read or Download:-

Electrostress-
Chapter 01 Disease
Chapter 02 Vibrations
Chapter 03 Facts and Figures
Chapter 04 Bedtime Story

Chapter 06 Power Lines
Chapter 07 Computers
Chapter 08 Microwaves
Chapter 09 Some Solutions
Chapter 10 The Positive Side?

11  Earth Stress, Earthquakes, Earth Sensitives
12 History of Ley Lines, Ionization Under Cancer Beds, Scientific Measurements
13 How to Use Divining Rods, Protect Yourself, Allergies
14 Unhealthy Earth Energies, The Hartmann Net and Curry Grid
15 Black Spirals, Crop Circles, Demons, Oscilloscope Measurement
16 Crossing Leys, Ion Effect, Allergic to Microwave Ovens, Graveyards, Quarries
17 Natural and Man-made Sources of Unhealthy Energies
18 Imprinting Your Own Energy
19 Eliminating Unhealthy Earth Energy
20 Cup-marked Stones or Petroglyphs
21 Human disease and Mother Earth

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