Standing naked

Yesterday we started our series on Harvesters and how they came into existence: first as an idea and a challenge, second as a solution. I've put together a short little video that explains the Harvesters and if you have a chance to view it, I'd love to know what you think. Cecil B. Demille I am not, but... Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only manipulated and converted into other forms - and it's true of undesirable noise energy as well as desirable power in our homes. But where does the noise energy come from in the first place? Actually there are three sources of noise energy in our homes: our neighbors, our own contributions and the outside world of radio interference. The first source of noisy distorted AC power comes from our pesky neighbors. If we lived in the country alone with our own power generating station in the backyard we'd never have a problem with someone else contaminating our AC power. But alas, most of us share our power with those around us. I can see from the utility pole outside my house in Boulder that there are about ten neighbors I share my power with. Boulder is reasonably sparse when it comes to the number of people sharing a power transformer - in a crowded city this might be several magnitudes more neighbors on the same circuit. Each household is connected in parallel with the power source. This type of connection is like a giant extension cord. Just imagine ten homes plugged into an extension cord power strip and that'll give you an idea of what this circuit looks like. In fact, the only thing separating me from my neighbors is the power meter that tells the utility company how much I use. If my neighbor runs a noisy appliance or adds something to his home that takes power in an unfriendly way, that noise and distortion carries down the shared wire to everyone connected. Other than becoming a hermit with your own power generating station there's not a lot you can do. The second form of noise and distortion is the same as I just described, only this time it's you that's creating the problem. When you fire up your furnace and fan, when your fridge compressor motor kicks in, computers, televisions and so on, you generate noise. Everything you connect to the power line in your home has an effect and it's you that's polluting your power line along with your neighbors. The last noise generator is your home itself. Think of your home standing naked with hundreds of feet of copper wire suspended above ground. This is how your home looks to a radio wave - like a giant antenna just waiting to receive whatever signal is being broadcast. Everything from cell phones, TV towers, cell towers, satellite broadcasts, high voltage power lines - all beaming their energy right at your home's antenna. If you could put on a special pair of glasses that would allow you to see all the radiated energy around you it would be frightening. We live in a very radioactive world of beamed energy that our homes pickup as any decent antenna might. This noise is added to your power line and carried on it quite nicely, thank you. All we've ever really been able to do is place our individual cleaning filters and power generating stations at the place we need them and connect the items we're concerned with to these small oasis of clean power. We'll continue the Harvester story tomorrow.