True story... More than 50 years ago, when I was just a kid, the owner of a local oil field welding and machine shop got sued in Federal Court for "stealing" electricity from the 240KV power lines which passed over his property, by way of using a homemade induction coil mounted on a pole. Which in turn was wired into his electrical system, and which had been powering his business for more more than 20 years already. The court ruled that he could not be sued for taking advantage of natural physics, and dismissed the case on day one. His business continued to thrive for another 30 years until his death. Shit you not.
Great story! Of course, it was the court that was clueless about the physics - or the law for that matter. The intent of the business owner was clear: steal electricity.
@@davidedickjr More like taking advantage of the environmental conditions of his property. How is it different than if the power company built a large concave mirrored glass headquarters that focuses on your property and you taking advantage of the concentrated solar energy that the building provides?
@@magicone9327i have those lines across my property that are constantly causing me grief. It would be nice to get some benefit from them. How do i set that up?
As an electrician, I was called out to a site where a crew was setting up a manufactured home under high voltage lines. The set up crew was getting shocked every time they touched the metal frame of the house. My volt meter showed 110 volts AC from the frame to ground. I put ground rods at each corner and wished them luck. Would hate to be living in that house...
@@fredriksjoblom5161 how else are we supposed to get rare childhood leukemias? Build neighborhoods next to radioactively contaminated areas, refineries, and chemical plants? Because we do that too 🙃
@@fredriksjoblom5161most high voltage go under ground.. in Northern Europe. In the 70s my room was maybe 20 meters from the high voltage lines coming into my town of about 30k. And the transformers to step it down was in my garden in a big concrete building… my grandpa was a plant manager at the electric company.
Back in the 70s my friends and I discovered an odd phenomenon. If we were barefoot and touched an unpainted spot on the house gutter downspout with our finger nail we got a mild shock. But only sometimes. Then we figured it out. The guttering was galvanized steel. If it rained, any dead leaves in the gutter would produce a mild acid and turn the gutter into a battery.
Funny you should mention acid inside of metal things. I cooked pork chops with apple sauce in a cast iron skillet. I had added garlic and onions and the garlic turned a bluish green color. That didn't deter me from eating it. I turned the (electric) stove off and used a digital thermometer to check the temp of the pork chops. They were done, but still piping hot, so I left them on the stove to cool off. I go back and check the temp, again and a huge spark happened, killing my thermometer. I thought maybe the stove had a short and called maintenance to look at it. They found nothing wrong with the stove. The best I can guess is I somehow created a capacitor and discharged it with the second temp check. I still ate the pork chops.
Power company: "There is no health safety issue with overhead power lines." Same power company: "Hey, you can't use power from the air. That's our power!"
Are you worried about health safety issues with the electicity in your home? You can do the same thing in your house, or more to the point your neightbor could do the same thing with your utlity hook up. Would you be ok with you neighbor "harvesting" 100kwh from you?
It's the amount of power and the distance from the wires that matters. Sure, I can do the same thing in my home, right next to the wiring in my walls. This guy is doing it at distances greater than the width of my property, and getting more power! So no, I'm not worried about the power in my home, but yes, I am worried about high tension lines. I also don't like the fact that power companies get government support to maintain and repair them. It was their choice to put them up high instead of burying them, and it's their equipment. Let them deal with the consequences.
Put insulators on your barbed wire fence and your stealing.... get the piss shoked out of you for touching a barbed wire on a wood post on a dry day and thats YOUR PROBLEM!!! I Get it now!
I knew a man who was in charge of maintaining lines like these. His crew informed him that a property owner had installed an array of wires on his property near the towers. They thought that he was stealing electricity. Management said that if he was smart enough to capture the electricity that they were losing, he was entitled to it.
@@marilynbridges8697 Electrical Engineer here. Unfortunately it isn't waste-energy... it's electromagnetically-coupled (like a gigantic transformer the size of a locomotive), but with a huge air-gap in the middle of the transformer. Any coupling through the air takes power away from the system. No free lunch here, unfortunately... it would be cool if it was free waste-energy for the taking though! =)
It is stealing electricity no matter how you look at it. A transformer hanging on the pole outside your house is in no way mechanically connected. It has two coils and the voltage comes from a primary coil to a low voltage coil thru induction. There is no loss. You are still putting load on the line. This is my 27th year as a journeyman lineman and I have seen everything you can see.
I'm a fencing contractor and I can say that I have put up several fences up under overhead power lines and sometime it will shock to piss out of you touching the fence.
Fences near an ehv line should be grounded. If it’s not an electric fence you can ground through standard grounding rods. If it’s electric you need to use an electric fence filter or shock filter. There are several manufacturers that make these.
I remember a story about 20 yeas ago. A farmer kept having bad problems with his cattle. Over a long time he finally found out the MUD had a charge running through it from the power lines.
An afterthought to my earlier post. In the late 1970's I owned a cablevision system. Our main trunk line to town from our headend on a mountain was 18 miles long. It was buried along a highway, underneath high voltage electric lines. Each of the 36 amplifiers on the trunk line operated on 60 volts AC, which was duplexed onto the cablevision line, along with the TV and FM channels. We had power supplies every mile or so, which injected 60 volts into the cablevision line, and the further you got from a power supply, the lower the voltage. At around 38 volts we'd install another power supply - and back up to 60 volts again. But amplifiers kept blowing. I mean, like burned up. Since the amps were in underground volts we were perplexed, since they were secure from grass fires. So out with the voltmeter. Surprisingly, we had between 100 and 400 volts on the line - despite putting only 60 volts into the thing to start with. We went through one hell of a lot of amplifiers before we finally figured out that we were getting inductive voltage from the overhead power line! At first we added light bulbs to each amplifier, which glowed brightly and scared traffic. And they would glow bright or dim, as the current load on the overhead wires varied from time time time. Finally, our engineer came up with a fix. A 'crowbar' which used an SCR diode that would short to ground any voltage over 63 volts. So the power line induced voltage would be bled off to ground. Those diodes would get hot like an electric stove element, to the point where we had to heat sink them to stop them from burning out - that's how much power we were getting from the power line induction.
Damn 36 amps, that's must've been a hell though, back in the day you really only had to care about C/N, unlike today where you have US (for modems) too.
@@twohullsThis wouldn't happen with underground power lines because they have a grounded shield. That's because people and other objects could be very close to them, and the other phases are buried together, rather than digging three trenches, and you don't want them to couple.
I remember back in the 70’s a farmer ran lines under power lines on his property and the power company sued him for stealing power. The FARMER WON and powers part of his place with the electricity that’s lost to the atmosphere.
@@acinfla9615 The guy that had a wire coil in his attic? (I know we all are trying to remember something from 40 years ago). I think I remember he was indeed fined.
@@Tore_Lund That’s how I remember it. I think they tried to fine him or bill him for stealing power. I can’t remember but he got away with it for a while.
Here's a neat test to try as we, myself and two fellow electricians in the mid 80's did. We grabbed 8' T-12 fluorescent lamps and wrapped the one end of them with aluminum foil. Then we held them in our hands straight up under similar 230kv transmission lines. They lit up like they were in fixture.
Back in the 90's I was doing work at a Navy VLF radio station. They offered us a tour of the radio house. When they went to show us the cables running out to the antenna array, they just grabbed a fluorescent tube lamp off of a bracket, and as soon as they held it the tube lit up. The cables were running in a large closet that went underground.
This was a Navy prank for any newbies aboard the ship, too. A saltier sailor would summon the new kids out to 'reset the phosphors' in the florescent lights, which meant dismounting the tubes from whatever lights were handy and bringing them out onto the forward deck. The prankster would demonstrate the proper way to 'reset the phosphors' by lifting the tube overhead and giving it a good shake - and a friend up on the bridge would turn on the radar.
No need to wrap them in anything....They'll light up underneath a 10KV line already....Just pick 'm up and hold above your head, in the rough direction of the lines....
Back last week, I went into my garage, replaced the fluorescent lamps in my fixture, then flipped the switch on. They lit up as if they were turned on. It was beyond amazing. Then I took the old lamps and threw them into the ocean for the dolphins to snack on.
In the early '80s, my friends house had powerlines just like that going over their house. The rain gutters and down spouts had a significant electrical charge. Us neighborhood kids loved pushing each other into them or better yet, tricking anyone that didn't know better into zapping themselves. It was strong enough to arc off any grass or weeds that touched the downspouts.
As a kid our neighbor would walk under similar transmission lines holding a fluorescent light tube over his head. Sometimes it would flicker, sometimes it would really light up. Forgot all about it until I saw your video. Thanks.
*If he would have hammered a long copper ground-rod into the earth and touched one end of the light tube to the ground rod it would have stayed lit to this day! Establishing a GROUND CONNECTION is critical!!*
We used to do that as a party trick in high school. Desk lamp fluorescent tube with light right up when held above our heads while standing under the HV lines in the neighborhood.
as a retired telephone linesman, I've dealt with EMF many times and to all kinds of degrees.The worst was when I was placing a temporary aerial cable under a large transmission line.I was in bucket, and blue spark started jumping between different metal parts of the bucket. I came down and grounded my truck, Still sparks jumping. I ended up finishing the job with hi voltage rubber gloves on, as I couldn't touch anything without getting zipped.
Years ago,I had a customer that was fed by type C rural wire, with the 14ga hardened steel conductors, it was hung on a transmission line on wooden poles, following an ice storm one side went open, and we had a helluva time measuring the open because it induced something like 130 volts AC, and because it crossed a highway ramp it was stupid high, so a regular bucket wouldn't reach, they ended up hanging a 6m strand and lashed a 6 pair drop to it because it was way too far between poles for self supporting drop. In retrospect, I should have had them lash up 2-19 Gopher wire, so we could have bonded and grounded the shielding, would have really reduced the FEMF and power influence.
Rural "c" was the worst for EMF pick up. I was stripping some one day to lay down in 5502, by my belly. It jumped arch blue spark onto my belly, and thru my shirt. Burned me and a hole in my shirt. I'd have to ground the wire, and I'd have about 20 seconds before another charge would hit. Another time on an ice storm, 4 guys were picking up some 109 for me on the pole. They picked it up, and all 4 knocked to ground with arch between wire and ground. Again for me to "tie" in the wire on the insulator, I had to ground it out and quickly tie onto insulator. We initially thought we had a primary wire laying on our wire.... but we drove the area a mile or so in each direction ..... no primary. Just EMF.
i parked my truck & small enclosed trailer under some lines at an offroad area a few years ago, got back from riding, the trailer had become mildly energized, gave me slight shock when i went to open the door.
Instead of shorting a capacitor out to discharge it, use a 20K to 50K, 10 watt resistor across the cap terminals and it will slowly and safely discharge the cap in a few minutes. Remember once a cap is discharges and you remove the short, the cap may very well regain a charge over time. So leave the resistor attached to the cap when not in use.
I used to work on gen powered light carts. eventually the capacitors would begin to fail, at that point the lights go out and come back on in about 12 minutes after the capacitor recharged. If you leave them set for long periods even a bad capacitor would recharge on it's own. the world is full of free-floating energy, such a mystical force. Nikola Tesla's playground.....
I know next to nothing about electronics. As a retired HVAC service technician, I was cringing while waiting for the capacitor to exploded. In my years of servicing air conditioning equipment, I replaced many run caps that had exploded. Glad yours didn’t.
I was in a radio/tv repair class in high school. We would hook small electrolytic capacitors up to a power supply and crank it up until they popped like a fire cracker.
@@youtopia2000we used to charge them up and toss them to people that didn’t know what caps were. It was a fun little prank to zap people when they caught the caps we tossed to them. 😂😂✌️
Those 1000 volts diodes change AC to DC. It takes 4 diodes to capture all of the sine wave the fence wire pick up. You can use one diode but it will only capture half the sine wave.
On the farm I grew up on, there is a 120,000 volt transmission line. One portion is 1/2 mile. My dad said ... years ago, before steel fence posts were common, (the posts were wood) that 5 wire fence (between his and a neighbor's field) would have an 'induced' current in the top 2 or 3 wires.... enough to receive a "Dirty Shock".
I used to bicycle past a farm property with HV lines over it, I got shocked from contact with my own bike frame and used to see arcs between the fence wires and the ground.
I have my metal roof grounded within 20 foot of highpower lines. The emf measures at 120 or higher in my addition, so metal siding will be used there, 0 to 8 in the current house also 0 directly under the lines. ?.
@@user-hp6sr8fe2n "EMF" is very broad and relative. It is a huge range of frequency, some of which are constant & universal, and some which might be more interactive with matter. But then also, 120 might be 300 on a different meter. It is an absolutely relative measurement.
0@@Observer_Effect I know the gophers follow the metal farm fence and the drip irrigation lines, tend to munch the roots along the line. I now have a dog and cat that will dig them up and enjoy a little extra protein, My meter is Erick Hill RT 100. Thanks, always willing to learn more. I had beets and turnips with the drip lines larger than I had ever see.
About 30 years ago was the first time I became aware of what happens in the vicinity of these towers. A very experienced horse breeder friend of mine married a man that had similar electrical lines running across a back pasture on his property. The marriage saw her move her 10-12 brood mares to his ranch where they were pastured in the same areas with the power lines. I understand that he had always used that area as hay fields, never having run livestock there for any appreciable time. Her brood stock included several older mares, each having produced strong healthy foals for many years. Within the first year some of these mares began experiencing miscarriages or still-births. Like I said, she was very experienced and kept meticulous records of every aspect of her operation. They finally narrowed the cause down to their prolonged proximity to those transmission lines. They moved the herd and never had that problem again.😐
I grew up near a field with some massive lines cutting through the middle, and i would pass through that field all the time. Being a kid, shorter of course, eyes closer to the ground, i started noticing how many 4 leaf clovers i would find under the lines. Then the more i looked, the more leaves i found. well as a kid i didn't know how unheard of this was but seriously, i found some clovers with up to 7 leaves. I wish i pressed some in books or took pictures, because i could find these things within a minute of looking for them, they were all over. But that was back in the 80s, they've since replaced the old giant wooden poles with metal ones, who knows what else they might have changed. I still go back there to look sometimes but i don't find them anymore. Oh and... yes they were clover. in case anyone thinks I'm full of it. The *other* 7 leaf plants grew on this neighbors property, which i didn't dare get too close to. But, If you do a search right now for 7 leaf clover you'll see pictures of them. They are supposed to be extremely rare.
I've heard the same story from a local farmer, lots of problems from the cattle herd with transmission lines going through thier pasture, they also fed hay directly under the lines because that's where the gate was located. All other herds were fine, same genetics etc.
I have seen the same 4, 5, 6 and 7 leaf clovers when i was a child, I think the reason here was actually the Chernobyl powerplant dust that fell all over eastern Europe. I am Bulgarian by the way. I barely find 4 leaf clovers now. @@derealized797
I work for an electrical utility. I was recently installing new equipment under the overhead lines while working on an insulated fiberglass ladder. I had one lead from my volt-meter to ground while holding the other lead and the induced electricity into me would go up about 125 volts per step on the ladder. It was interesting to see the constant bug zapper action arcing when I held the lead about 1/8th inch from the grounded building next to me.
I work in substations and when i was a maintenance electrician I would climb the A frame towers. On a 220Kv line the induce was so great that i was able to write my name into the A frame with my finger, well for a little bit. I found holding a screwdriver hurry less.😆 Have a good one, stay safe!
Yes. As long as you are holding the conductor (Screwdriver) you won't feel it. Let your finger touch it and ouch. I was removing the sealant from a pass through to install wiring into the building and I thought that I was disturbing a wasp in there at first when I heard the buzzing noise. @@mmi6280
Very interesting experiment! During the time the cap was charging from 186V to 331V, the average current was 0.19 milliamps. [ i=C x delta(v)/delta(t) ] This raw current at the open end of the wire will not kill you but the capacitor itself can deliver enough current to be dangerous. I would wear gloves around this circuit. A comment below mentions how HV lines affected horses. I've heard of other cases when HV affected cows and horses. Their feet are always touching the ground and an AC current flows through their body.
not related to power lines, but the NEC has rules for grounding structures for dairy farming. Apparently the smallest of currents traveling through the cows feet will sour the milk, making it undeniable.
@@G8tr1522 Or maybe it's because the fences and guardrails are all metal and in some places you have electrical equipment in contact with it. A colleague of mine managed to kill 10 cows in the milking parlour because he forgot to ground the milk pump and when on the third day of testing the farmer managed to flood it a current of about 40ma was flowing from the pump's chassis through the stainless steel pipes to the metal guiderails for positioning of the cows for milking. The structure was also not grounded and the cows were grounding it out trough the wet concrete floor. Turns out cows are very sensitive to 50Hz currents because all 10 in the parlour dropped dead from that.
Have you noticed how guardrails always screw up someone's body current and tend to get hit alot? Gophers follow my fence lines and drip irrigation to the free food buffet.@@TheOriginalEviltech
Inductive resonance is a real thing and can be tapped. I found this out building solar powered electric fencing in Oklahoma. Those powerlines play hell with the control boards in fencing and we found out that we didn't need to power them up if the fence ran under those lines. Free electric fence power.....enough to deter horses and cows from going though. For fun walk underneath a high tension line with a fluorescent tube and hold it over your head in the dark. Free lighting !
@@heeeyno cicruit which can resonate. There is no thing as "inductive resonance", nor "capacitive resonance" nor "resistive resonamce". There is capacitance, there is iductance there is resonance. Separate terms. If you say "inductive resonance" I will not be taking your story seriously. You cant just make up terms. They are already made up. So everything else is INCORRECT.
When I was a land surveyor, if we would park our work truck under power lines like these, our truck would shock you... We had an aluminum camper top gimmick on the trucks, if you landed on it, both your elbows would have burn lines on them... I know all about that stray current...! Thanks for sharing... Keep up your awesomeness...
Weird coincidence but I worked for a seismic survey crew and did the same thing. I just crawled out of a swamp, soaking wet and went to place my pin flags into the back of the pickup truck. As soon as the underside of my arm touched the truck I got a very noticeable zap. The rest of the crew laughed when I squealed and didn't believe me but nobody would touch the truck. Also, this was back in the day when we had to use the time cube and do sun shots. They have GPS now, spoiled babies.
I worked for a local municipality as an operator of a TV inspection truck. This truck was used to inspect the interior of pipe using a CCTV camera. The spool of cable it used to connect the camera to the rig was over 500FT long, and coiled-up on a 4ft diameter spool. One job assignment had us inspecting a storm drain under a 240KV transmission line... It knocked two of us down stepping back onto the truck after hooking up the camera to that cable. EMS was called, and it finally dawned on me WHY we got shocked. I got 480VAC between the rebar of the catch basin and the frame of the truck. SHOCKING, huh?!
You can get significant induction voltages from much less than 230kv if you are close enough! I first figured that about 20 years ago while waiting for a train. It was a rainy day, so I had my umbrella up. I was stood on the platform and kept feeling this zapping sensation in my right hand and a faint buzzing noise. I looked up and there were little sparks around the spokes of my umbrella and as I adjusted my grip so as to only hold the plastic handle there was visible arcing about 4-5mm onto my hand. 😵 I was amazed! This was coming from the 25kv traction supply lines about 8ft above my head.
Back in the 80's we ran a permanent electric fence around a large farm I was working for. Part of that fence ran under some large power lines coming from a power plant and once that fence was insulated it was hot without being connected to a charger. This fence was 5ft tall with 6 lines and fiberglass posts and the lines alternated between hot and ground, They were all hot under the large power lines.
Sounds like you were wasting free electricity. You should have set up a large scale version of what was shown in this video, and powered your electric fence for $0.00.
so how about legalities there then. if the power company claims that drawing on that magnetic field is stealing their power then it must work the other way round: if they, so to speak, 'push' their power into your fence with all concomitant possible dangers and inconveniences then they should be liable for that. right? quid pro quo.
@@abrogard142 That's assuming the power company would notice, let along care, that he was capturing power leaking from the lines. Right now this phenomenon isn't large enough for there to be a standardized ruling one way or the other. It very well may be that even if the power company does accuse him of stealing power, he could take this case to trial *and win* thus negating that possibility altogether.
Friend of ours back in the 70's built a new tie stall dairy barn for his registered Holstein herd. High tension lines on steel towers ran about 400 ft behind his barn. When he got the florescent lights hooked up and they turned them off they didn't turn off! Over the years they installed florescent lights in several other buildings with the same results. As far as I know they still work today.
@@somethinburnin I believe so but honestly cannot tell you, didn't pay that close of attention plus I haven't been past there in over 10 years, They're about an hour drive from here
A great example of an air core transformer. You will get more induction by reducing the separation between primary and secondary, and increasing the length in parallel. Changing the angle between primary and secondary reduces the (effective) parallel length, which reduces the induction.
Looks like capacitive coupling since he's just connecting to one end of the wire. If he went to one side (to couple better to a single phase) and had a larger 'plate' i.e. more wire, he'd probably get more out of it.
You may get better results not using a coax cable being that the core you are hooking up to is shielded. ground the woven metal shielding to the copper on one end. that will utilize the mesh in the induction process.
And coil the secondary for increased inductance. I was watching this and wondering what the result would be if you stretched out a toy slinky and performed the same test.
I suspect a sheet of aluminium foil, or a vehicle, or any other large, flat conductive object would work very well as a capacitor plate. Put it high up, and I'm guessing directly under one of the outer phases will be optimal but experimentation will tell.
There's a historic railroad SMRS IN Michigan USA that one of the volunteers was an elect engineer. He became perplexed about an 1890 railroad bridge not rusting hardly any. Checking metal composition possibilities and anything he could think of couldn't figure why. One day I told him why I thought it was natural magnetism since the rails went mostly north/south and not having rail traffic much of the year it induced a small anti corrosive charge. He said didn't think of that and would explain whole thing.
Retired land surveyor. Whenever we surveyed under hi tension lines and set up the transit you could feel that it was energized because it would 'bite' when you touched it and if you grabbed hold of it it would 'buzz' in your hands.
As a retired building inspector, I have seen why all buildings must stay back from high-tension, high-power lines. Among many reasons, electricity can arc through Smoke, especially high-particulate smoke such as that from a wood stove (or solid-fuel burning appliance). Electricity can travel a long distance through smoke. But of course there are Electromagnetic reasons to stay back as well. This video illustrates an example of that electromagnetic energy.
Arc discharge in volcanic plumes is an example at scale. Dusty plasma in "Space" aligns in filaments that stretch light years. Though effectively a vacuum in material terms fluctuating field effects permeate and inform an electric Universe - not just at atomic scale. I was wondering recently if ferrous ions might be offgassed by my wood stove. I have noted migrating rust-colouring to some rocks on the top. I hadn't thought of smoke to local power lines - but I've never felt anything sparky from touching the stove. Other particulates may also operate your observation - such as dust or pollen. Lots of nano-particulates now sprayed to save the planet. I don't know if they descend without molecular bonding (ie water vapour) atmospheric capacitance isn't just a voltage gradient but a leaky dielectric we call weather (or even climate).
In a physics class I took a few years back one of the exercises was calculating the windings needed to power a house from the EMF coming off a high power line. Then the final question in the exercise was : "is it ethical?" Well I'd love to give it a try and see how long it took for them to find me out! :D - EDIT - FYI - The power companies monitor the lines for leakage. Building a system large enough to power anything substantial would show up on their test and found out. It would be considered stealing. I hope this puts an end to this conversation.....
@@rogerhargreaves2272 Well it depends on how ethical you think stealing power is. You're setting up an inductor under the power lines that's not free energy, anymore than bypassing your electricity metre is. If you find a water tank, that isn't yours, but the water is slowly evaporating off, is lighting a fire under the tank and then condensing the steam not stealing the water? It's not "lost" energy that's being recovered, the the transmission losses are LOST, much like how the naturally evaporating water is lost. Putting an inductor under the power lines is equivalent to lighting a fire and boiling more water off. It's just hiding theft in a way where it appears to just be extra natural losses (until someone finds out at least). Think about an electric tooth brush or at least its charging unit. When the tooth brush isn't on the charging unit, the unit still has AC running through it but it's just resonating back and forth, very little is coupled to the magnetic field it's generating, so that magnetic field is just wobbling back and forth, constantly taking energy but also putting it back into the mains (actually an idling toothbrush unit is way worse for loses than the above, because the above will have capacitors tuned to put the energy back in at the right phase at the substations). The dominant losses in the toothbrush situation are due to a small amount of resistance in the coil that the AC is running through. When you put the brush on the unit though, all of a sudden that magnetic field is driving a coil in the brush, inducing a current in the brush to charge the battery in the brush. The unit isn't making free energy, it's just now being transferred from the mains driven charging unit to the brushes battery. So make no mistake, it is NOT free energy. Every Joule taken is an extra Joule the electricity provider has to generate in addition to the natural losses they have with transmission system. So the real question is stealing a few milliWatts ok? Personally, if it wasn't silly amounts of power (i.e. powering your home, though that'd be a lot cheaper and safer to just rig the electricity metre) I probably wouldn't tell anyone.
My last final exam question was in environmental engineering. I had to determine how long a fish could live when certain chemicals were introduced into its bowl. I answered the fish died from jumping out of the bowl when the chemicals were released. He dropped me from a B to C on final grade!
I'd say that it's free electricity because it's in the air. Would never notice you collecting electricity, because there'd be no loss on their end. Maybe if they were doing maintenance and stumbled onto it, but it's still not illegal. Think of it like using an air compressor. You can't be charged for the air that is all around, although I'm sure that the J P Morgan's of the world would love figure out away to make money from free air use.
AC Induction is very common on a long parallel run of metallic cables. I work in the telecommunication industry for over 20yrs and we have to mitigate these induced voltages. Normally we use AC Chokes to flip the phase 180°. This counters the induced voltages. However, there is a saturation point where the the the AC Choke can be over run and the effects become null. Generally, these voltages does not produce high currents, but still can give you a healthy jolt. If you ever heard a 60Hz hum on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line, then you know why now.
I worked for Hydro-Quebec. They used to remove the direct connection to ground of the "ground wire" and do it through lightning arresters. They would pickup the voltage from that line to power a remote substations.
Did something similar .... used copper blanket mounted on a wall ..... worked really well for 3yrs. Powered 3 x 12v devices (sleep alarm, lava lamp, dancing flower). Give it a try ... lots of fun. Better than replacing potatoes every week.
@@davidca96 I've never worked on hardline. Just RG6 & 11. It's only been a few times where I brush up my arm against a drop while it's disconnected from the splitter. But I've only been on the cable side for a few years. Did telco for 17 before that, which only has -48 DC idle, but ringing is 90 AC which definitely gives a good zap!
@@grabasandwich Ahh ok, I am a network maintainence tech myself, been in the business for 23 years. It sure does wake you up especially if your gloves are wet haha.
About 45 years ago, a friend of mine bought a small parcel of land from his family farm, and built a house on it. There was a set of high-tension electrical transmission line along one border of his land where was was a disused stretch of barbed-wire fencing. You could definitely get a pretty good jolt off of that fence.
I was hunting near some big power lines here in Ontario. I was riding my ATV directly under the power lines. I was getting small sharp shocks on a constant basis through my brake levers. I was thinking the power lines had broken and fallen somewhere down the line. Apparently this happens all the time. Very cool.
Same thing happened to me on my dirtbike when I stopped to clear my goggles because it started to rain. I thought the rain was becoming conductive. Scared the living shivves outs of me and I throttled away at full speed!
Wow! What an interesting experiment, and the comments below are just as interesting. Anyone can see clearly what is going on here, which we should all be aware of. Many times, I have walked areas where these run through because the easement makes it easy to walk through, like national parks and other areas, it is kept mowed down and, on a hill, it is easy to see long distances. So, that amount of energy is below and in surrounding area all the time! It does affect living things..... and could cause some issues I would think! Thank you for this video, it is very amazing! I am going to share and put it in my community spot so others can see too (if anyone looks). Thank you so much and You stay safe!
I've heard about this phenomenon back in the 90s. But they referred to it as "stray voltage" and tell you stories about cattle getting electrocuted, and homes that were next to lines would have all kinds of problems, as well as the occupants coming down with weird illnesses and cancers.
I believe there was a huge lawsuit in Iowa maybe fifty years ago over this issue. The farmers were trying to prevent being forced to have these power lines cross their land, sometimes very close to a house or barn.
Years ago I read about links between high power lines and what medical researches called 'cancer clusters' which were the people, mainly children, who lived in low cost housing built near to the lines having significantly higher levels of several types of cancer. The power companies were not found liable however those people in the lawsuit were offered alternate housing away from the power lines out of the kindness of the companies heart.
@@bendover1028There is exactly zero peer reviewed research that shows anything of the sort. None. Nothing. There is no physical way that non-ionizing radiation can possibly cause such damage.
I am 79 years old and 50 years ago I had a girlfriend also now in her eighties who contracted the dreaded MS disease. She lived very close to powerlines and some scientists wondered if powerlines were the cause of this and other illnesses. Your experiment just shows what is radiated from these lines and possibly affects millions of others. This lady, badly crippled has lived in a nursing home since 1990 bless her. I think that there is a massive cover up of the hidden damage done by radiation such as this and I am glad that you have highlighted it. Well done. B
if power lines cause disease, why don't microwave ovens? Short answer: non-ionizing radiation is not the same as ionizing radiation (WHAT A SHOCKER!!) also, power lines don't cause disease. Stop with this nonsense.
Well, it shows energy is radiated, but not that it causes problems. Remember it's taking miles of metal fence to pick up this energy. And if the fence was connected to ground, it wouldn't be detectable.
As a pipeliner I’ve worked on many projects laying pipe , like 36” or 42” , along power line R.O.W. We have to ground every piece of pipe brought in just while laying there under those lines. Heck yeah they build charge !! Seriously no joke.
🔌🔌In 1977 I worked in a utility transmission department as a COOP Electrical Engineer in southwestern Michigan that had 765kV power lines from the nuclear plant. An individual claimed that a fence caused a spark in his tractor. Sure enough, we found out that this could happen and caused a change in easements setbacks. We also tested 69 and 230kV. 765kV was much more likely to spark. Also, the blowing sandunes caused the land-to-plow line clareances to change drastically.🔌🔌
@@FreiherrDinkelacker It was the Cook Nuclear plant which was owned by AEP and operated by Indian and Michigan Electric. I wish more nuclear plants were built.
@@Carl_in_AZ2 new Google energy plant complexes of some kind being built in a city near me as we speak...I'm pretty sure they arent the only ones being built. Never seen anything like them before and security is very tight. And not a peep about them.
@@reidhansen7030 Before I retired I worked on providing backup emergency engineering design for many Google Data centers throughout the world. What city and state? All their data center locations have a high level of security. The next nuclear plant under design is Bill Gates's TerraPower in Wyoming. It will not be used to power any Microsoft facilities. Azure(Microsoft) data center has talked about a small nuclear reactor(SMR) plant but it will most likely not be in North America and will be many years away.
I remember us having to dig an underground ground grid. and place ground rods down all over and ground cables all tied together to keep the induction down.
A length of insulated hookup wire would be cheaper than coax. I would expect a larger power draw if you moved your pickup wire further away from the lines (up to a point) because the wires are carrying 3-phase and the fields cancel to some degree the closer you move to the centre - they won't cancel completely because the wires are physically separated but field cancellation is what the power company would like to happen. The idea is to couple more closely to just one of the wires to reduce the field cancellation effect (make one field stronger than the other two which in effect moves you closer to a single phase pickup). If you want a decent current, a large loop with one side as close to one of the outer lines as possible and the opposite side of the loop well away would help. This gives a single turn transformer secondary with one of four sides coupled as strongly as possible with two sides not coupled at all and the fourth ideally low-to-no coupling.
Thank you sir for your efforts, in both braving the cold and the testing. I am in Wisconsin and it's -9 this morning so I know what your dealing with in that regard. As to your test and charging your capacitor I am not surprised of the amount of passive power you captured. Depending on the transmission flow rate in the wires, the equation for radiated power would show that a capacitor several times your 1200 volt rating could be charged (given the bridge rectifier having diodes of sufficient rating to handle the load. Excellent job and very informative enjoy you very much.
You could put a step down transformer on the end of your coax wire, that would decrease the voltage to your bridge rectifier, but it will increase your amperage to a usable amount, that you could run a burried insulated cable, to your house, to keep a battery bank charged to help you reduce your electric bill. 😁👍
@@johnbeer4963 but there not fiscally connections? if anything anything cleaning waist RF energy and responsibly disposing of it in responsible way? catching repurposing it? all for free?
@@dh2032 I wish it were exactly how You say but there was a guy in my country a few years ago stuck a bunch of fluorescent tubes in his field under a power line and there was quite a fuss about it. He definitely got charged for a load of electricity, i'm not sure if there was a criminal court case about it but i seem to remember there being one
@@johnbeer4963 That's interesting. How did they meter the 'stolen' electricity? Do you know what their 'proof' was? Also, would there be a loss to the company and can we sue the company for using our ancestors bodies to run their turbines? 😋
Back in the mid 70’s I was a Crane operator in Phoenix AZ. We were on a job North of Flagstaff in a small town called Grey Mountain. Arizona Public Service a power company was installing a large electrical transformer. In this business everything on the job including the crane is required to be grounded. As I was sitting in the cab of the crane the linemen were in the process of grounding the crane. We were located in an area similar to the power lines in the video….i looked down and to my surprise I noticed them laughing as by removing the ground wire that had been attached to my outrigger I could see them using a electrical arc to etch their initial’s in the paint of the crane.
Great video! You might try coiling wire into plastic barrels to see what effect you get. About 25 years ago there was a fella here in Phx who was gathering enough of the power leaking out of the HV lines that ran across the back of his yard that he was running his house on it for free. When the power co. found out what he was doing they were big mad, but the cops & court said he was breaking no laws so they had to leave him alone!
The same thing holds true for shunt fed and broadcast towers. I used to manage a tower facility in the Northeast that was adjacent to a school and had a chain link fence around it. Every time I would bring my key up to the lock it would draw an arc because the fence was electrically hot due to the RF field and the highly reactive antenna.
If its your land, and they aint paying rent, then Id say it was ethical. (They control and restrict your use of the land under the lines) Just my opinion.
@@harrypitts7389 failing radials can be fatal for transmitter sites. 25 years ago, I was CE for a AM directional along the coast. 16 acre plot with two towers. Owner was more interested in leasing space to cellulars, than in maintaining the field free of growth. I warned the owner multiple times about the roots severing ground radials but he continued to ignore. Years later, one morning, I get a call. Station went off the air during pattern switch. I drive the 3 hours to get there and notice smoked coming from the building's vents. I open door cautiously and step aside. Smoke pours out of door. Waited ten minutes then rushed in and turned the thermostat for the ventilation fan down so it would turn on. Ran outside and waited another ten minutes. Once the smoke was cleared, I went inside and observed the damage. The Harris SX5 has totally melted down. The contactor that did the switching was in the top of the SX5. It's insulators were made of some sort of fiberglass/waxy paraffin material, and when the contactor drew an arc, the arc sustained and caused the waxy materials to ignite, dripping down flaming debris into the lower part of the transmitter. It was a total write-off. I didn't want to tell the owner "told ya so!", but I think he knew.
LOL you should put a disclaimer on this. Kids all over the country now are going to be doing this! Thanks for sharing. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya
I used to install central vacuums. I was finishing an install at one particular house After all the connections were made, pipe and low volt electrical, I plugged in the main power cord. The motor came on as soon as I plugged it in. I thought I had miswired something. I went back thru all of my low voltage connections as it just sends 12-24v out to each outlet and if it comes back, it trips a relay for the motor. I couldn’t find any shorts in the lines. So I put a meter on the wires to check for continuity between them and had none. But why was the motor turning on with the low volt lines connected and not on with them disconnected? The only thing I could think at the time was a bad circuit board or maybe the radio station across the street had something to do with it. I went to the local RadioShack and picked up a power supply and a relay and got them temporarily going with the understanding that I would be back again once I figured out what was happening. After contacting the manufacturer of the system, they sent me a new circuit board and that fixed the issue. It turns out that they had ran into this before and it was indeed the radio station causing the issues. The low voltage wiring was acting as an antenna and picking up stray voltage that was triggering the onboard relay.
You should put a 50K resistor and amp meter across the positive and negative leads to see how much the voltage might drop to. To measure the resulting current and see the usable DC voltage available. Maybe see if it could power some LED Christmas lights. :)
Thank you for creating this video. I've felt tingling when up around high voltage transmission lines. I didn't think it would be healthy to spend a lot of time around them, but I didn't come up with a method that would allow them to be shock dangerous unless touching them some how or coming close enough for them to arc. This experiment shows that it is conceivable that it is a possibility some type of configuration might emerge that could store energy and create a deadly charge. It would likely be some weird like some piece of equipment with a hidden high voltage compactor that somehow gets a conducting induction loop by chance created to it under a high voltage transmission line. It is in a trillions of a chance, but some association of junk under transmission line could have that happen. I'm surprised there is not more videos in the popular science/mechanics venue that bring up how much energy high voltage A.C. transmission lines loose through stray induction to their surroundings. Another characteristic would how much they loose by radio wave radiation. Typically I'd assume radio wave transmission loss of energy is close to zero, but not zero compared to the energy in the line.
It was when we could have gotten so far until the bowl fell breaking into many pieces so after that we decided to be more careful. */OR/* We were almost finished when the bowl fell and broke .We decided to be much more careful moving forward. see what I did there? your welcome.
You may wanna take some of the advice I've read in your comments.. the static can be harnessed , but take precautions..i.e. lighting strikes power surges.. lighting arrestor are available.., store in battery.. even if u step it down just to power well pump. Your ahead of the game.
What a fantastic response you have had to this video. well done I am so pleased for you. Everyone will be syphoning free electricity from the power lines now lol.
You tested e-field pickup. You might get more power from residual magnetic pickup, and the voltage would be safer - you can run a 'fence' wire along the ground under one of the outer lines, and a return line a few meters away from the power line. This should be a much lower voltage around your loop and might be a useful amount of current. You might also find it is mostly 180Hz (third harmonic) due to most of the 3-line 60Hz cancelling itself out!
Yeah - is it the dielectric field that would be captured ? I would not think there would be huge current and huge magnetism being transmitted but the electric field would be enormous - and what of the 'theft' issue ? does pulling field off deprive the field ? or is the field just wasted emissions ? my guess is "B" so no theft
Cool. I was thinking on the same lines as you. No pun intended. Can you imagine the size of the magnetic field and it's density around that heavy conduit carrying how much voltage??? Yeah. I'd be abliged to " experiment in ignorance " what I could do with that magnetic field. 😊 I use aether sticks in my garden pots. Thy utilize the free magnetic energy around us. Magnitizing the soil that plants really enjoy. It also helps detour subterranean insects that thrive on the roots of your food, and many common ones that feed on the leaves and stalks. They don't like the the frequency. 😊 But the plant sure does.😮
It’s really wild how much inductance is happening under those power lines I was on a transmission line building crew and it would charge the line we were building beside it to 29,000 volts and when we put the grounds on it would make at least a 6’ arc. We also had fun with the static from it. We would make little wire pistols and shock each other on the neck or behind the ear haha
A guy I went to school with built his house right under those power lines, the large ones with the steel triangle support tower. We studied electrical engineering, I thought he was nuts for doing that. Grand kid was born with all sorts of issues and didn't survive more than a few months. AC power is nothing too be fooled with or taken lightly, some engineers don't even realize that.
@@jedclampett3725 Spoke to people in a housing tract built underneath massive high voltage transmission lines, whilst canvasing for a sales job out in the backwoods of TX. The residents of that little housing tract had lost multiple members of various families to cancer and other ailments that could not be explained. A study had been done to find out why everyone was dying there, and the only common denominator was those high voltage lines. They were all convinced they were the culprit.
> . . . when we put the grounds on it would make at least a 6’ arc. < The dielectric strength of air is about 1,000 volts per millimeter, or 1,000,000 volts per meter. 6' is 1.5 meters so are you saying that you developed 1.5million volt arc?, and lived to tell about it? An arc of six inches in dry air corresponds to 150,000 volts, which is also courting death if there is any current at all behind it.
@@peteinwisconsin2496 Yet Tesla and Mark Twain played with that electricity in Tesla's lab all the time. I guess when you know what your doing, you can get away with doing dangerous stuff. Re: Dangers of AC power. Read "The body electric" by Robert O Becker the last chapter is how he tried to convince utilities to not use that frequency because of the harm it can cause. Tesla tried to warn them as well. They weren't having it. I guess it was intended to cause damage and feed the healthcare industries profits.
Back in the late '60s and early '70s, I tried to convince my Grandpa and Dad to let me put up a few loose coils of wire at the edge of the treeline and run them to a few lights along the horse path along one section of fence. This was back about 50 feet or so from the easement where the high tension towers ran. My Grandpa complained occasionally about being caught in the dark on that end of the farm and I figured putting up a light every 100 yards or so would provide enough to orient back to the house if caught out after dark. They were convinced the power company would come after them, but I couldn't convince them it was all loss for the power company anyway. The minor amount we'd get for a dozen light bulbs wouldn't even show, since it was loss anyway. It wasn't like I was going up a tower and hanging a coil up there. I always meant to run out with a coil of wire, a light, and a meter and see how much we could get, just to know, but never did.
I remember going up on the hills near where I stayed a few years back with a fluorescent tube. When I stood under the 400kV lines holding the tube vertically in my hand the tube lit up from the top of the tube down to wherever I held it. It wasn't super bright but that was due to the field created under the lines being capable of producing only a low charge flow through the insulating air and if instead I had erected a small wire array say 2m in the air and had electrically connected one end of the tube to it and hung it vertically down and earthed the bottom end of the tube to the ground it would be very bright and the brightness could be varied by raising and lowering the top wire array. You could have done that easily enough.
Kreosan did this but they also used a transformer (it might have been a car ignition coil or perhaps a TV fly-back transformer). They had a rectifier of course, but also some kind of voltage regulator. With this setup they could harvest enough energy to charge a cell phone with the antenna just being a one meter whip and the ground the frame of one of their bikes. The lines they were under though were the big ones, maybe 500KV.
I was an RF tech, we tested potential cell sites, and would use a bucket truck to hoist the antenna to the proposed height. To look both for potential coverage and obstacles, I would go up in the bucket and take pics on the 8 cardinal points to get a 360 view. One time we were proposing mounting to HV transmission lines, the SDG&E guy opened the gate and drove away, so we went about setting up. I was about 8 ft from the lines, in a metal framed bucket. My compass went nuts (actually reversed polarity) and as I reached for the controls I got BIT, not deadly, but I crossed my arms and had the driver lower me from the ground controls. Later talked to the SDG&E guy, who had no idea we were setting up, that close to the lines and said that would NEVER work, as it's inside the 'field' and it would fry the antennas! that compass still points south!
You can walk under them with a long florescent tube and it will light up . We used to tape a small one on our radio antennas key the microphone and they lit up from the RF. Same if you pulled into a gas station with tubes under the canopy touch them with a 1/4 wave 10 meter whip and you could light them up all the ways around the station .
I used to work for Hydro-Québec which is the power company in the province of Québec, Canada. We have very high voltage lines (735 kv) coming from James Bay going to Montréal area about 1200 kilometres. We also have microwaves repeaters every 30-50 kilometres along the lines. To power those stations they insulated the wire over the lines for 10-20 kilometres on each sides of the stations and use the electricity for the buildings and all the equipment inside. If I recall the lights inside where very unstable depending on the temperature, humidity. I am not sure they are still used because the installed fiber optic cable on the wire so the communication is way faster.
Caution, you can accumulate enough induced voltage in your “fence” wire alone to stop your heart (1 - 4 amps). I’ve lost a co-worker to very similar conditions. Don’t experiment and loose your life.
It only takes about 20 - 40 milliamps to cause fibrillation. The higher amperage is actually better, since it will stop the heart - meaning it is easier to restart.
I knew a guy that pretty much powered his big barn and shop with big sono tubes wrapped in Romex, that he buried under the big power-lines that ran across a field behind the barn, his house was powered by panels. He was totally off the grid.
My parents spoke of a city park in their home town in Germany where there was a park that had all the lights powered by overhead high tension lines. No wires to the lights, just a collector on top of the pole.
Nice experiment¡. With 1KV reverse breakdown diodes you probably wont get much past that voltage on the charging DC capacitor. That's because the line voltages are alternating above and below ground potential (I agree with other comment in that there should be a mix of harmonics depending on the distance between the pick-up wire, witch doesn't need to be coax btw, and the HV lines in relation to the distance between the different HV conductors themselves). Anyway, because your DC capacitor terminals are ungrounded, usually the positive terminal will sit above ground potential and negative terminal will sit below ground potential. When the incoming or pick up wire picks a voltage of say 500V below ground, the diode of the rectifier that is connected between the positive terminal of the capacitor and the incoming pick up wire would get a reverse voltage of 1KV if the capacitor is charged to 1000V (Would help to see a diagram of connections and potentials referenced to ground). Conversely when pick up wire gets 500V above ground, the diode that is connected between the negative terminal of the capacitor and the pick up wire would get a reverse voltage of 1KV when the capacitor is charged to 1000V. Because of the relatively low current, the diodes would conduct in reverse without getting destroyed. The way to get higher voltages on the capacitor would be to connect the pickup wire to one terminal of the capacitor and the other terminal through a series of diodes to ground. That way you could reach n*1000 V on the DC capacitor, assuming that the cap has enough voltage rating and you use a series of n diodes rated at 1KV of reverse voltage. Of course you would get a half wave rectifier, so half the incoming current
I worked at a company called Genscape in Louisville Ky years ago. They sell reports about commodities to brokers and one of those reports was on what electricity was going where and who was selling electricity to whom based off of boxes they paid land owners to place next to high voltage power lines that measure how much electricity was going through the line based off the magnetic fields.
That's interesting, not the boxes, but the fact they totally bypass the power company and make their own measurements. Because the power company would already know this stuff but they don't want to ask them.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 It not a matter of willing to ask its a matter of the power company willing to release or quickly release. These commodity brokers trade on that info daily sometimes hourly. An example would be if Con-Edison has a problem with a plant and has to buy power from Duke Energy. The brokers would invest in Duke Energy supplies. It is big money. They use FLIR cameras on oil tanks like those at Cushing to provide oil stockpiles info to brokers. They use satellite phots to predict soy and corn yield for Ethanol production. Huge money in those reports.
Good video on describing lines of flux called the left hand rule. The lines off flux coming off the high voltage lines is pretty significant. Higher the voltage, the larger the lines of flux. The RF cable you are capturing the voltage is pretty cool but use caution when doing this.
The higher the CURRENT, the higher the magnetic flux. The distribution network uses high voltage lines specifically to reduce the current and magnetic flux levels.
Family farm is under some of these. You always hoped when you were baking that if the shear pin broke in the baler it wouldn’t break under those lines because you would get zapped changing it. Dad said when they were kids they would take tube type bulbs out there at night and there was enough power to light them somewhat at night
Having been a crane Operator for the power company you can definitely build a charge by induction being close to power lines , and can be deadly if you are not very careful
Reminds me of the foxhole radios i made in my youth; Was always amazed that a small antenna pulled enough voltage from the air to run a piezo speaker earpiece.
We were working on a road to a radio antenna near a power generation plant. Not sure what the voltage was on the HV transmission lines, but I had parked my F350 crew cab long bed under the transmission lines perpendicular to the lines. Chrome door handles and I had a very hard time getting the door open to get in. Every time I touched the handle, it hit me like an electric fence.
As a Security Officer at a Power Station I often walked onder HV lines at night. One night I was carrying a flourescent light tube 5 feet long! As I walked under the lines the tube under my arm started to flicker, as a joke I lifted it up pointing at the wires! I was amazed when it lit!! Not full brightnes but it lit! Another time a big boss, against my advice took his new car on site and parked it under the lines, when he came back out the whole car was dead no ignition nothing! It seems the lines were cold when he parked but the generators started and the lines were activated, the sudden surge of HV had fried the on board computer from a hight of about 50 feet!! Last oneNow working at an Aluminium smelter a worker took ill inside the potrooms where the metal was melted in electric powered crucibles each of about 5 tonnes. Ambulance arrived and was told DO NOT drive into the building, however a boss on the scene ignored our instructions and waved it in, they were only about 5 yards inside before they stopped to pick up the casualty and put him into the ambulance! Then the fun started, the ambulance would not start, totally dead, to make matters worse all the electronic medical equipment was also fried! Ended up they had to tow it out of the building and send for another ambulance for the patient, Total bill was £100,000+ all becase a boss thought he knew better than the Security men! He tried to blame the men on duty but ALL the potroom lads said they heard him countermand the advice from Security so HE got the dressing down!!!
I was a line clearance worker, aka Tree man, for a power company. We parked our trucks inside an electrical substation. You could feel the hair on your arms reacting to the energy in the air. O.S.H.A says on a simgle phase primary line(7,200kva) you must maintain 2 foot 10 inches or the electricity can/will ark/ jump to the ground source (you) 🖖✌️👍
Personally I hated having to go anywhere near HV lines or substations.. Had to repair some equipment at one and the warning signs said 15 ft. It was foggy, security guy said ignore signs and try to stay at least 5ft away from the security fence, (20 +ft from any HV equipment) the warning was only good in sunny weather!
When looking for a new house, I was aware of the EMF surrounding high tension power lines. One of my stipulations was that the house be at least a quarter mile from any transmission lines. My extended family thought I was nuts...they built immediately adjacent to to transmission lines because the property was cheap. There are well documented effects of EMF and young people inducing lukemia. They have three young boys. God help them.
We bought adjacent to a 230kV line, and I didn't even check with a Gauss meter, but did have a plan. The house has aluminum siding. The second month here the steel roof went on. The window screens are now all aluminum. Five bars outside the (steel) front door. Zero in the living room and bed room. Not perfect, but the gardens are further from the HVL and I worry more now about just carrying the phone.
It's not really the fault of "antiquated" infrastructure. When superconductivity is practical, efficiencies will increase. Whether the line was built in 1922 or 2024, present technology will be inefficient due to the (past and present) fundamental economics of transmission system design. Let's see what happens once we depart from ACAR, ACSR, HTLS and ACC conductors with significant corona losses. Superconductivity will hasten this advantage.
Many years ago I was setting light poles with a bucket truck in a parking lot. There was two maybe three, HV lines (systems) above, I can't remember. I was in the bucket operating the boom. I reached out to grab the pole to stabilize it and got a tingle. I told the guy down below, he though I was just blowing smoke. When he grabbed the bottom of the pole to center it on the light base he got a surprise. He took his lineman,s pliers and grabbed the ground wire from the feed wires and weld it close to the pole. there was a continuous arc. One of the guys ran to get some rubber gloves. It was all good once the pole was sitting on the base.
That one Pole was inducing more power to ground than I would need to run the lights in my shed. I'm rather surprised that the right of way allowed those poles to go up at all.
My son was a contractor safety inspector for the army corps of engineers and I was his go to when he ran into weird issues. He called me one day from a site he had been summoned to where workers were being shocked when they would hook loads on a 100 foot open boom Crane. He had looked for all the obvious sources and found nothing. I was aware of the location by Lake Pontchartrain and said you near the high voltage transmission lines coming across the lake. Take a welding lead and connect it to the boom and put the other end on a ground rod. The grease on the boom pins was enough of an insulator that the boom was charging up and knocking the riggers on their butts. Problem solved.
An acquaintance of my mis spent youth used to have a pneumatic -- It looked like a potato gun -- that fired a sabowed chain that would create a bolt of lightning upon striking transmission lines. He did it to a distro line in the evening once; no lightning but four blocks went dark. Crazy stuff.
20 years ago , and more , people complained about weird stuff physically with family members , from living under or next to High Power Lines , 10 years ago , people complained about weird stuff mentally , that lived in apartment complexes , and the smart meters were all on their outside wall , RIDE THE LIGHTNING ! In slow motion
On a similar note. I was a pipeline technician for BP. We had some LPG pipelines that ran across or parallel to high voltage electric transmission lines. What a hassle this created. An impressed current was introduced on our pipelines, leading to corrosion. We had to install all kinds of catholic protection equipment, and huge "ground field grids" of buried anodes. Thousands of anodes.
Was setting up sound system for a return celebration for Bravo Company after operation desert storm in Union Gap Wa. Organizers rounded up a few flatbed trailers to use as staging. Location was parallel to high voltage line above. Suspected and tested metal deck to ground and found over 425 volts present. Rounded up many sets of auto jumper cables to securely ground all decks before allowing anybody near. Would have been terrible to have casualties while we were celebrating their return after they all had survived battle.
Excellent practical demonstration - and cautionary tale. I was interested in the charge rate and wondered if I plotted the voltage vs time if it would show the expected exponential curve. (data for the curious: 2:04/0V, 2:36/180V, 3:45/328V, 4:38/423V, 5:10/478V, 5:37/515V. Stopped there because of the glove break.) It does initially but then the slope stays the same. Interesting. A friend of mine worked at SNC in Wisconsin. One of their products was a device (probably a common-mode choke) used in rural land-line telephone systems prevent phone techs from getting killed from just the thing you demonstrated. Think about the power in a phone line that runs close to and parallel to power lines for miles! Yikes!
@ethanlamoureux5306 it's not the case in my area. The pairs aren't shielded, they're twisted and don't even have a guard wire. Many of the copper pairs are within 4 meters of 33kv aerial lines.
@@dinosshed That may be true in some cases, altho I have only ever seen it on rather old, smaller cables with few pairs, such as a 6-pair drop. Bear in mind that when I say shielded, I don’t mean each individual pair is separately shielded, but rather the whole cable is normally protected by a corrugated metal shield just inside the outer jacket. This protects against physical damage as well as electrical interference. The oldest cables used lead jackets, and when they moved to polyethylene jackets, they also started using an internal shield to do the same job as the lead jacket.
@ethanlamoureux5306 I used to lead wipe the mains and repair the air leaks on them. Some of the aerial cables were shielded, but they were rarely joined with the strapping.
Worked at a pool liner factory during the 80's. We'd cut the patterns in the vinyl and and got them ready for assembly by fusion using large machines. There were no need for powerlines for the flourscent lights as the ambient energy made them shone. At my end, with a metal tape measure, when doing my thing measuring the shapes that made up the pool liner, I would often get burned by the tape measure which somehow funneled the ambient energy comeong from the machine's It's all right there;-)
And that’s why we have to bond the water of a swimming pool. I have seen voltage as high as 97 V and people that didn’t want to get it done right I told him they couldn’t use it. So be safe out there. Peace
I worked with these machines which produce high power RF (radio frequency). They induce heat in the vinyl thru molecular friction. Called ''heat sealing". The stray RF would cause all kinds of bad effects including interfereing with airplane coms. Google ''kabar'' or thermatron.
I know it from a constructor who was building a stable near a high-voltage line, then still 380kV. The stable is built from steel load-bearing beams. Every time a beam was raised they got shocks. Only after earthing and steel hoists was that problem solved. But even when tightening bolts, you felt shocks.
This works. We had HV lines running directly over the horse corral at a property we lived in a short time. I would take florescent bulbs out there and show people how they lit up just holding them up under the lines at night. But don't dare try to hook anything up, they will find that drain.
My boss/friend was riddled with cancer and died at the young age of 42 years old. The reason, people believed, was that he grew up in a house under, or almost under power lines. Also, one time, 1989, we camped out under power lines after a Grateful Dead show, in tents, outside my Cherokee . When we woke up and went to get in the truck. We were getting shocked. I guess we were the ground because the tires blocked another path. Crazy.
I heard about a guy whose fence paralleled a railway high tension railway power line for some distance. He drew power by capacitance from his fence, and used it yo power his home. Eventually he got prosecuted for "stealing electricity" he proved that he was actually reducing the railway companies' power bills by straightening out the power factor. By adding his capacitive load on a power line that was powering inductive electric motors, the watt meter gave a lower reading. The prosecution case was dismissed, but the raioway company interposed a grounded screening fence to stop the guy drawing any more power this way.
I've done some experimenting in this area too. This is capacitive coupling through the air between your wire and the power lines, so you have to use a full-wave rectifier as you are, otherwise the 'air' capacitor simply charges, and you get no power. This setup works to a lesser degree even under 14.4 kV distribution lines. You were likely pushing those diodes near their limit, because when reverse-biased, you have the capacitor voltage plus the peak source voltage in the opposite polarity across them. Of course this is divided across 2 diodes in the full wave rectifier.
Great video. I discovered back in the 90s that you could collect free inductive energy from high voltage lines. I was walking my dog on a misty day under a main run. Stopped to rest and enjoy the view when I noticed a tingling in my hand clutching the metal umbrella pole. Grabbed the plastic handle and Placed other finger close to the pole and got a 1/16" arc.
![[TH] VCT Masters Shanghai Playoffs DAY 6 // G2 vs GEN | 100T vs TH](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/M6jxF80AajI/mqdefault.jpg)
True story... More than 50 years ago, when I was just a kid, the owner of a local oil field welding and machine shop got sued in Federal Court for "stealing" electricity from the 240KV power lines which passed over his property, by way of using a homemade induction coil mounted on a pole. Which in turn was wired into his electrical system, and which had been powering his business for more more than 20 years already. The court ruled that he could not be sued for taking advantage of natural physics, and dismissed the case on day one. His business continued to thrive for another 30 years until his death. Shit you not.
God bless conservatives lol
Great story! Of course, it was the court that was clueless about the physics - or the law for that matter. The intent of the business owner was clear: steal electricity.
@@davidedickjr More like taking advantage of the environmental conditions of his property. How is it different than if the power company built a large concave mirrored glass headquarters that focuses on your property and you taking advantage of the concentrated solar energy that the building provides?
It's not technically stealing. The power is wasted anyways because the field is just being grounded out by the soil underneath.
@@magicone9327i have those lines across my property that are constantly causing me grief.
It would be nice to get some benefit from them. How do i set that up?
As an electrician, I was called out to a site where a crew was setting up a manufactured home under high voltage lines. The set up crew was getting shocked every time they touched the metal frame of the house. My volt meter showed 110 volts AC from the frame to ground. I put ground rods at each corner and wished them luck. Would hate to be living in that house...
Jesus christ i cant believe someone would put a house there.
Capacitive coupling?
Holy crap dude, how is that even legal? You would not be allowed to build a house under a HV transmission line in Europe, for obvious reasons 😅
@@fredriksjoblom5161 how else are we supposed to get rare childhood leukemias? Build neighborhoods next to radioactively contaminated areas, refineries, and chemical plants?
Because we do that too 🙃
@@fredriksjoblom5161most high voltage go under ground.. in Northern Europe. In the 70s my room was maybe 20 meters from the high voltage lines coming into my town of about 30k. And the transformers to step it down was in my garden in a big concrete building… my grandpa was a plant manager at the electric company.
Back in the 70s my friends and I discovered an odd phenomenon. If we were barefoot and touched an unpainted spot on the house gutter downspout with our finger nail we got a mild shock. But only sometimes. Then we figured it out. The guttering was galvanized steel. If it rained, any dead leaves in the gutter would produce a mild acid and turn the gutter into a battery.
Wow that's pretty incredible
Not enough to shock you. Buddy you had an electrical fault.
At school we used to get a tingle from licking an aluminium pencil sharpener with a steel blade; I think there was a bit of a thermocouple effect too
It may also be accumulating atmospheric electricity.
Funny you should mention acid inside of metal things. I cooked pork chops with apple sauce in a cast iron skillet. I had added garlic and onions and the garlic turned a bluish green color. That didn't deter me from eating it. I turned the (electric) stove off and used a digital thermometer to check the temp of the pork chops. They were done, but still piping hot, so I left them on the stove to cool off. I go back and check the temp, again and a huge spark happened, killing my thermometer. I thought maybe the stove had a short and called maintenance to look at it. They found nothing wrong with the stove. The best I can guess is I somehow created a capacitor and discharged it with the second temp check. I still ate the pork chops.
Power company: "There is no health safety issue with overhead power lines." Same power company: "Hey, you can't use power from the air. That's our power!"
Are you worried about health safety issues with the electicity in your home? You can do the same thing in your house, or more to the point your neightbor could do the same thing with your utlity hook up. Would you be ok with you neighbor "harvesting" 100kwh from you?
It's the amount of power and the distance from the wires that matters. Sure, I can do the same thing in my home, right next to the wiring in my walls. This guy is doing it at distances greater than the width of my property, and getting more power!
So no, I'm not worried about the power in my home, but yes, I am worried about high tension lines. I also don't like the fact that power companies get government support to maintain and repair them. It was their choice to put them up high instead of burying them, and it's their equipment. Let them deal with the consequences.
Put insulators on your barbed wire fence and your stealing.... get the piss shoked out of you for touching a barbed wire on a wood post on a dry day and thats YOUR PROBLEM!!! I Get it now!
@@johnmartin3517Steeling what exactly, it’s electricity that is bleeding off the power company wires that is a loss to them so shut the fuck up!
@@johnmartin3517 "Free" electric fence.
I knew a man who was in charge of maintaining lines like these. His crew informed him that a property owner had installed an array of wires on his property near the towers. They thought that he was stealing electricity. Management said that if he was smart enough to capture the electricity that they were losing, he was entitled to it.
It would be stealing if you were directly connected. Using waste energy is no different than people scavenging in a landfill.
In Australia and New Zealand it is classed as theft as the power loss to the power company is measurable and therefore chargeable
@@marilynbridges8697 Electrical Engineer here. Unfortunately it isn't waste-energy... it's electromagnetically-coupled (like a gigantic transformer the size of a locomotive), but with a huge air-gap in the middle of the transformer. Any coupling through the air takes power away from the system. No free lunch here, unfortunately... it would be cool if it was free waste-energy for the taking though! =)
It is stealing electricity no matter how you look at it. A transformer hanging on the pole outside your house is in no way mechanically connected. It has two coils and the voltage comes from a primary coil to a low voltage coil thru induction. There is no loss. You are still putting load on the line. This is my 27th year as a journeyman lineman and I have seen everything you can see.
@@t.r.4496there’s always something else to see or learn. Anyone making that claim is just a fool.
I'm a fencing contractor and I can say that I have put up several fences up under overhead power lines and sometime it will shock to piss out of you touching the fence.
That is something to think about. Easements often have gates to control access.
Morel of the Story ? Never Pee on a wire fence near a Powerline ! Check !
Fences near an ehv line should be grounded. If it’s not an electric fence you can ground through standard grounding rods. If it’s electric you need to use an electric fence filter or shock filter. There are several manufacturers that make these.
You should ground the fences to prevent being charged by close coupling.
I remember a story about 20 yeas ago. A farmer kept having bad problems with his cattle. Over a long time he finally found out the MUD had a charge running through it from the power lines.
An afterthought to my earlier post. In the late 1970's I owned a cablevision system. Our main trunk line to town from our headend on a mountain was 18 miles long. It was buried along a highway, underneath high voltage electric lines. Each of the 36 amplifiers on the trunk line operated on 60 volts AC, which was duplexed onto the cablevision line, along with the TV and FM channels. We had power supplies every mile or so, which injected 60 volts into the cablevision line, and the further you got from a power supply, the lower the voltage. At around 38 volts we'd install another power supply - and back up to 60 volts again. But amplifiers kept blowing. I mean, like burned up. Since the amps were in underground volts we were perplexed, since they were secure from grass fires. So out with the voltmeter. Surprisingly, we had between 100 and 400 volts on the line - despite putting only 60 volts into the thing to start with. We went through one hell of a lot of amplifiers before we finally figured out that we were getting inductive voltage from the overhead power line! At first we added light bulbs to each amplifier, which glowed brightly and scared traffic. And they would glow bright or dim, as the current load on the overhead wires varied from time time time. Finally, our engineer came up with a fix. A 'crowbar' which used an SCR diode that would short to ground any voltage over 63 volts. So the power line induced voltage would be bled off to ground. Those diodes would get hot like an electric stove element, to the point where we had to heat sink them to stop them from burning out - that's how much power we were getting from the power line induction.
Damn
36 amps, that's must've been a hell
though, back in the day you really only had to care about C/N, unlike today where you have US (for modems) too.
So the overhead lines were how high? And your cable was how deep? I thought lines near/over a highway were 4000V max.
@@MrSummerbreeze01 i read that as the lines were also buried in the ground.
@@twohullsThis wouldn't happen with underground power lines because they have a grounded shield. That's because people and other objects could be very close to them, and the other phases are buried together, rather than digging three trenches, and you don't want them to couple.
@@MrSummerbreeze01 Go to an ordinary neighborhood, the distribution lines are most commonly 7.2-25 kV. The lines feeding the substation are 33-66 kV.
THIS is what I come to TH-cam for. Thank you for your presentation.
Thank you for coming!
I remember back in the 70’s a farmer ran lines under power lines on his property and the power company sued him for stealing power. The FARMER WON and powers part of his place with the electricity that’s lost to the atmosphere.
I remember that.
If it’s the same guy he actually did a coil of wire.
As I recall he had been doing it for quite a while.
@@acinfla9615 The guy that had a wire coil in his attic? (I know we all are trying to remember something from 40 years ago). I think I remember he was indeed fined.
@@Tore_Lund
That’s how I remember it.
I think they tried to fine him or bill him for stealing power.
I can’t remember but he got away with it for a while.
I feel like I found the end of the internet: here it is, the true "1 secret trick they don't want you to know for free wireless electricity"! 😂
The farmer basically built an induction open air transformer-probably took him a while to fine tune it to usable voltage
Here's a neat test to try as we, myself and two fellow electricians in the mid 80's did. We grabbed 8' T-12 fluorescent lamps and wrapped the one end of them with aluminum foil. Then we held them in our hands straight up under similar 230kv transmission lines. They lit up like they were in fixture.
Back in the 90's I was doing work at a Navy VLF radio station. They offered us a tour of the radio house. When they went to show us the cables running out to the antenna array, they just grabbed a fluorescent tube lamp off of a bracket, and as soon as they held it the tube lit up. The cables were running in a large closet that went underground.
This was a Navy prank for any newbies aboard the ship, too. A saltier sailor would summon the new kids out to 'reset the phosphors' in the florescent lights, which meant dismounting the tubes from whatever lights were handy and bringing them out onto the forward deck. The prankster would demonstrate the proper way to 'reset the phosphors' by lifting the tube overhead and giving it a good shake - and a friend up on the bridge would turn on the radar.
When I was an Electrical Operator at a 500kV station we could light up the florescent bulbs without any problem under the 500kV structures.
No need to wrap them in anything....They'll light up underneath a 10KV line already....Just pick 'm up and hold above your head, in the rough direction of the lines....
Back last week, I went into my garage, replaced the fluorescent lamps in my fixture, then flipped the switch on. They lit up as if they were turned on. It was beyond amazing. Then I took the old lamps and threw them into the ocean for the dolphins to snack on.
In the early '80s, my friends house had powerlines just like that going over their house. The rain gutters and down spouts had a significant electrical charge. Us neighborhood kids loved pushing each other into them or better yet, tricking anyone that didn't know better into zapping themselves. It was strong enough to arc off any grass or weeds that touched the downspouts.
!!!
what super powers came from the ensuring dna mutations?
The eighties were fun.
As a kid our neighbor would walk under similar transmission lines holding a fluorescent light tube over his head. Sometimes it would flicker, sometimes it would really light up. Forgot all about it until I saw your video. Thanks.
*If he would have hammered a long copper ground-rod into the earth and touched one end of the light tube to the ground rod it would have stayed lit to this day! Establishing a GROUND CONNECTION is critical!!*
We used to do that as a party trick in high school. Desk lamp fluorescent tube with light right up when held above our heads while standing under the HV lines in the neighborhood.
I seen florescent parties, everyone brings a tube and they all light up, it's pretty cool
as a retired telephone linesman, I've dealt with EMF many times and to all kinds of degrees.The worst was when I was placing a temporary aerial cable under a large transmission line.I was in bucket, and blue spark started jumping between different metal parts of the bucket. I came down and grounded my truck, Still sparks jumping. I ended up finishing the job with hi voltage rubber gloves on, as I couldn't touch anything without getting zipped.
And the customers complained of hum on line
Years ago,I had a customer that was fed by type C rural wire, with the 14ga hardened steel conductors, it was hung on a transmission line on wooden poles, following an ice storm one side went open, and we had a helluva time measuring the open because it induced something like 130 volts AC, and because it crossed a highway ramp it was stupid high, so a regular bucket wouldn't reach, they ended up hanging a 6m strand and lashed a 6 pair drop to it because it was way too far between poles for self supporting drop.
In retrospect, I should have had them lash up 2-19 Gopher wire, so we could have bonded and grounded the shielding, would have really reduced the FEMF and power influence.
Rural "c" was the worst for EMF pick up. I was stripping some one day to lay down in 5502, by my belly. It jumped arch blue spark onto my belly, and thru my shirt. Burned me and a hole in my shirt. I'd have to ground the wire, and I'd have about 20 seconds before another charge would hit.
Another time on an ice storm, 4 guys were picking up some 109 for me on the pole. They picked it up, and all 4 knocked to ground with arch between wire and ground. Again for me to "tie" in the wire on the insulator, I had to ground it out and quickly tie onto insulator. We initially thought we had a primary wire laying on our wire.... but we drove the area a mile or so in each direction ..... no primary. Just EMF.
i parked my truck & small enclosed trailer under some lines at an offroad area a few years ago, got back from riding, the trailer had become mildly energized, gave me slight shock when i went to open the door.
@@russellsmith3825Meanwhile, your brain is cooking!😮😱😶🌫️
Instead of shorting a capacitor out to discharge it, use a 20K to 50K, 10 watt resistor across the cap terminals and it will slowly and safely discharge the cap in a few minutes. Remember once a cap is discharges and you remove the short, the cap may very well regain a charge over time. So leave the resistor attached to the cap when not in use.
Thats no fun!
@@cerealbucketcoaster With a Cap like that , you only fuck it up ONCE .
@@gazrgazr2394 sometimes we all need a good shock in life, to get things right. LOL
I used to work on gen powered light carts. eventually the capacitors would begin to fail, at that point the lights go out and come back on in about 12 minutes after the capacitor recharged. If you leave them set for long periods even a bad capacitor would recharge on it's own. the world is full of free-floating energy, such a mystical force. Nikola Tesla's playground.....
@@rodneyanderson1402
What a load of crap.
I know next to nothing about electronics. As a retired HVAC service technician, I was cringing while waiting for the capacitor to exploded. In my years of servicing air conditioning equipment, I replaced many run caps that had exploded. Glad yours didn’t.
I was in a radio/tv repair class in high school. We would hook small electrolytic capacitors up to a power supply and crank it up until they popped like a fire cracker.
@@youtopia2000we used to charge them up and toss them to people that didn’t know what caps were. It was a fun little prank to zap people when they caught the caps we tossed to them. 😂😂✌️
Smelled like burnt peanut butter@@youtopia2000
@@louskunt9798haha yup this was done to many an apprentice back in the day
Those 1000 volts diodes change AC to DC. It takes 4 diodes to capture all of the sine wave the fence wire pick up. You can use one diode but it will only capture half the sine wave.
On the farm I grew up on, there is a 120,000 volt transmission line.
One portion is 1/2 mile.
My dad said ... years ago, before steel fence posts were common, (the posts were wood) that 5 wire fence (between his and a neighbor's field) would have an 'induced' current in the top 2 or 3 wires.... enough to receive a "Dirty Shock".
I used to bicycle past a farm property with HV lines over it, I got shocked from contact with my own bike frame and used to see arcs between the fence wires and the ground.
That happened to me once on my bicycle too. It was in the Netherlands.
I have my metal roof grounded within 20 foot of highpower lines. The emf measures at 120 or higher in my addition, so metal siding will be used there, 0 to 8 in the current house also 0 directly under the lines. ?.
@@user-hp6sr8fe2n "EMF" is very broad and relative. It is a huge range of frequency, some of which are constant & universal, and some which might be more interactive with matter. But then also, 120 might be 300 on a different meter. It is an absolutely relative measurement.
0@@Observer_Effect I know the gophers follow the metal farm fence and the drip irrigation lines, tend to munch the roots along the line. I now have a dog and cat that will dig them up and enjoy a little extra protein, My meter is Erick Hill RT 100. Thanks, always willing to learn more. I had beets and turnips with the drip lines larger than I had ever see.
About 30 years ago was the first time I became aware of what happens in the vicinity of these towers. A very experienced horse breeder friend of mine married a man that had similar electrical lines running across a back pasture on his property. The marriage saw her move her 10-12 brood mares to his ranch where they were pastured in the same areas with the power lines. I understand that he had always used that area as hay fields, never having run livestock there for any appreciable time. Her brood stock included several older mares, each having produced strong healthy foals for many years. Within the first year some of these mares began experiencing miscarriages or still-births. Like I said, she was very experienced and kept meticulous records of every aspect of her operation. They finally narrowed the cause down to their prolonged proximity to those transmission lines. They moved the herd and never had that problem again.😐
Kind of makes you wonder what kind of effect they have on anyone underneath them for any length of time
Right , huh ?!
I grew up near a field with some massive lines cutting through the middle, and i would pass through that field all the time. Being a kid, shorter of course, eyes closer to the ground, i started noticing how many 4 leaf clovers i would find under the lines. Then the more i looked, the more leaves i found. well as a kid i didn't know how unheard of this was but seriously, i found some clovers with up to 7 leaves. I wish i pressed some in books or took pictures, because i could find these things within a minute of looking for them, they were all over. But that was back in the 80s, they've since replaced the old giant wooden poles with metal ones, who knows what else they might have changed. I still go back there to look sometimes but i don't find them anymore.
Oh and... yes they were clover. in case anyone thinks I'm full of it. The *other* 7 leaf plants grew on this neighbors property, which i didn't dare get too close to. But, If you do a search right now for 7 leaf clover you'll see pictures of them. They are supposed to be extremely rare.
I've heard the same story from a local farmer, lots of problems from the cattle herd with transmission lines going through thier pasture, they also fed hay directly under the lines because that's where the gate was located. All other herds were fine, same genetics etc.
I have seen the same 4, 5, 6 and 7 leaf clovers when i was a child, I think the reason here was actually the Chernobyl powerplant dust that fell all over eastern Europe. I am Bulgarian by the way. I barely find 4 leaf clovers now. @@derealized797
I work for an electrical utility. I was recently installing new equipment under the overhead lines while working on an insulated fiberglass ladder. I had one lead from my volt-meter to ground while holding the other lead and the induced electricity into me would go up about 125 volts per step on the ladder. It was interesting to see the constant bug zapper action arcing when I held the lead about 1/8th inch from the grounded building next to me.
Just try not to be the bug.
I work in substations and when i was a maintenance electrician I would climb the A frame towers. On a 220Kv line the induce was so great that i was able to write my name into the A frame with my finger, well for a little bit. I found holding a screwdriver hurry less.😆 Have a good one, stay safe!
Yes. As long as you are holding the conductor (Screwdriver) you won't feel it. Let your finger touch it and ouch. I was removing the sealant from a pass through to install wiring into the building and I thought that I was disturbing a wasp in there at first when I heard the buzzing noise. @@mmi6280
lern to climd up n down the ladder fast and you could play a tune,,,,
Another kind of 'step voltage'
I don't know why this popped up in my recommendations but I'm glad it did.........was really surprised by the amount of juice you were able to store.
Very interesting experiment!
During the time the cap was charging from 186V to 331V, the average current was 0.19 milliamps. [ i=C x delta(v)/delta(t) ]
This raw current at the open end of the wire will not kill you but the capacitor itself can deliver enough current to be dangerous.
I would wear gloves around this circuit.
A comment below mentions how HV lines affected horses.
I've heard of other cases when HV affected cows and horses. Their feet are always touching the ground and an AC current flows through their body.
not related to power lines, but the NEC has rules for grounding structures for dairy farming. Apparently the smallest of currents traveling through the cows feet will sour the milk, making it undeniable.
@@G8tr1522 Or maybe it's because the fences and guardrails are all metal and in some places you have electrical equipment in contact with it. A colleague of mine managed to kill 10 cows in the milking parlour because he forgot to ground the milk pump and when on the third day of testing the farmer managed to flood it a current of about 40ma was flowing from the pump's chassis through the stainless steel pipes to the metal guiderails for positioning of the cows for milking. The structure was also not grounded and the cows were grounding it out trough the wet concrete floor. Turns out cows are very sensitive to 50Hz currents because all 10 in the parlour dropped dead from that.
@@G8tr1522old wives tail, dairy farms have the same NEC code as any other farm building for grounding.
Have you noticed how guardrails always screw up someone's body current and tend to get hit alot? Gophers follow my fence lines and drip irrigation to the free food buffet.@@TheOriginalEviltech
I build what I want when I want in the unregulated small town.@@spreerider12
Inductive resonance is a real thing and can be tapped. I found this out building solar powered electric fencing in Oklahoma. Those powerlines play hell with the control boards in fencing and we found out that we didn't need to power them up if the fence ran under those lines. Free electric fence power.....enough to deter horses and cows from going though. For fun walk underneath a high tension line with a fluorescent tube and hold it over your head in the dark. Free lighting !
No its not a real thing. Resonance is a real thing. Inductors, inductance is a real thing. "Inducivr resonance" is bullshit.
@@dinodubroja7433 what's an LC circuit then
@@dinodubroja7433 Well, you need both induction and capacitance to produce a resonant circuit. I can sort of see where he's coming from.
@@heeeyno its a circuit
@@heeeyno cicruit which can resonate. There is no thing as "inductive resonance", nor "capacitive resonance" nor "resistive resonamce". There is capacitance, there is iductance there is resonance. Separate terms. If you say "inductive resonance" I will not be taking your story seriously. You cant just make up terms. They are already made up. So everything else is INCORRECT.
When I was a land surveyor, if we would park our work truck under power lines like these, our truck would shock you... We had an aluminum camper top gimmick on the trucks, if you landed on it, both your elbows would have burn lines on them... I know all about that stray current...! Thanks for sharing... Keep up your awesomeness...
Thanks for your comment!
No problem... Don't ever stop being yourself...! Also, try to compliment someone daily... it just may change their day for the better... Take care...
@@kurtisstutzman7056great idea!
had the same thing happen but only happened with dew on ground
Weird coincidence but I worked for a seismic survey crew and did the same thing. I just crawled out of a swamp, soaking wet and went to place my pin flags into the back of the pickup truck. As soon as the underside of my arm touched the truck I got a very noticeable zap. The rest of the crew laughed when I squealed and didn't believe me but nobody would touch the truck. Also, this was back in the day when we had to use the time cube and do sun shots. They have GPS now, spoiled babies.
I worked for a local municipality as an operator of a TV inspection truck. This truck was used to inspect the interior of pipe using a CCTV camera. The spool of cable it used to connect the camera to the rig was over 500FT long, and coiled-up on a 4ft diameter spool. One job assignment had us inspecting a storm drain under a 240KV transmission line... It knocked two of us down stepping back onto the truck after hooking up the camera to that cable. EMS was called, and it finally dawned on me WHY we got shocked. I got 480VAC between the rebar of the catch basin and the frame of the truck. SHOCKING, huh?!
You can get significant induction voltages from much less than 230kv if you are close enough! I first figured that about 20 years ago while waiting for a train. It was a rainy day, so I had my umbrella up. I was stood on the platform and kept feeling this zapping sensation in my right hand and a faint buzzing noise. I looked up and there were little sparks around the spokes of my umbrella and as I adjusted my grip so as to only hold the plastic handle there was visible arcing about 4-5mm onto my hand. 😵
I was amazed! This was coming from the 25kv traction supply lines about 8ft above my head.
Back in the 80's we ran a permanent electric fence around a large farm I was working for. Part of that fence ran under some large power lines coming from a power plant and once that fence was insulated it was hot without being connected to a charger. This fence was 5ft tall with 6 lines and fiberglass posts and the lines alternated between hot and ground, They were all hot under the large power lines.
Sounds like you were wasting free electricity. You should have set up a large scale version of what was shown in this video, and powered your electric fence for $0.00.
so how about legalities there then. if the power company claims that drawing on that magnetic field is stealing their power then it must work the other way round: if they, so to speak, 'push' their power into your fence with all concomitant possible dangers and inconveniences then they should be liable for that. right? quid pro quo.
@@abrogard142 That's assuming the power company would notice, let along care, that he was capturing power leaking from the lines. Right now this phenomenon isn't large enough for there to be a standardized ruling one way or the other.
It very well may be that even if the power company does accuse him of stealing power, he could take this case to trial *and win* thus negating that possibility altogether.
Friend of ours back in the 70's built a new tie stall dairy barn for his registered Holstein herd. High tension lines on steel towers ran about 400 ft behind his barn. When he got the florescent lights hooked up and they turned them off they didn't turn off! Over the years they installed florescent lights in several other buildings with the same results. As far as I know they still work today.
Was it 3 runs of 4 wires each? 760KV
@@somethinburnin I believe so but honestly cannot tell you, didn't pay that close of attention plus I haven't been past there in over 10 years, They're about an hour drive from here
@@dvdosterloh was it in Northern NY? Because we got the 760KV that did things just like that
I had so much fun reading these comments. Great content, great video, great subscribers!
Yes, very interesting experiences and stories these comments, and well worth the read! Thanks.
the comments for me are the best part often i don't even watch the video lol
A great example of an air core transformer. You will get more induction by reducing the separation between primary and secondary, and increasing the length in parallel. Changing the angle between primary and secondary reduces the (effective) parallel length, which reduces the induction.
Looks like capacitive coupling since he's just connecting to one end of the wire. If he went to one side (to couple better to a single phase) and had a larger 'plate' i.e. more wire, he'd probably get more out of it.
You may get better results not using a coax cable being that the core you are hooking up to is shielded. ground the woven metal shielding to the copper on one end. that will utilize the mesh in the induction process.
And coil the secondary for increased inductance. I was watching this and wondering what the result would be if you stretched out a toy slinky and performed the same test.
I suspect a sheet of aluminium foil, or a vehicle, or any other large, flat conductive object would work very well as a capacitor plate. Put it high up, and I'm guessing directly under one of the outer phases will be optimal but experimentation will tell.
I'm going to say you are correct, sir... on all counts.
peace. @@Rich-on6fe
I have PhD in electrical engineering. You are cracking me up (in a good way). Greetings from tropical Manila :-)
Glad you enjoyed it!
There's a historic railroad SMRS IN Michigan USA that one of the volunteers was an elect engineer. He became perplexed about an 1890 railroad bridge not rusting hardly any. Checking metal composition possibilities and anything he could think of couldn't figure why. One day I told him why I thought it was natural magnetism since the rails went mostly north/south and not having rail traffic much of the year it induced a small anti corrosive charge.
He said didn't think of that and would explain whole thing.
Retired land surveyor. Whenever we surveyed under hi tension lines and set up the transit you could feel that it was energized because it would 'bite' when you touched it and if you grabbed hold of it it would 'buzz' in your hands.
As a retired building inspector, I have seen why all buildings must stay back from high-tension, high-power lines.
Among many reasons, electricity can arc through Smoke, especially high-particulate smoke such as that from a wood stove (or solid-fuel burning appliance). Electricity can travel a long distance through smoke. But of course there are Electromagnetic reasons to stay back as well. This video illustrates an example of that electromagnetic energy.
Arc discharge in volcanic plumes is an example at scale. Dusty plasma in "Space" aligns in filaments that stretch light years. Though effectively a vacuum in material terms fluctuating field effects permeate and inform an electric Universe - not just at atomic scale.
I was wondering recently if ferrous ions might be offgassed by my wood stove. I have noted migrating rust-colouring to some rocks on the top.
I hadn't thought of smoke to local power lines - but I've never felt anything sparky from touching the stove.
Other particulates may also operate your observation - such as dust or pollen.
Lots of nano-particulates now sprayed to save the planet. I don't know if they descend without molecular bonding (ie water vapour) atmospheric capacitance isn't just a voltage gradient but a leaky dielectric we call weather (or even climate).
In a physics class I took a few years back one of the exercises was calculating the windings needed to power a house from the EMF coming off a high power line. Then the final question in the exercise was : "is it ethical?" Well I'd love to give it a try and see how long it took for them to find me out! :D - EDIT - FYI - The power companies monitor the lines for leakage. Building a system large enough to power anything substantial would show up on their test and found out. It would be considered stealing. I hope this puts an end to this conversation.....
I’d say it’s ethical. ✅
@@rogerhargreaves2272 Well it depends on how ethical you think stealing power is. You're setting up an inductor under the power lines that's not free energy, anymore than bypassing your electricity metre is. If you find a water tank, that isn't yours, but the water is slowly evaporating off, is lighting a fire under the tank and then condensing the steam not stealing the water?
It's not "lost" energy that's being recovered, the the transmission losses are LOST, much like how the naturally evaporating water is lost. Putting an inductor under the power lines is equivalent to lighting a fire and boiling more water off. It's just hiding theft in a way where it appears to just be extra natural losses (until someone finds out at least).
Think about an electric tooth brush or at least its charging unit. When the tooth brush isn't on the charging unit, the unit still has AC running through it but it's just resonating back and forth, very little is coupled to the magnetic field it's generating, so that magnetic field is just wobbling back and forth, constantly taking energy but also putting it back into the mains (actually an idling toothbrush unit is way worse for loses than the above, because the above will have capacitors tuned to put the energy back in at the right phase at the substations). The dominant losses in the toothbrush situation are due to a small amount of resistance in the coil that the AC is running through. When you put the brush on the unit though, all of a sudden that magnetic field is driving a coil in the brush, inducing a current in the brush to charge the battery in the brush. The unit isn't making free energy, it's just now being transferred from the mains driven charging unit to the brushes battery.
So make no mistake, it is NOT free energy. Every Joule taken is an extra Joule the electricity provider has to generate in addition to the natural losses they have with transmission system. So the real question is stealing a few milliWatts ok?
Personally, if it wasn't silly amounts of power (i.e. powering your home, though that'd be a lot cheaper and safer to just rig the electricity metre) I probably wouldn't tell anyone.
Lawsuit many years ago cleared a land owner that set up an air vote transformer to pull power from a HV line. I believe it was in California.
My last final exam question was in environmental engineering. I had to determine how long a fish could live when certain chemicals were introduced into its bowl. I answered the fish died from jumping out of the bowl when the chemicals were released. He dropped me from a B to C on final grade!
I'd say that it's free electricity because it's in the air. Would never notice you collecting electricity, because there'd be no loss on their end. Maybe if they were doing maintenance and stumbled onto it, but it's still not illegal. Think of it like using an air compressor. You can't be charged for the air that is all around, although I'm sure that the J P Morgan's of the world would love figure out away to make money from free air use.
AC Induction is very common on a long parallel run of metallic cables. I work in the telecommunication industry for over 20yrs and we have to mitigate these induced voltages.
Normally we use AC Chokes to flip the phase 180°. This counters the induced voltages. However, there is a saturation point where the the the AC Choke can be over run and the effects become null.
Generally, these voltages does not produce high currents, but still can give you a healthy jolt.
If you ever heard a 60Hz hum on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line, then you know why now.
I worked for Hydro-Quebec. They used to remove the direct connection to ground of the "ground wire" and do it through lightning arresters. They would pickup the voltage from that line to power a remote substations.
Did something similar .... used copper blanket mounted on a wall ..... worked really well for 3yrs. Powered 3 x 12v devices (sleep alarm, lava lamp, dancing flower). Give it a try ... lots of fun. Better than replacing potatoes every week.
I've been a cable guy for 17 years and felt a tingle from the shielding wire many times. Inductance is cool! 😊
till it isnt
Would running the fence in a spiral increase the power gathered?
Good luck explaining the spiral fence to the power company though. lol
Splicing .875 with 90v on it hurts, doesnt it?
@@davidca96 I've never worked on hardline. Just RG6 & 11. It's only been a few times where I brush up my arm against a drop while it's disconnected from the splitter. But I've only been on the cable side for a few years. Did telco for 17 before that, which only has -48 DC idle, but ringing is 90 AC which definitely gives a good zap!
@@grabasandwich Ahh ok, I am a network maintainence tech myself, been in the business for 23 years. It sure does wake you up especially if your gloves are wet haha.
Very interesting-I’ve heard stories about the impact on livestock grazing under those lines- your work clarifies the significance-thanks
Thanks for sharing!
What does it do to the livestock?
About 45 years ago, a friend of mine bought a small parcel of land from his family farm, and built a house on it. There was a set of high-tension electrical transmission line along one border of his land where was was a disused stretch of barbed-wire fencing. You could definitely get a pretty good jolt off of that fence.
I was hunting near some big power lines here in Ontario. I was riding my ATV directly under the power lines. I was getting small sharp shocks on a constant basis through my brake levers. I was thinking the power lines had broken and fallen somewhere down the line. Apparently this happens all the time. Very cool.
Same thing happened to me on my dirtbike when I stopped to clear my goggles because it started to rain. I thought the rain was becoming conductive. Scared the living shivves outs of me and I throttled away at full speed!
Wow! What an interesting experiment, and the comments below are just as interesting. Anyone can see clearly what is going on here, which we should all be aware of. Many times, I have walked areas where these run through because the easement makes it easy to walk through, like national parks and other areas, it is kept mowed down and, on a hill, it is easy to see long distances. So, that amount of energy is below and in surrounding area all the time! It does affect living things..... and could cause some issues I would think! Thank you for this video, it is very amazing! I am going to share and put it in my community spot so others can see too (if anyone looks). Thank you so much and You stay safe!
careful, alot of times locals like to setup makeshift firing ranges on these straightaways
I've heard about this phenomenon back in the 90s. But they referred to it as "stray voltage" and tell you stories about cattle getting electrocuted, and homes that were next to lines would have all kinds of problems, as well as the occupants coming down with weird illnesses and cancers.
I believe there was a huge lawsuit in Iowa maybe fifty years ago over this issue. The farmers were trying to prevent being forced to have these power lines cross their land, sometimes very close to a house or barn.
Non-ionizing EMF can't cause weird illnesses or cancer. There is no physical mechanism to do that.
Years ago I read about links between high power lines and what medical researches called 'cancer clusters' which were the people, mainly children, who lived in low cost housing built near to the lines having significantly higher levels of several types of cancer. The power companies were not found liable however those people in the lawsuit were offered alternate housing away from the power lines out of the kindness of the companies heart.
@@bendover1028There is exactly zero peer reviewed research that shows anything of the sort. None. Nothing. There is no physical way that non-ionizing radiation can possibly cause such damage.
I am 79 years old and 50 years ago I had a girlfriend also now in her eighties who contracted the dreaded MS disease. She lived very close to powerlines and some scientists wondered if powerlines were the cause of this and other illnesses. Your experiment just shows what is radiated from these lines and possibly affects millions of others. This lady, badly crippled has lived in a nursing home since 1990 bless her. I think that there is a massive cover up of the hidden damage done by radiation such as this and I am glad that you have highlighted it. Well done. B
if power lines cause disease, why don't microwave ovens? Short answer: non-ionizing radiation is not the same as ionizing radiation (WHAT A SHOCKER!!)
also, power lines don't cause disease. Stop with this nonsense.
Well, it shows energy is radiated, but not that it causes problems. Remember it's taking miles of metal fence to pick up this energy. And if the fence was connected to ground, it wouldn't be detectable.
As a pipeliner I’ve worked on many projects laying pipe , like 36” or 42” , along power line R.O.W. We have to ground every piece of pipe brought in just while laying there under those lines. Heck yeah they build charge !! Seriously no joke.
As a kid in Wisconsin in the 70s I knew a dairy farmer who sued and won a case against the power company. The emf was making the cows go dry.
🔌🔌In 1977 I worked in a utility transmission department as a COOP Electrical Engineer in southwestern Michigan that had 765kV power lines from the nuclear plant. An individual claimed that a fence caused a spark in his tractor. Sure enough, we found out that this could happen and caused a change in easements setbacks. We also tested 69 and 230kV. 765kV was much more likely to spark. Also, the blowing sandunes caused the land-to-plow line clareances to change drastically.🔌🔌
@@FreiherrDinkelacker It was the Cook Nuclear plant which was owned by AEP and operated by Indian and Michigan Electric. I wish more nuclear plants were built.
@@Carl_in_AZ2 new Google energy plant complexes of some kind being built in a city near me as we speak...I'm pretty sure they arent the only ones being built. Never seen anything like them before and security is very tight. And not a peep about them.
@@reidhansen7030 Before I retired I worked on providing backup emergency engineering design for many Google Data centers throughout the world. What city and state? All their data center locations have a high level of security. The next nuclear plant under design is Bill Gates's TerraPower in Wyoming. It will not be used to power any Microsoft facilities. Azure(Microsoft) data center has talked about a small nuclear reactor(SMR) plant but it will most likely not be in North America and will be many years away.
Isnt that due to sand being a conduct for electricity ? That the dunes were a conductive area..
I remember us having to dig an underground ground grid. and place ground rods down all over and ground cables all tied together to keep the induction down.
That was an excellent practical demonstration of the Right Hand Rule !!
A length of insulated hookup wire would be cheaper than coax. I would expect a larger power draw if you moved your pickup wire further away from the lines (up to a point) because the wires are carrying 3-phase and the fields cancel to some degree the closer you move to the centre - they won't cancel completely because the wires are physically separated but field cancellation is what the power company would like to happen. The idea is to couple more closely to just one of the wires to reduce the field cancellation effect (make one field stronger than the other two which in effect moves you closer to a single phase pickup).
If you want a decent current, a large loop with one side as close to one of the outer lines as possible and the opposite side of the loop well away would help. This gives a single turn transformer secondary with one of four sides coupled as strongly as possible with two sides not coupled at all and the fourth ideally low-to-no coupling.
Thank you sir for your efforts, in both braving the cold and the testing. I am in Wisconsin and it's -9 this morning so I know what your dealing with in that regard. As to your test and charging your capacitor I am not surprised of the amount of passive power you captured. Depending on the transmission flow rate in the wires, the equation for radiated power would show that a capacitor several times your 1200 volt rating could be charged (given the bridge rectifier having diodes of sufficient rating to handle the load. Excellent job and very informative enjoy you very much.
Thanks for commenting. One more night of -18˚F, then we are expected to be above zero. 👍🏻
You could put a step down transformer on the end of your coax wire, that would decrease the voltage to your bridge rectifier, but it will increase your amperage to a usable amount, that you could run a burried insulated cable, to your house, to keep a battery bank charged to help you reduce your electric bill. 😁👍
It would be awesome if _somebody_ made an animation depicting the setup that you're describing....🙏 😁
also known as electricity theft
@@johnbeer4963 but there not fiscally connections? if anything anything cleaning waist RF energy and responsibly disposing of it in responsible way? catching repurposing it? all for free?
@@dh2032 I wish it were exactly how You say but there was a guy in my country a few years ago stuck a bunch of fluorescent tubes in his field under a power line and there was quite a fuss about it. He definitely got charged for a load of electricity, i'm not sure if there was a criminal court case about it but i seem to remember there being one
@@johnbeer4963 That's interesting. How did they meter the 'stolen' electricity? Do you know what their 'proof' was? Also, would there be a loss to the company and can we sue the company for using our ancestors bodies to run their turbines? 😋
Back in the mid 70’s I was a Crane operator in Phoenix AZ. We were on a job North of Flagstaff in a small town called Grey Mountain. Arizona Public Service a power company was installing a large electrical transformer. In this business everything on the job including the crane is required to be grounded. As I was sitting in the cab of the crane the linemen were in the process of grounding the crane. We were located in an area similar to the power lines in the video….i looked down and to my surprise I noticed them laughing as by removing the ground wire that had been attached to my outrigger I could see them using a electrical arc to etch their initial’s in the paint of the crane.
Great video! You might try coiling wire into plastic barrels to see what effect you get. About 25 years ago there was a fella here in Phx who was gathering enough of the power leaking out of the HV lines that ran across the back of his yard that he was running his house on it for free. When the power co. found out what he was doing they were big mad, but the cops & court said he was breaking no laws so they had to leave him alone!
Thank you for your powerful creating and understanding 🙏🙏🙏
The same thing holds true for shunt fed and broadcast towers. I used to manage a tower facility in the Northeast that was adjacent to a school and had a chain link fence around it. Every time I would bring my key up to the lock it would draw an arc because the fence was electrically hot due to the RF field and the highly reactive antenna.
If its your land, and they aint paying rent, then Id say it was ethical. (They control and restrict your use of the land under the lines) Just my opinion.
BC Engineering stories. Old AM stations with rotted radials, everything is hot.
@@harrypitts7389 failing radials can be fatal for transmitter sites. 25 years ago, I was CE for a AM directional along the coast. 16 acre plot with two towers. Owner was more interested in leasing space to cellulars, than in maintaining the field free of growth. I warned the owner multiple times about the roots severing ground radials but he continued to ignore.
Years later, one morning, I get a call. Station went off the air during pattern switch.
I drive the 3 hours to get there and notice smoked coming from the building's vents. I open door cautiously and step aside. Smoke pours out of door. Waited ten minutes then rushed in and turned the thermostat for the ventilation fan down so it would turn on. Ran outside and waited another ten minutes. Once the smoke was cleared, I went inside and observed the damage. The Harris SX5 has totally melted down. The contactor that did the switching was in the top of the SX5. It's insulators were made of some sort of fiberglass/waxy paraffin material, and when the contactor drew an arc, the arc sustained and caused the waxy materials to ignite, dripping down flaming debris into the lower part of the transmitter. It was a total write-off. I didn't want to tell the owner "told ya so!", but I think he knew.
LOL you should put a disclaimer on this. Kids all over the country now are going to be doing this! Thanks for sharing. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya
Nah, they are too busy looking at Tik Tok on their phones
seriously you believe disclaimer would stop them from repeating his experiment?
@@ataria5609 LOL Nope, but at least he'd be covered. 😂
I'm so glad I found this channel
Hey, glad you found it!
An electrical engineer told my about this trick already 30 years ago. Evidently it works even better near a radio station.
I used to install central vacuums.
I was finishing an install at one particular house After all the connections were made, pipe and low volt electrical, I plugged in the main power cord. The motor came on as soon as I plugged it in. I thought I had miswired something. I went back thru all of my low voltage connections as it just sends 12-24v out to each outlet and if it comes back, it trips a relay for the motor. I couldn’t find any shorts in the lines. So I put a meter on the wires to check for continuity between them and had none. But why was the motor turning on with the low volt lines connected and not on with them disconnected?
The only thing I could think at the time was a bad circuit board or maybe the radio station across the street had something to do with it.
I went to the local RadioShack and picked up a power supply and a relay and got them temporarily going with the understanding that I would be back again once I figured out what was happening.
After contacting the manufacturer of the system, they sent me a new circuit board and that fixed the issue. It turns out that they had ran into this before and it was indeed the radio station causing the issues. The low voltage wiring was acting as an antenna and picking up stray voltage that was triggering the onboard relay.
90,000 watts of power...
You should put a 50K resistor and amp meter across the positive and negative leads to see how much the voltage might drop to. To measure the resulting current and see the usable DC voltage available. Maybe see if it could power some LED Christmas lights. :)
You could for sure get some use out of it.
You can calculate from how fast the capacitor is charging
Or you could directly measure the current flow. It can't be very much as the small diodes did not burn out. @@viagra5207
Thank you for creating this video. I've felt tingling when up around high voltage transmission lines. I didn't think it would be healthy to spend a lot of time around them, but I didn't come up with a method that would allow them to be shock dangerous unless touching them some how or coming close enough for them to arc. This experiment shows that it is conceivable that it is a possibility some type of configuration might emerge that could store energy and create a deadly charge. It would likely be some weird like some piece of equipment with a hidden high voltage compactor that somehow gets a conducting induction loop by chance created to it under a high voltage transmission line. It is in a trillions of a chance, but some association of junk under transmission line could have that happen.
I'm surprised there is not more videos in the popular science/mechanics venue that bring up how much energy high voltage A.C. transmission lines loose through stray induction to their surroundings. Another characteristic would how much they loose by radio wave radiation. Typically I'd assume radio wave transmission loss of energy is close to zero, but not zero compared to the energy in the line.
It was when we could have gotten so far until the bowl fell breaking into many pieces
so after that we decided to be more careful.
*/OR/*
We were almost finished when the bowl fell
and broke .We decided to be much more careful moving forward.
see what I did there?
your welcome.
You may wanna take some of the advice I've read in your comments.. the static can be harnessed , but take precautions..i.e. lighting strikes power surges.. lighting arrestor are available.., store in battery.. even if u step it down just to power well pump. Your ahead of the game.
What a fantastic response you have had to this video. well done I am so pleased for you. Everyone will be syphoning free electricity from the power lines now lol.
The popularity of this video was unexpected...🤷🏻♂️ The comment section sure is filling up with interesting stories!
You tested e-field pickup. You might get more power from residual magnetic pickup, and the voltage would be safer - you can run a 'fence' wire along the ground under one of the outer lines, and a return line a few meters away from the power line. This should be a much lower voltage around your loop and might be a useful amount of current. You might also find it is mostly 180Hz (third harmonic) due to most of the 3-line 60Hz cancelling itself out!
You are correct but I just perused all comments and yours is the only one to state that.
Yeah - is it the dielectric field that would be captured ? I would not think there would be huge current and huge magnetism being transmitted but the electric field would be enormous - and what of the 'theft' issue ? does pulling field off deprive the field ? or is the field just wasted emissions ? my guess is "B" so no theft
Cool. I was thinking on the same lines as you. No pun intended. Can you imagine the size of the magnetic field and it's density around that heavy conduit carrying how much voltage??? Yeah. I'd be abliged to " experiment in ignorance " what I could do with that magnetic field. 😊 I use aether sticks in my garden pots. Thy utilize the free magnetic energy around us. Magnitizing the soil that plants really enjoy. It also helps detour subterranean insects that thrive on the roots of your food, and many common ones that feed on the leaves and stalks. They don't like the the frequency. 😊 But the plant sure does.😮
It’s really wild how much inductance is happening under those power lines I was on a transmission line building crew and it would charge the line we were building beside it to 29,000 volts and when we put the grounds on it would make at least a 6’ arc. We also had fun with the static from it. We would make little wire pistols and shock each other on the neck or behind the ear haha
A guy I went to school with built his house right under those power lines, the large ones with the steel triangle support tower. We studied electrical engineering, I thought he was nuts for doing that. Grand kid was born with all sorts of issues and didn't survive more than a few months. AC power is nothing too be fooled with or taken lightly, some engineers don't even realize that.
@@jedclampett3725 Spoke to people in a housing tract built underneath massive high voltage transmission lines, whilst canvasing for a sales job out in the backwoods of TX. The residents of that little housing tract had lost multiple members of various families to cancer and other ailments that could not be explained. A study had been done to find out why everyone was dying there, and the only common denominator was those high voltage lines. They were all convinced they were the culprit.
> . . . when we put the grounds on it would make at least a 6’ arc. <
The dielectric strength of air is about 1,000 volts per millimeter, or 1,000,000 volts per meter. 6' is 1.5 meters so are you saying that you developed 1.5million volt arc?, and lived to tell about it?
An arc of six inches in dry air corresponds to 150,000 volts, which is also courting death if there is any current at all behind it.
@@peteinwisconsin2496 Yet Tesla and Mark Twain played with that electricity in Tesla's lab all the time. I guess when you know what your doing, you can get away with doing dangerous stuff. Re: Dangers of AC power. Read "The body electric" by Robert O Becker the last chapter is how he tried to convince utilities to not use that frequency because of the harm it can cause. Tesla tried to warn them as well. They weren't having it. I guess it was intended to cause damage and feed the healthcare industries profits.
Back in the late '60s and early '70s, I tried to convince my Grandpa and Dad to let me put up a few loose coils of wire at the edge of the treeline and run them to a few lights along the horse path along one section of fence. This was back about 50 feet or so from the easement where the high tension towers ran. My Grandpa complained occasionally about being caught in the dark on that end of the farm and I figured putting up a light every 100 yards or so would provide enough to orient back to the house if caught out after dark. They were convinced the power company would come after them, but I couldn't convince them it was all loss for the power company anyway. The minor amount we'd get for a dozen light bulbs wouldn't even show, since it was loss anyway. It wasn't like I was going up a tower and hanging a coil up there. I always meant to run out with a coil of wire, a light, and a meter and see how much we could get, just to know, but never did.
Thanks for the comment!
Could animals get hurt from this? Could it start a fire?
I remember going up on the hills near where I stayed a few years back with a fluorescent tube. When I stood under the 400kV lines holding the tube vertically in my hand the tube lit up from the top of the tube down to wherever I held it. It wasn't super bright but that was due to the field created under the lines being capable of producing only a low charge flow through the insulating air and if instead I had erected a small wire array say 2m in the air and had electrically connected one end of the tube to it and hung it vertically down and earthed the bottom end of the tube to the ground it would be very bright and the brightness could be varied by raising and lowering the top wire array. You could have done that easily enough.
Enter LEDs:)
Kreosan did this but they also used a transformer (it might have been a car ignition coil or perhaps a TV fly-back transformer). They had a rectifier of course, but also some kind of voltage regulator. With this setup they could harvest enough energy to charge a cell phone with the antenna just being a one meter whip and the ground the frame of one of their bikes. The lines they were under though were the big ones, maybe 500KV.
I was an RF tech, we tested potential cell sites, and would use a bucket truck to hoist the antenna to the proposed height. To look both for potential coverage and obstacles, I would go up in the bucket and take pics on the 8 cardinal points to get a 360 view. One time we were proposing mounting to HV transmission lines, the SDG&E guy opened the gate and drove away, so we went about setting up. I was about 8 ft from the lines, in a metal framed bucket. My compass went nuts (actually reversed polarity) and as I reached for the controls I got BIT, not deadly, but I crossed my arms and had the driver lower me from the ground controls. Later talked to the SDG&E guy, who had no idea we were setting up, that close to the lines and said that would NEVER work, as it's inside the 'field' and it would fry the antennas! that compass still points south!
They had you in a bucket 8 feet away! WTF?
You can walk under them with a long florescent tube and it will light up . We used to tape a small one on our radio antennas key the microphone and they lit up from the RF. Same if you pulled into a gas station with tubes under the canopy touch them with a 1/4 wave 10 meter whip and you could light them up all the ways around the station .
A ten yard whip? How are you running an antenna that long? Longest I've seen on a vehicle was about 3 yards.
We did this as teens and it looked like a light saber from starwars
@@TehButterflyEffect
He means an antenna used for the 10 meter amateur radio band. Approx 8’ long antenna.
@@TehButterflyEffect A 10 METER whip . thats part of the radio spectrum 27 to 28 hz part of that is the CB channels 102 inches is a 1/4 wave antenna .
@@jhonsiders6077: That's eleven meters.
I used to work for Hydro-Québec which is the power company in the province of Québec, Canada. We have very high voltage lines (735 kv) coming from James Bay going to Montréal area about 1200 kilometres. We also have microwaves repeaters every 30-50 kilometres along the lines. To power those stations they insulated the wire over the lines for 10-20 kilometres on each sides of the stations and use the electricity for the buildings and all the equipment inside. If I recall the lights inside where very unstable depending on the temperature, humidity. I am not sure they are still used because the installed fiber optic cable on the wire so the communication is way faster.
Really cool experiment. Thanks.
Glad you liked it!
Caution, you can accumulate enough induced voltage in your “fence” wire alone to stop your heart (1 - 4 amps). I’ve lost a co-worker to very similar conditions. Don’t experiment and loose your life.
It only takes about 20 - 40 milliamps to cause fibrillation. The higher amperage is actually better, since it will stop the heart - meaning it is easier to restart.
I knew a guy that pretty much powered his big barn and shop with big sono tubes wrapped in Romex, that he buried under the big power-lines that ran across a field behind the barn, his house was powered by panels. He was totally off the grid.
My parents spoke of a city park in their home town in Germany where there was a park that had all the lights powered by overhead high tension lines. No wires to the lights, just a collector on top of the pole.
Nice experiment¡. With 1KV reverse breakdown diodes you probably wont get much past that voltage on the charging DC capacitor. That's because the line voltages are alternating above and below ground potential (I agree with other comment in that there should be a mix of harmonics depending on the distance between the pick-up wire, witch doesn't need to be coax btw, and the HV lines in relation to the distance between the different HV conductors themselves). Anyway, because your DC capacitor terminals are ungrounded, usually the positive terminal will sit above ground potential and negative terminal will sit below ground potential. When the incoming or pick up wire picks a voltage of say 500V below ground, the diode of the rectifier that is connected between the positive terminal of the capacitor and the incoming pick up wire would get a reverse voltage of 1KV if the capacitor is charged to 1000V (Would help to see a diagram of connections and potentials referenced to ground). Conversely when pick up wire gets 500V above ground, the diode that is connected between the negative terminal of the capacitor and the pick up wire would get a reverse voltage of 1KV when the capacitor is charged to 1000V. Because of the relatively low current, the diodes would conduct in reverse without getting destroyed. The way to get higher voltages on the capacitor would be to connect the pickup wire to one terminal of the capacitor and the other terminal through a series of diodes to ground. That way you could reach n*1000 V on the DC capacitor, assuming that the cap has enough voltage rating and you use a series of n diodes rated at 1KV of reverse voltage. Of course you would get a half wave rectifier, so half the incoming current
I worked at a company called Genscape in Louisville Ky years ago. They sell reports about commodities to brokers and one of those reports was on what electricity was going where and who was selling electricity to whom based off of boxes they paid land owners to place next to high voltage power lines that measure how much electricity was going through the line based off the magnetic fields.
That's interesting, not the boxes, but the fact they totally bypass the power company and make their own measurements. Because the power company would already know this stuff but they don't want to ask them.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 It not a matter of willing to ask its a matter of the power company willing to release or quickly release. These commodity brokers trade on that info daily sometimes hourly. An example would be if Con-Edison has a problem with a plant and has to buy power from Duke Energy. The brokers would invest in Duke Energy supplies. It is big money. They use FLIR cameras on oil tanks like those at Cushing to provide oil stockpiles info to brokers. They use satellite phots to predict soy and corn yield for Ethanol production. Huge money in those reports.
Good video on describing lines of flux called the left hand rule. The lines off flux coming off the high voltage lines is pretty significant. Higher the voltage, the larger the lines of flux. The RF cable you are capturing the voltage is pretty cool but use caution when doing this.
'Left hand rule' lmfao
Fleming’s Left-Hand Rule and Fleming’s Right-Hand Rule are essential rules applicable in magnetism and electromagnetism.
@@xxportalxx.
The higher the CURRENT, the higher the magnetic flux.
The distribution network uses high voltage lines specifically to reduce the current and magnetic flux levels.
@xxportalxx. Eh he had a 50/50 chance to get it RIGHT 😅😅😅😂
absolutely correct.
peace be upon you.@@combfilter3654
Family farm is under some of these. You always hoped when you were baking that if the shear pin broke in the baler it wouldn’t break under those lines because you would get zapped changing it. Dad said when they were kids they would take tube type bulbs out there at night and there was enough power to light them somewhat at night
Having been a crane Operator for the power company you can definitely build a charge by induction being close to power lines , and can be deadly if you are not very careful
Reminds me of the foxhole radios i made in my youth; Was always amazed that a small antenna pulled enough voltage from the air to run a piezo speaker earpiece.
We were working on a road to a radio antenna near a power generation plant. Not sure what the voltage was on the HV transmission lines, but I had parked my F350 crew cab long bed under the transmission lines perpendicular to the lines. Chrome door handles and I had a very hard time getting the door open to get in. Every time I touched the handle, it hit me like an electric fence.
Thanks for sharing!
try to open the door while jumping off the ground XD
As a Security Officer at a Power Station I often walked onder HV lines at night. One night I was carrying a flourescent light tube 5 feet long! As I walked under the lines the tube under my arm started to flicker, as a joke I lifted it up pointing at the wires! I was amazed when it lit!! Not full brightnes but it lit! Another time a big boss, against my advice took his new car on site and parked it under the lines, when he came back out the whole car was dead no ignition nothing! It seems the lines were cold when he parked but the generators started and the lines were activated, the sudden surge of HV had fried the on board computer from a hight of about 50 feet!! Last oneNow working at an Aluminium smelter a worker took ill inside the potrooms where the metal was melted in electric powered crucibles each of about 5 tonnes. Ambulance arrived and was told DO NOT drive into the building, however a boss on the scene ignored our instructions and waved it in, they were only about 5 yards inside before they stopped to pick up the casualty and put him into the ambulance! Then the fun started, the ambulance would not start, totally dead, to make matters worse all the electronic medical equipment was also fried! Ended up they had to tow it out of the building and send for another ambulance for the patient, Total bill was £100,000+ all becase a boss thought he knew better than the Security men! He tried to blame the men on duty but ALL the potroom lads said they heard him countermand the advice from Security so HE got the dressing down!!!
😲
I was a line clearance worker, aka Tree man, for a power company. We parked our trucks inside an electrical substation. You could feel the hair on your arms reacting to the energy in the air. O.S.H.A says on a simgle phase primary line(7,200kva) you must maintain 2 foot 10 inches or the electricity can/will ark/ jump to the ground source (you)
🖖✌️👍
Personally I hated having to go anywhere near HV lines or substations.. Had to repair some equipment at one and the warning signs said 15 ft.
It was foggy, security guy said ignore signs and try to stay at least 5ft away from the security fence, (20 +ft from any HV equipment) the warning was only good in sunny weather!
When looking for a new house, I was aware of the EMF surrounding high tension power lines. One of my stipulations was that the house be at least a quarter mile from any transmission lines. My extended family thought I was nuts...they built immediately adjacent to to transmission lines because the property was cheap. There are well documented effects of EMF and young people inducing lukemia. They have three young boys. God help them.
We bought adjacent to a 230kV line, and I didn't even check with a Gauss meter, but did have a plan. The house has aluminum siding. The second month here the steel roof went on. The window screens are now all aluminum. Five bars outside the (steel) front door. Zero in the living room and bed room. Not perfect, but the gardens are further from the HVL and I worry more now about just carrying the phone.
Harvesting wasted energy from antiquated, inefficient infrastructure. Very smart sir.
It's not really the fault of "antiquated" infrastructure. When superconductivity is practical, efficiencies will increase. Whether the line was built in 1922 or 2024, present technology will be inefficient due to the (past and present) fundamental economics of transmission system design. Let's see what happens once we depart from ACAR, ACSR, HTLS and ACC conductors with significant corona losses. Superconductivity will hasten this advantage.
A neat way of collecting power, from the induced field !
My grandfather had a shed on his farm that was lit with a 40w bulb using just the tin roof of the shed and a ground wire
Many years ago I was setting light poles with a bucket truck in a parking lot. There was two maybe three, HV lines (systems) above, I can't remember. I was in the bucket operating the boom. I reached out to grab the pole to stabilize it and got a tingle. I told the guy down below, he though I was just blowing smoke. When he grabbed the bottom of the pole to center it on the light base he got a surprise. He took his lineman,s pliers and grabbed the ground wire from the feed wires and weld it close to the pole. there was a continuous arc. One of the guys ran to get some rubber gloves. It was all good once the pole was sitting on the base.
Thanks for sharing!
That one Pole was inducing more power to ground than I would need to run the lights in my shed. I'm rather surprised that the right of way allowed those poles to go up at all.
As an mcdonalds worker, I think what you're doing is toally legal and brilliant.
Did you run this by Ronald himself?
@@bob_mosavo😂
I will call you as an expert witness then
My son was a contractor safety inspector for the army corps of engineers and I was his go to when he ran into weird issues. He called me one day from a site he had been summoned to where workers were being shocked when they would hook loads on a 100 foot open boom Crane. He had looked for all the obvious sources and found nothing. I was aware of the location by Lake Pontchartrain and said you near the high voltage transmission lines coming across the lake. Take a welding lead and connect it to the boom and put the other end on a ground rod. The grease on the boom pins was enough of an insulator that the boom was charging up and knocking the riggers on their butts. Problem solved.
An acquaintance of my mis spent youth used to have a pneumatic -- It looked like a potato gun -- that fired a sabowed chain that would create a bolt of lightning upon striking transmission lines. He did it to a distro line in the evening once; no lightning but four blocks went dark. Crazy stuff.
Another good one is wire fences around large broadcast transmitters, when the fences demodulate the signal and you can listen to the show.
I've done that, it's pretty cool.
20 years ago , and more , people complained about weird stuff physically with family members , from living under or next to High Power Lines , 10 years ago , people complained about weird stuff mentally , that lived in apartment complexes , and the smart meters were all on their outside wall , RIDE THE LIGHTNING ! In slow motion
On a similar note. I was a pipeline technician for BP. We had some LPG pipelines that ran across or parallel to high voltage electric transmission lines.
What a hassle this created. An impressed current was introduced on our pipelines, leading to corrosion.
We had to install all kinds of catholic protection equipment, and huge "ground field grids" of buried anodes. Thousands of anodes.
Cathodic?
Was setting up sound system for a return celebration for Bravo Company after operation desert storm in Union Gap Wa. Organizers rounded up a few flatbed trailers to use as staging. Location was parallel to high voltage line above. Suspected and tested metal deck to ground and found over 425 volts present. Rounded up many sets of auto jumper cables to securely ground all decks before allowing anybody near. Would have been terrible to have casualties while we were celebrating their return after they all had survived battle.
Excellent practical demonstration - and cautionary tale. I was interested in the charge rate and wondered if I plotted the voltage vs time if it would show the expected exponential curve. (data for the curious: 2:04/0V, 2:36/180V, 3:45/328V, 4:38/423V, 5:10/478V, 5:37/515V. Stopped there because of the glove break.) It does initially but then the slope stays the same. Interesting. A friend of mine worked at SNC in Wisconsin. One of their products was a device (probably a common-mode choke) used in rural land-line telephone systems prevent phone techs from getting killed from just the thing you demonstrated. Think about the power in a phone line that runs close to and parallel to power lines for miles! Yikes!
Telephone cables are normally fully shielded, and the shield is grounded. Only the drops going to houses are unshielded.
@ethanlamoureux5306 it's not the case in my area. The pairs aren't shielded, they're twisted and don't even have a guard wire. Many of the copper pairs are within 4 meters of 33kv aerial lines.
@@dinosshed That may be true in some cases, altho I have only ever seen it on rather old, smaller cables with few pairs, such as a 6-pair drop. Bear in mind that when I say shielded, I don’t mean each individual pair is separately shielded, but rather the whole cable is normally protected by a corrugated metal shield just inside the outer jacket. This protects against physical damage as well as electrical interference. The oldest cables used lead jackets, and when they moved to polyethylene jackets, they also started using an internal shield to do the same job as the lead jacket.
@ethanlamoureux5306 I used to lead wipe the mains and repair the air leaks on them. Some of the aerial cables were shielded, but they were rarely joined with the strapping.
If it took 213s to get to 515V, that works out to 11.67J in 213s which is... 55mW. So this could keep a small light lit indefinitely.
Worked at a pool liner factory during the 80's. We'd cut the patterns in the vinyl and and got them ready for assembly by fusion using large machines.
There were no need for powerlines for the flourscent lights as the ambient energy made them shone.
At my end, with a metal tape measure, when doing my thing measuring the shapes that made up the pool liner, I would often get burned by the tape measure which somehow funneled the ambient energy comeong from the machine's
It's all right there;-)
And that’s why we have to bond the water of a swimming pool. I have seen voltage as high as 97 V and people that didn’t want to get it done right I told him they couldn’t use it.
So be safe out there.
Peace
Was this caused by static electricity in the vinyl?
I worked with these machines which produce high power RF (radio frequency). They induce heat in the vinyl thru molecular friction. Called ''heat sealing". The stray RF would cause all kinds of bad effects including interfereing with airplane coms. Google ''kabar'' or thermatron.
I know it from a constructor who was building a stable near a high-voltage line, then still 380kV. The stable is built from steel load-bearing beams. Every time a beam was raised they got shocks. Only after earthing and steel hoists was that problem solved. But even when tightening bolts, you felt shocks.
This works. We had HV lines running directly over the horse corral at a property we lived in a short time. I would take florescent bulbs out there and show people how they lit up just holding them up under the lines at night.
But don't dare try to hook anything up, they will find that drain.
My boss/friend was riddled with cancer and died at the young age of 42 years old. The reason, people believed, was that he grew up in a house under, or almost under power lines. Also, one time, 1989, we camped out under power lines after a Grateful Dead show, in tents, outside my Cherokee . When we woke up and went to get in the truck. We were getting shocked. I guess we were the ground because the tires blocked another path. Crazy.
I heard about a guy whose fence paralleled a railway high tension railway power line for some distance. He drew power by capacitance from his fence, and used it yo power his home. Eventually he got prosecuted for "stealing electricity" he proved that he was actually reducing the railway companies' power bills by straightening out the power factor. By adding his capacitive load on a power line that was powering inductive electric motors, the watt meter gave a lower reading.
The prosecution case was dismissed, but the raioway company interposed a grounded screening fence to stop the guy drawing any more power this way.
those power companies would rather spend millions of $ than find out one customer is 'stealing' a single joule of their energy
I've done some experimenting in this area too. This is capacitive coupling through the air between your wire and the power lines, so you have to use a full-wave rectifier as you are, otherwise the 'air' capacitor simply charges, and you get no power. This setup works to a lesser degree even under 14.4 kV distribution lines. You were likely pushing those diodes near their limit, because when reverse-biased, you have the capacitor voltage plus the peak source voltage in the opposite polarity across them. Of course this is divided across 2 diodes in the full wave rectifier.
Yep, it sounds like you have done this before. Thanks for commenting.
Great video.
I discovered back in the 90s that you could collect free inductive energy from high voltage lines.
I was walking my dog on a misty day under a main run.
Stopped to rest and enjoy the view when I noticed a tingling in my hand clutching the metal umbrella pole.
Grabbed the plastic handle and Placed other finger close to the pole and got a 1/16" arc.