[GTALUG] Dirty Power and Wi Fi Far field effect

[Russell Reiter]

OK this reminds me of another war story from my lifes experiential outcomes
and the wired grid.

I was sitting in a friends apartment one dark and stormy night when I
noticed severe sparking from the overhead power lines. Now I'm not an
alarmist and after several decades working in sustainable development I
have developed certain commnication skills and I convinced dispatch that
this was excessive sparking so they sent out TFD.

Now what I hadn't told dispatch was that my concern was based on the
knowledge that this particular building had two loads coming into it, one
for one municipal address and one for the one we were in. The caveat: the
developer had severed the power to the other address. So what is the issue
you say. All the copper grounding throughout the building. You recall a
previous comment on ground and optimisim I made. Also this was around the
time all the downtown electrical leaks were happening.

So TFD showed up, I related my concerns and was received with skeptisim and
disbelief by the crew. That is until they got a call to a house a block
away about the power being out. So I went over with them to see the cause
of the outage.

It's one thing for the connections to sever at the tap and fall to the
ground than it is the other way round. Obviously one feeds the wet ground
with current, the other doesn't. Ask any worm picker why they plug a 12v
car battery into the ground after a rainstorm and they'll tell you they
tickle the worms to the surface.

So at this point in the tale you are left with the same questions the fire
department had, what did one event have to do with the other.

Well we reverse engineered the time of my call and the time of the other
call to figure the arcing from the service wires to the trees in front of
my friends apt happened at approximately the same time.

How does copper ground wires throughout a two story house factor in. Well
think of delta confiuration on a balanced polyphased distribution grid. All
those above ground copper tendrils acted as a homing beacon for the wave
which was trying to find it's way home via a center tap. It wasn't
traveling from the service to the trees, it was traveling from the ground
to the center tap via the trees.

The fire department guys couldn't figure out how Ontario Hydro got to the
second call before they did. The first response crew got their yuks at the
expense of the second crew, snowing them about who I was and what I was
doing there. I kept my mouth shut, either you have enough grounded
knowledge to know what is possible or you don't. For myself, I'm always
exploring what I don't know and this is what makes hacking fun for me.

FTW means fix the world, not fuck the world. So I fix what I can and ask
for help with the rest.

Close to twenty years on this list and I've learned a lot and helped a
little, at least that's what I hope for, but it is what it is as they say.

For those who don't send my posts to /dev/null I'll have an update on MP
bios follies and the fate of the Toshiba satellite Peter gave me. The issue
is whether to use an inductive or a deductive solution after trashing the
HD by using it as a case thermometer.

Peace out.
Russell
On Saturday, March 14, 2015, Stewart C. Russell <scruss at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2015-03-14 07:32 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > I have no idea if this really results in a big load imballance problem
> > in general, or not.
>
> It does require a little bit of care in planning to make sure the loads
> on all of the phases are reasonably well balanced, but isn't a huge
> problem. You might want to avoid large inductive loads on one branch,
> though.
>
> The Strachan switchyard near where the OP lives is under huge load with
> all the new condos nearby. I wouldn't be at all surprised if its power
> quality wasn't quite to standard.
>
> cheers,
>  Stewart
>
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