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Hi home electrical thread. I just bought a house and I'm dealing with ridiculous amounts of EMI in my home studio. I've checked all the obvious stuff so now I'm going down the rabbit hole and discovered some very noisy current in the water main coming into the basement. It varies but right now it's reading about 700mA according to my clamp meter. I'm assuming this is a big part of my noise issue but it's also clearly a safety issue, what can/should I do with this information to have zero amps in my water pipes? I'm a stupid baby so what I'm asking is who do I call who will take this seriously? I feel like the city will think I'm just some EMI wacko and ignore me but I don't know if a private electrician can do anything if this is an issue that spans the entire block.
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Feb 22, 2024 04:13
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 04:39 |
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Alright so. After a morning of flipping breakers and running back and forth I feel like I know more and less at the same time. The good news is that with the entire house shut off there's no current on the water pipe, so it's not something like a neighbor's broken neutral returning current through my good neutral through the water pipe (I don't 100% know what this means but I read that it happens sometimes). I found a few breakers that individually cause the current in the water pipe to change. Basically every breaker that services something in the basement affected it, as well as one kitchen breaker and an unlabeled breaker that I haven't identified yet. Is this something that any regular electrician will know how to fix or am I way off in the land of weird edge cases with my electrified water? I also hooked my guitar up to my laptop on battery power to find the breakers making the most noise. With everything off there's the expected amount of ambient noise so that's a bit of a relief, I'm not living in an electromagnetically cursed location where it's impossible to record stuff. But for the most part, any breaker that affected current in the water pipe made noise. The loudest breaker was the one the kitchen GFCI outlets are on. I got an outlet tester last week and it says they're all properly grounded so I'm not sure what to make of that, there's nothing plugged in to them. The breaker with the basement ceiling lights and outlets was pretty loud too. The lights were all switched off so it's not dimmers or fluorescent lights making the noise, it's just the breaker being switched on. And finally the furnace breaker was making a lot of noise for some reason. So knowing all this, what do. Again, is this regular electrician work or do I need some kind of EMI expert for this?
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Feb 22, 2024 17:08
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My only appliance with a 3 prong 220 plug is my dryer and unplugging that and/or shutting off the breaker doesn't affect the reading or the noise whatsoever. Should I unplug all the appliances and everything on each circuit repeat what I just did? I feel like it may be related to the basement light/outlet wiring given what I've seen so far, that breaker causes the biggest change and makes the most EM noise. There are also a few (unused) ungrounded 2 prong outlets on that breaker.
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Feb 22, 2024 17:33
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