A new technical test report shows that the new “smart” electricity meters that have been rolled out in Norway and in other countries, in homes and at workplaces, pollute the electricity grid in the buildings with more “dirty electricity” than do old meters. Thereby, the new meters have the potential to be a health problem – even when they are “un-smartened”, i.e., with the radio transmitters in the meters removed or silenced. “Dirty electricity” is an industry term for several types of electrical noise spreading through power lines and creating or impacting electromagnetic fields around them.
The test report is part of the evidence to be used in a case for the appeal court in Oslo, Norway, in September 2022 to underpin that the 10 plaintiffs’ claims that they may have health issues from “smart” utility meters even when the microwave transmitter is turned off or removed, cannot be “evidently unfounded”.
As an introduction to the test report, we here explain what we did, and refer to scientific findings demonstrating that these test results may have significant health relevance.
What we did and what science shows
We collected 23 different models of electricity meters, produced between 1985 and 2019, and got them tested to compare the “dirty electricity” produced from them. The company EMF Consult AS tested the amount of dirty electricity from the different meters, concluding in the report that the new meters create more dirty electricity than do older models.
– The amounts of dirty current are particularly significant at frequencies outside the spectrum tested for CE approval, which follows the EU’s certification norms, says cybernetics and electrical engineer Odd Magne Hjortland, who is the report’s author. The thresholds specified in the relevant norms are found as straight lines in the report’s graphs. – The fact that the AMS meters are located just where the house’s wiring network spreads out into the house, causes this noise to spread out effectively in the building, so that, in principle, you live inside a three-dimensional antenna that emits electromagnetic pulses in step with the noise. The noise will be amplified when several meters are installed in the same transformer circuit, which is the normal situation, Hjortland continues.
Sound engineer Erik Avnskog has also worked with the topic of electric noise for a number of years, both due to him having been a music studio owner and music producer, as well as later as an electro-hypersensitive searching for technical filtering of this noise. Avnskog tells us that such noise may indeed be problematic. We know from other test measuring we have initiated, that the noise increases upwards and past the frequencies tested in the test here presented.
It is well documented that very low frequencies consisting of “bursts” or “pulses” or “spikes” or “peaks” found in such “dirty electricity”, may affect biology, e.g. by impacting metabolism and alter the brain’s sleep pattern, by opening cell wall calcium channels (VGCCs) resulting in increased production of oxidants (ROS), and by creating extra signalling in the nervous system. Such effects happen even at very weak pulses, as long as they reach the “right” frequencies, i.e. pulse rhythms that charged di-poled proteins or other elements in the body naturally respond to.
Experience tells that some individuals are far more sensitive to such impacts others and react acutely, others only after some time, or never. The measurement test results in this new report may therefore explain why some people experience health problems from new smart meters – even when they have been exempted and removed from the new meters’ radio transmitters, even though others do not react at all.
Read More : Report: Electric “Smart” Meters “pollute the electricity grid
