New home Electric install
Hi Shaun, my son is building a new home, I want to assist in the design. I purchased the meter and filters 10 years ago and understand the effective frequency range is 10-100Khz, I'm considering recommending metal clad feeders(the heavy cables entering the house, running between the meter box and the main breaker panel) which is about 70' in length. Then I may be able to contain the polluted power coming into the home until reaching the main breaker panel at which point try to filter it there. I am not aware of a whole house system and so am open to your thoughts to reduce EM waves, there will be young children in the home. Also are there twisted pair 'Romex' style wire which can assist in EMF reduction which can be used 'in the wall' and are UL approved and not be prohibitively expensive? Sincerely, Mark
Hi Mark,
There are so many things you could do in a new construction situation to reduce the EMF (magnetic, electric, and dirty electricity) from wiring. It really depends on your needs and your budget.
Having oversized wire coming in (particularly the neutral) could help in some situations - or seeing that they use finer stranded (more strands) cable - that's even better. Metal conduit the whole way will shield the electric fields, but you will still have some magnetic field very near to the conduit - so run this considering living and sleeping spaces especially so that you don't throw a field where someone is going to sleep.
You could have a main breaker panel for the big loads, and a separate subpanel for the smaller loads, and use something like the DNA Line Filter in between. So you could have the rooms where you spend the most time, including bedrooms, on this "protected" subpanel - the DNA line filter will offer protection from dirty electricity from the rest of the house. Just don't use any electronics on the protect circuits. We carry the DNA line filters - they work well but aren't cheap.
We also recommend shutting the power off at night to all sleeping areas - any live wires that are near the sleeping areas.
The Stetzerizer filters will do the trick for filtering by the main breaker panel and also out on branch circuits. I don't have a whole house system I recommend at this time. I only know of one EMF guy who uses a different filter near the breaker panel but I'm not sure how big if any of a difference this makes as I haven't tested it myself. I'm sure I will discuss that more, but for now we just recommend the Stetzerizer Filters - they perform extremely well.
Make sure the electrician does NOT connect neutrals from multiple circuits. Every circuit should have its own dedicated neutral - all the current going out on a romex cable from the main breaker should return on that same romex. I would also avoid multi-wire branch circuits. Seriously - spend the extra $10 or $20 it costs to wire completely independent circuits so that there isn't wire sharing and elevated magnetic fields as well as harder-to-deal-with dirty electricity that we see often times in kitchens where they do MWBC. It isn't the worst thing in the world, but they do often behave strangely so it's just nicer to avoid having them.
These are just a few of the things off the top of my head. There is so much more that can be done. I would recommend the phone consulting and then we can get a much better look at the situation and give you personalized recommendations for your needs. Probably 1 hour of phone consulting would save you a lot of mistakes/hassles and get you the best possible results.