Experiments

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gar

Senior Member
Location
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Occupation
EE
190102-0919 EST

On the subject of experiments.

I do experiments in all sorts of places. Such as: living room, kitchen, bedroom, pantry, garage, basement, backyard, out in the country, at the shop, and anywhere that is useful. Not just in a laboratory.

The pantry is a very constant temperature low air flow rate location. The kitchen provides water, heat, cold, and table space. Also natural gas, but I have no active ports in the house. So propane gets used for these needs.

The garage provides freezer space, table space, hot and cold temperature chamber. Haven't had a car in the garage for 30 or more years. At one time my machine shop was in the garage.

The living room is good for taking pictures, and doing miscellaneous experiments.

The bedroom is radio communication, and RFI experiments.

The basement is photo lab, machine work, electronic work, parts storage, computers , printing, all sorts of test equipment, place to do some electrical power measurements, chemistry, storage of mercury, and office and computers.

Den is computer and copier location. In days past my wife did silk screening in the den.

The shop is a different location 2 miles away. Mostly my son's stuff. About 8 CNC machines, and manual machines, sheet metal equipment, welding, grinding, and material storage. I have worked fom home or other places all my life.

I have gone out in the recreation areas where Consumers Power and DTE interconnect and measured the direction of ground current below the high voltage lines. It was not parallel with the power lines.

Henry Ford was chief engineer at a Detroit power plant in the 1890s. He used some of their capability to do somethings, but he had a shed at the back of his rented home on Bagley Street where he had a machine shop, and made his first gasoline engine. This engine was first run on the kitchen sink with his wife dripping gasoline into the engine. Ignition was from the electric socket over the sink. His first car, the quadricycle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Quadricycle was built in that shed. The Bagley shop is now in Greenfield Village.

Thomas Edison did experiments at home as a boy, and still as a boy at other locations, like the baggage car of the Grand Trunk Railroad as it was going between stations. Because his chemicals started a fire in the baggage car he and all his equipment were thrown off at Smiths Creek, Michigan.

In 1876 at the age of 29 Edison invented what maybe the world's first industrial research facility at Menlo Park, NJ. Before this he was an individual having to go many different places to have work done to accomplish a given invention. Also true of other inventors. With the invention of the research park he was able to bring together many of the inter-related needs to develop a product in one place, efficiency. Edison's development of the electric power industry was greatly aided by the invention of Menlo Park. Here all of the pieces needed to create a practical electrical system were developed (invented). An efficient dynamo, a light bulb with adequate life, a high voltage parallel system, switches, sockets, fuses, metering, etc. The Edison Effect (diode), magnetic core saturation, and means to remove gasses from bulb components, were discovered at Menlo Park.

Today a single inventor can do a lot, but there are many things that can not be done outside of a large research facility. There is no way I can make a microcircuit in my basement, but 2 miles from me they can make the world's smallest computer in a 100 million dollar facility. I could possibly design such a device in my basement, but I could not make it.

Inter-related with experiments there are various people types. Idea people are inventors. Examples are Ford, Edison, Tesla, Igor Sikorsky, Babbage, Howard Aiken, Arthur Burks, John von Neumann, Jonas Salk, Julius Lilienfeld, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Hewlett and Packard.

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drcampbell

Senior Member
Location
The Motor City, Michigan USA
Occupation
Registered Professional Engineer
I heard about a farmer who first lodged a complaint against the power company for saturating his farm with electromagnetic energy from their newly-constructed transmission line, then stole energy with a low parallel wire. When the power company sued him for theft of power, he showed their letter -- saying that an insignificant amount of energy escaped from the powerlines -- to the court. Didn't hear the outcome.
 

Adamjamma

Senior Member
that is one experiment I plan on doing... can I get free electricity form the power company without connectig or touching their lines??? seen a lot of stuff on pinterest but...
 

mivey

Senior Member
that is one experiment I plan on doing... can I get free electricity form the power company without connectig or touching their lines??? seen a lot of stuff on pinterest but...
Yes you can as long as you are willing to sacrifice freedom for free electricity. It is illegal.
 

Sahib

Senior Member
Location
India
190102-0919 EST

On the subject of experiments

There is no way I can make a microcircuit in my basement, but 2 miles from me they can make the world's smallest computer in a 100 million dollar facility. I could possibly design such a device in my basement, but I could not make it

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But if you try long enough, just as Edison did to invent light bulb, you could do it, IMO. But with lot of failures intervening. That is how science develops!
 

LarryFine

Master Electrician Electric Contractor Richmond VA
Location
Henrico County, VA
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
Yes you can as long as you are willing to sacrifice freedom for free electricity. It is illegal.
Seems like saying it's illegal to receive a radio transmission.

Does it actually cost the POCO any more when energy is collected this way?
 

gar

Senior Member
Location
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Occupation
EE
190104-1100 EST

Sahib:

I don't have 100 million dollars. Somethings take a lot of money to do.

Could I make a very simple integrated circuit in my basement? Possibly. Would I? No.

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LarryFine

Master Electrician Electric Contractor Richmond VA
Location
Henrico County, VA
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
A fluorescent tube light, when held under HV transmission line, lights up illuminating a farmer field at the cost of POCO. Definitely illegal!
No question that energy used this way costs the POCO in lost revenue, presuming the light would be used by the farmer either way.

My question is whether there is an actual increase in electricity supplied to the transmission line for energy harvested this way.

Or is this just intercepting power that would otherwise be wasted in capacitance to the earth, causing no real increase in power used?
 

Sahib

Senior Member
Location
India
No question that energy used this way costs the POCO in lost revenue, presuming the light would be used by the farmer either way.

My question is whether there is an actual increase in electricity supplied to the transmission line for energy harvested this way.

Or is this just intercepting power that would otherwise be wasted in capacitance to the earth, causing no real increase in power used?

The power loss due to fluorescent light is really in addition to the power being already lost to the surrounding by radiating HV transmission lines.
 

Adamjamma

Senior Member
Ok. You build a water pipeline. It passes through my land. I have a pond on my land that before your pipeline was built averaged five foot deep in the middle of summer, but since you built your pipeline, averages twenty feet deep and overfills a bunch, keeping a stream throughout the year instead of just in rainy season... but you do all maintenance upon your pipeline and I have nothing to do with it.
so now you decide I owe you for the extra water your pipes must be supplying me with? If I have no connections at all to your pipeline?

That is basically what you are saying concerning the power... it somehow leaks enough to supply me wirelessly yet I am supposed to pay for it if it supplies me wirelessly..kinda like saying that people living beside a drive in should pay for the movie every night..
 

ggunn

PE (Electrical), NABCEP certified
Location
Austin, TX, USA
Occupation
Electrical Engineer - Photovoltaic Systems
Ok. You build a water pipeline. It passes through my land. I have a pond on my land that before your pipeline was built averaged five foot deep in the middle of summer, but since you built your pipeline, averages twenty feet deep and overfills a bunch, keeping a stream throughout the year instead of just in rainy season... but you do all maintenance upon your pipeline and I have nothing to do with it.
so now you decide I owe you for the extra water your pipes must be supplying me with? If I have no connections at all to your pipeline?

That is basically what you are saying concerning the power... it somehow leaks enough to supply me wirelessly yet I am supposed to pay for it if it supplies me wirelessly..kinda like saying that people living beside a drive in should pay for the movie every night..

It's not the same. Conservation of energy says if energy is harvested from a source then it's lost from the source. In this case it's a very small amount, of course. Remember the harvesting of rounded off pennies the guys in Office Space were doing?

The drive-in movie should build a fence if they don't want their neighbors watching for free, but they won't be getting the sound at any rate. Of course with some of the <ahem> movies that drive-ins play, is the sound all that important? :D
 

LarryFine

Master Electrician Electric Contractor Richmond VA
Location
Henrico County, VA
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
My thought is the energy lost to the ground is partially dissipated in the fluorescent tube, as an experiment it could be tested in principle with a van de Graaf. A parallel line I am not sure about, but suspect it would be acting as a transformer.
My question is whether the energy consumed is additional energy taken from the line or a reduction in the energy otherwise lost.
 

FionaZuppa

Senior Member
Location
AZ
Occupation
Part Time Electrician (semi retired, old) - EE retired.
If I take say a coil of wire and place it in close proximity of the poco line that has a flip-flop magnetic field associated with it, the coil should produce voltage and support a load.

So then, the question becomes, where exactly are those joules coming from? You and your coil are not the source of energy (no work put in by you). Thus, whomever is providing the input work is the one who is providing the energy you are taking.
 

gar

Senior Member
Location
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Occupation
EE
190104-1911 EST

Larry Fine:

If you are talking about a fluorescent tube, then:
1. The field being interacted with is the electric field which is basically a capacitor and its current is not dissipative.
2. Add a resistance into the field, then there is a dissipative component and that draws power from the supply lines.

If you are talking about a coil in the magnetic field, then:
1. If no load on the coil, then no absorbed power.
2. Put a resistive load on the coil, then thru reaction via the magnetic coupling you remove power from the transmission system.

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LarryFine

Master Electrician Electric Contractor Richmond VA
Location
Henrico County, VA
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
Again, I understand and agree that the energy comes from the power line. I'm asking whether the energy is an additional load on the system, or is it energy re-directed from the existing losses, with no additional system load.

To use a water example, if i drill a tiny hole in a water supply pipe and catch the dripping drops in a bucket to use, I'm clearly causing additional water to flow and guilty of theft.

If, on the other hand, I hang a bucket under an existing leak, and collect water that would otherwise seep into the ground or evaporate, it's not so clear that I'm stealing water.
 

gar

Senior Member
Location
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Occupation
EE
90104-2043 EST

Larry Fine:

I believe I answered your question.

When we have the electric field around the power lines before the fluorescent is moved into the field we have only the capacitive current flowing. This is not a dissipative load. No power is consumed.

When we move the fluorescent bulb into the field and it lights, then we have modified the field and addrd a resistive component to the load on the power line and that does remove energy from the power line. I have never run this experiment and don't personally know if the bulb will light.

What I have done is use a 25 W 2 meter transmitter connected to a beam antenna to show that I can light a fluorescent out in space with no conductive connection and somewhat show the beam's beaming effect.

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