EMF Safety Network

 These comments have been collected online from a  variety of reader comments:

_______________________________________

After our house in Half Moon Bay got SmartMeters, we could no longer listen to AM radio.

The signals are swamped by loud rasping pulses of noise. I located the source of the strongest RFI (Radio Frequency Interference): the circuit breaker panel, where all the house wiring is concentrated. SmartMeters must use the wiring as a transmitting antenna.

I contacted PG&E on its website. No response. So, I sent a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission: no response.

Our local station on AM 1710 is hooked up to emergency services and first responders to provide emergency warnings and instructions to residents here on the coast. That function is obviously being severely compromised now.

As a retired electronics engineer, I have to say PG&E either did inadequate product testing before rolling out its new product or it just can’t see the bigger picture. At some point in the future, the energy-saving benefits of SmartMeters may — or may not — be realized. However, in the meantime, we are all suffering from the operation of the law of unintended consequences.

 ________________________________________________________

I live in Walnut Creek

My 11/9/09 bill: $168.03,

my 12/9/09 bill: $366.20,

my 1/11/10 bill: $1010.09,

my 2/10/10 bill: $1053.23.

My smart meter was installed sometime in Dec. 09.

PG&E says its my fault. I am seeing others have had the same problem. Just wanted to weigh in on this issue. I am wanting to sue. Price gouging. This is WRONG.

______________________________________________________________

As a newspaper editor in little ole Cleburne County, Alabama we come out tomorrow with a story on a house which may have burned down because of a smart meter, another incident of a meter apparently getting so hot it almost  burned along with circuit panel inside the home and people being told either by installer or power co that if they did not replace all the wiring in their home that the meter would indeed cause a fire!!!! I am told by a commercial builder that some meters may be faulty and allow 300-440 volts in on a home’s 220 and 110 lines. We’re seeing problems out here of burn outs in appliances, meltdowns of hair dryers, kitchen appliance , and a number of high-end electronics getting zapped. Goodbye Bose radio, goodbye wide, wide screen tv and see if the utility cos are going to pay for those items – don’t think so!

 __________________________________________________________________

My grandparents started having problems with their (computerized) ceiling fans, and suspected that it had to do with their new smart meter. They would go haywire, turning on and off, reversing, and even turning on their lights. I suggested that they keep track of when it happened, and see if it was at the same time of day. Sure enough, at six o’clock every evening (occasionally at three in the morning, and other times of the day) they would beep and turn on and off. When theyc alled PG&E and asked, sure enough those were the times that the meters reported back to the home office. Someone came out shortly afterwards and replaced the meters, but not before the computer chips in the fans fried. They said new chips were around $700 (I didn’t ask if that was for the whole house, or each of the four fans they have). They were too nice to report that to PG&E, let alone try to file a complaint to get paid back for the damage caused by the meters.

­­­­­­­­­­­­________________________________________________________________________

well my smart meter has caused my central system to completly shut down. no air or heat. and it is a brand new system. only 4 years old. theres is no electricity in the central air and heating unit . yes i tried the electrical box. could it be the plug? has anyone heard of this?

_____________________________________________________________________

We just had a smart meter put in.

I have a 4 year old $2,000.00 Toshiba HDTV that was working just fine. KRCB is ~22-1~22-2 and 22-3

Now with channel 22-1 on and coming in fine my TV freezes, turns off, and turns on and and will cycle this way for ever while on 22-1

22-2 works well~22-3 and any of the other digital channels will do the same, the other non hyphen channels available come in.

22-1~22-2~22-3 are all KRCB the tv picks up all the non-channels and I use a rabbits ears.

I am thinking you should have available from your own staff for us the frequency of the RF waves from the meters that are provided by PG&E so that we can compare to the frequency’s of our remote controls

This is new, it just happened after the meter went in 

 _______________________________________________________________________

Well, my SmartMeter experience has gotten off to a very rocky start, right on the installation day. My meter is not behind a fence (i.e. there’s open access to it from the street). Apparently, PG&E took this as an invitation to install the SmartMeter while I was not home and without any notice. I had left my dishwasher on delayed run mode and came back to it having been halted mid-cycle thanks to this little upgrade. More seriously, I have a dozen fish tanks on GFCI outlets and the upgrade tripped 50% of the outlets, leaving those fish tanks without filtration and heaters (granted they don’t need heaters today) for several hours until I got home to manually reset the GFCI outlets. I’m just glad I got off work early today, because had I got home at my normal time, I’d have come home to sick or dead fish. These are not cheap fish either, nor ones I could replace locally, and they don’t take kindly to being unfiltered.

 _____________________________________________________________

… when PG&E shows up to install your new “smart meter,” they will have to remove your old meter first… This will result in your power being shut off for however long it takes the contractor, that really doesn’t know what he’s doing, to put the new meter on… I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like it when people show up and surreptitiously shut off services that I ALWAYS pay for ON TIME… It’ll be great when we all get home and our Tivo’s and WIFI routers aren’t working anymore and, if you have birds like me, your pets have thrashed themselves and your house to pieces… And I’m not a crazy tin-foil hat person, but they showed up a month ago and installed one of their smart-meter repeaters on the telephone pole next to my house and now none of our cell phones work in our house and these are brand new phones that worked perfectly before they put the new repeater in.

 ______________________________________________________________

Mine hasn’t blown up or caught fire, but after PG&E replacing 3 meters since the original installation they now say they need to replace it again. None of the ones they have put on my home have ever worked, they are not even registering at the central grid. I have been getting estimated bills or no bills at all ever since the first meter went in and they haven’t even been aware of the problem until I call them to ask where my bills are. Lord knows how much they are going to claim I owe them if they ever get this problem fixed.

______________________________________________________________________

“Earlier today our local utility sent around a person to install a new 
”Smartmeter”. Luckily a local ham gave me a heads up about the 
RFI generated by these things so I was prepared. By using a battery 
operated shortwave receiver (tuned to 7.2 MHz) I showed the installer 
what the background noise level was with the old (mechanical) meter. 
Once the Smartmeter was installed, the noise level (seems like 
digital hash) was *easily* 10 dB higher. I had him remove the 
Smartmeter and re-install the old mechanical meter. 
The utility that supplies us with gas and electricity is PG&E 
and they are installing these things throughout California now. 

All hams that use the low bands should be aware of this issue. 
The last thing we need is another broadband noise source.” 

_____________________________________________________________________________

While we haven’t had any fluctuations in our power bills since we had our “smart meter” installed we have been experiencing problems with our ceiling fans. We have Casablanca Intelli-touch fans in six rooms in our home; these fans have a computer board that receives signal from the wall switch via an electric impulse. These impulses turn the fans on, adjust the fan speed, turn on the light and reverse the blades. Until the “smart meter” was installed we had absolutely no problems with these devices – they worked flawlessly. Immediately after the “smart meter” was installed we started noticing that when the fans were on they were prone to bizarre behavior which includes change in fan speed, reversal of fan direction, operation of the lights and/or fan or both if only the power switch was on. We also began to notice that these problems, while somewhat intermittent, would almost always occur at the same time in the evening. We called PG & E and reported the issue and a service rep was sent out to our home. He looked at the meter and reportedly tightened a few wires and then proceeded to tell my wife that we probably had a short in our electrical system that was to blame for the odd performance of the fans (HUH?). Never mind that each of the fans in separate rooms are on different breakers! When my wife told me what the rep said and then told me I needed to check each of the house plug-ins for a short I said that wouldn’t be necessary since the PG&E rep didn’t know squat about what he was talking about. We got a survey in the mail which was dutifully filled out and returned only to explain the problem was not resolved. Another call was made to PG&E and about a week later another – smarter – rep responded to our situation. He called us first and patiently listened to my bizarre tale of fan woe. He asked if I would like an old style meter to see if the problem would persist or a new “smart meter” to see if the first one was flawed. Admittedly, he said we’d eventually have to have a “smart meter” anyway so we opted to have a new “smart meter” installed. And guess what – nothing has changed except the fans now go crazy at 12:45 A.M. instead of 6:20 P.M.I can hardly wait until summer when either we are awakened every night at a quarter of one or we try to sleep sans our ceiling fan. I’ll give credit to the second PG&E rep tho, he called us a couple of days after the new “smart meter” was installed to see if the problem was still on-going; good customer service, while appreciated, is no substitute for  a ceiling fan during a Bakersfield summer. The computer boards on these fans are expensive and I don’t want to have to replace them. More importantly we want to use the appliances that we so handsomely pay electricity for, in the manner and at the time of our choosing – NOT ACCORDING TO PG&E’s SCHEDULE BECAUSE THEY CAN NOT GET IT OR WILL NOT MAKE IT RIGHT!

___________________________________________

If anyone thinks that these so-called “Smart Meters” are for anything other than increasing profits is a fool. The meter currently on the house is working just fine. The investment was made and recouped long ago. The electric company is not going to spend hundreds of dollars per living unit (house, apartment, condo or otherwise) to buy and install these meters so you and I can pay less money.

They can sit back and continue to collect on what’s out there right now or they can put in new meters and charge more money under the cloak of “it’s green” or “it’ll only charge you for what you use”.

Electric, water and sewer should be required to be non-profit. These are the most basic of utilities.

 ________________________________________________________________

 The Not-So-Smart Meter was installed on my house in October 2007 since the installation my bills have been three times more expensive than before.  I have call PG&E each month after receiving my bill.  At first I was shocked and thought that there must have been a mistake, of course PG&E says that the meter is accurate, they gave me some suggestions to save more energy which I went over and beyond to change.  I bought new applicances, turned the water heater down much lower than what they recommend, the ac/heater is set at 64 degrees so we pretty much freeze our tushs off in the winter and burn up in the summer!  PG&E actually told me not to turn on lights and begin using electrictiy when I come home from work.  I have been living by candle light in order to save on my bill.  A month goes by and I get another bill and it is only a few cents less than the previous months bill.  I called once again and requested that someone come out to my house to make sure that there is not a problem and PG&E told me that they only thing they would do is check my stove, ac/heater and water heater and since they are all gas then I need to call the gas company.  I explained that I don’t have a problem with my gas bill and that it’s the electricity bill that I have a problem with.  For the last four months my PG& E bill has been roughly the same amount each month, and I have been using the same amount of electricity as I was using last year but my bill is three times as high.  I also have several co-workers who are experiencing the same problem.  I feel sorry for the elderly who are on a fixed income.  How are they going to pay for their bill.  I feel that I am working to pay for my bill and I’m not home for most hours in the day!  I believe that there is a problem with the new meters  and that PG&E definitely needs to look into the problem.

­­­­­­­_____________________________________________________________________

I’ve noticed that my computer speakers make odd buzzing noises at different times of the day, and I suspect that my smart meter has something to do with it.

 __________________________________________________________

I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned the safety risk from these new wireless smartmeter devices.

They communicate as an always-on, two-way wireless device operating in the microwave band. This energy exposure is now a known carcinogen, and since these smartmeters will be transmitting their radiation 24 hours a day, you wil constantly be exposed to it from your own smartmeter and all of those other smartmeters around you.

PGE had to very drastically speed up its planned deployment schedule of these “smartmeters”, ever since the World Health Organization’s recent report on this type of radiation exposure (including that from cell phones and cell-phone towers) which revealed these wireless transmitting devices to be a very significant long-term health risk, and since communities were starting to realize this and organize against the deployment of these smartmeter devices. The growing evidence of this wireless radiation as a carcinogen, and high association with significant increases in occurances of a wide variety of major diseases and human health disorders, is now presenting a huge threat to the wireless industry’s profitability.

What’s worse, all of this new “smartmeter” wireless radiation exposure to us could have been easily avoided by PGE, if they had simply chosen to use the relatively new and very reliable powerline-networking protocol, which would use the exising powerlines to transmit network data in a hard-wired fashion (rather than choosing instead to use the microwave-based wireless radiation networking protocol in these smartmeters).

There will surely be a very serious long-term health impact on every community that receives these smartmeter devices, and apparently you will not be allowed the option to opt-out either. Children and pregnant women may be most short-term vulnerable to these new risks, as well as those with reduced immune system function – but all of us will be negatively health effected, with progressively worse effects and exponentially increasing illness occurrance over time.

_______________________________________________________________________

The real problem is that the smart electric meters are a defacto rate increase, sometimes a couple of hundred dollars a month. People who use power during the day, like mothers, retired folks, the bedridden, all are going to be forced to pay a surcharge for peak power. This is a hidden rate increase not specifically addressed by the PUC. It is not completely offset by equally decreased off  hour rates, thus a de facto rate increase. It is an exorbitant rate, unaffordable for those who need power during the day.

­­­­­­________________________________________________________________________

What really bothers me about the new meters is their software – it was written by programmers who weren’t thinking about viruses and malware. There has been some chatter in the technical press about worms and viruses being written that infect the smart meters and propagate themselves from meter to meter, and then can shut off your power when they get the secret signal from a server somewhere in China or Eastern Europe… Could cause a lot of social disruption during a crisis?

_________________________________________________

We just had our meter changed to this ” smart ” meter. It blinks a very visible light. If you are inside with the lights and porch light off, you can see the light from its blinking I can see it from 100 feet away. My radio reception buzz’s periodically with a sound like Morse code on steroids and it does it on two different stereo systems at the same time that its happening with one of the systems not even on radio reception. I just went out to see how much it blinks and it blinks 3 times a second.

________________________________________________________

I have a similar problem. Smart meter was installed yesterday. When I came home, a GFI breaker was tripped. 

This is the first time this breaker (or any breakers) have tripped in over 2 years of living at my house. The box and all the breakers were installed new and permitted just over 2 years ago. 

No appliances are on this breaker, just lights, outlets, and a bathroom fan. Regardless, the breaker is tripping randomly (even in the middle of the night) with no lights, nothing plugged in, or anything on whatsoever. This is after I had the power company come out late at night to replace the meter, and listen to them over and over insist that the meter has nothing to do with the problem. I understand that in theory an upstream source (the meter) should not affect the breaker, but nevertheless this does not explain the extremely improbable “coincidence”.