Imagine you’ve just spent a hefty sum of money to install new electrical equipment in your home. A new meter, fluorescent lighting and dimmer switches for all the incandescent lighting in your rooms. Then, one by one as the days go by, the lighting fixtures begin flickering and burning out as so do the dimmer switches. Now then, imagine suffering through weeks of having to repeat the process of setting up appointments with repairman, waiting for them to arrive, repair the work and leave. Yet each time they leave your home, the problems persist, lights continue to flicker and fail as do the switches and meanwhile your TV signals are constantly being disrupted. What would you do?
When people’s lives are inconvenienced and valuable time is lost by what is perceived as someone’s incompetence or mismanagement, law suites can and do occur. In this case, the contractor who performed the work was sued for supplying defective materials and faulty workmanship. The contractor had only recently begun working residential accounts, up until then street lighting had been their primary market.
It was then, that the law firm hired to defend the electrical contractor retained my company, Multi-Trade Associates, to work through the electrical defect issues and to prepare to testify in defense of the plaintiff’s charges of faulty workmanship and defective parts.
Meanwhile, during the time that the law suite was preceding, the home owner, now sitting in a home seemingly haunted by ghost, decided to try and resolve the problem by calling out the local power company for assistance. Once they arrived and made a survey of the situation they made one very important change, one that didn’t involve reworking any of the contractor’s original work. What they did was to move the pole mounted with the transformer 80-feet further away from the house. The burned out fixtures were replaced with new ones and from that time forward the nightmare for this home owner had vanished.
Well, even though when I arrive at the scene the situation appeared to have been resolved, it was still my duty to convince the courts that my client was not at fault.
It was during my study of the depositions, prior to a site inspection that I learned that by moving the power lines the problem had been corrected. I knew right awayat a powerful radio transmission was going to be the culprit in this case thanks to the years I spent building and installing ham radio equipment and my time working as a radio and telephone technician for the United States Forest Service. In fact, I remember making such a comment to my wife Barbara on my way out the door to do the inspection.
Sure enough, as I drove up the road to the home, there it was, a huge 40 foot in diameter empty round X-60 foot high water tank with several large radio transmitter antennae placed around the top. Next to the tank was an air-conditioned radio shack. Moving forward now was a simple matter of countering the plaintiff’s notion that the contractor had installed defective electrical hardware. It is a well understood fact that transmission sources can play havoc when power lines and structures are in close proximity. There are local building code regulations in almost every city that govern the positioning of radio transmission equipment near power lines. My talk with several neighbors confirmed this was still the case as they were still experiencing the same flickering lights and TV signal disruption.
The huge water tank being empty meant that it had created what is called a “frequency cavity” greatly amplifying the radio frequency power, perhaps as much as a thousand times. This loose power was being transmitted to the surrounding grounding system and onto the neighborhood power lines affecting the home owner’s electrical circuitry. End of story.