Ohio Supreme Court Drawn Into Magnetic Homes Case 462
The Ohio Supreme Court will decide if a builder will have to replace magnetized parts of two couples' homes, even though they signed a limited warranty which did not specifically cover replacing positively- or negatively-charged building materials. After moving into the homes the couples found that something was not quite right. Their TV screens were distorted. Cordless phones ran into interference. Computer hard drives were corrupted. Soon after, it was discovered that steel joists in the homes had become magnetized."
Re:I have to wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, something definitely seems fishy here. You have to have a really strong magnetic field to affect a hard drive from any distance. Are steel objects flying out of their hands and sticking to the corners of the room? And yes, magnetic fields should have zero effect on electronic equipment, unless it's moving (which creates an electric field). If the house is like those rotating restaurants, except much faster, and is spinning around a stationary phone, I can see how that would cause a problem...
Re:I have to wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
And yes, magnetic fields should have zero effect on electronic equipment, unless it's moving (which creates an electric field).
And guess what a computer hard drive does 5400 to 10800 times a minute.
Highly Suspect (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to kill a harddrive with a magnet? It basically requires passing a rare earth magnet closely over the platters several times before the data is reliably damaged and if they had that kind of magnetic fields it would cause much bigger problems. And while I don't know to much about the properties EM radiation, I believe that magnetic fields don't interfere with radio waves.
My guess is that its the steel beams themselves are causing interference with the phones, that they incidentally had hdd failures (they have lived there for like 6 years), and the the steel beams have slight magnetic field because a small amount of current is passing through them (electricians like to ground to steel beams instead of running a ground line back to power box and putting to ground their) and they blame that weak magnetic field for their problems.
This is all purely speculation because they don't give any real details about the field.
Re:I have to wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's surrounded by a Faraday's Cage... twice.
I am very familiar with the effects of strong magnetic fields. To get such an effect you would have to have an active wide-band transmitter (to affect TV's, computers and everything else that's claimed) and the power consumption of the house alone (if it's even possible to create a magnet that size with the amount of ferro-magnetic material available) would be through the roof. A magnet with that power would require supercooling and at least a couple of residential power supplies from the power company to magnetize the space of a large living room.
Re:Why replace? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary reads like BS anyway.
If they actually have magnetic mono-poles in their house they should sell them for millions of dollars, instead of complaining about it.
No one describes a magnet as "positively charged".
Also charge is an entirely different property than magnetism.
It seems far more likely the beams are not properly grounded and are possibly acting like an antenna, causing all kinds of interference.
And unless they mounted their hard drives onto the "magnetic" beams I seriously doubt the field is strong enough to affect them.
Finally I have to wonder how would these beams get magnetized?
Did the electrician wrap some power cables around it?
Re:Why replace? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad wiring, perhaps? Running electrical wires in close proximity to the steel joists could cause magnetization of the joists over time. Iron and its alloys are pretty easy to magnetize in that manner./quote
Last I checked we use alternating current in this country.