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."
I have to wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why replace? (Score:3, Interesting)
No shit.
The navy used to degauss whole fucking battleships in the second world war.
You can even buy commerical degaussing wands for repairing old crt deflection plates reasonably cheap, now that crt is essentially a dead technology. My old employer had several for just this purpose.
What I want to know is how the hell the joists picked up such a magnetic potential in the first place.
degauss it (Score:4, Interesting)
If its just a couple of beams, it can be degaussed using a arc-welded and a few wraps of the arc-welds cables around the beam. There is a more to the procedure but the tools are easy to obtain. Did this in the Navy, wrap a submarine in about 300 turns of cable and run a few thousand amps through them.
HDD BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why replace? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. I lined my last house with tongue and groove pine boards and noticed that adjacent boards contained slices through imperfections in the original trees. This is because the boards are produced, processed, transported and installed serially. So maybe the metal structural components of the house have a shared history? If they get heated in a foundry the magnetic poles will be free to align against the prevailing field, which could be quite strong if there is a lot of DC current around. Then they get stacked and installed in the house, still in the same orientation relative to each other.
Re:Why replace? (Score:5, Interesting)
And this would affect their hard drives and TV how, exactly?
Seriously, if the beams were magnetic enough to cause the claimed damage to the contents of the house, they wouldn't have been able to separate them from each other in this construction pile you've theoretically stacked up. They wouldn't even have been delivered, because they wouldn't have been able to scrape them off the forklifts, or lift them from the truck beds. Other vehicles passing them on the roads would have been stuck to the sides of their trailers. Once delivered, the carpenters' hammers would have flown through the air, heads permanently affixed to the beams.
Yes, they could be magnetic enough to disrupt a compass reading. The earth's field is maybe 60 microteslas, so it's not a high bar to pass. But strong enough to erase a bit in a hard drive? The coercivity of the media is about 1700 Oe for cobalt, which takes a lot stronger field than that.
Re:Why replace? (Score:4, Interesting)
A magnetized hull is detrimental to a number of electronic warfare devices. We're not so worried about mines, or even being detected, so much as we're concerned about the proper functioning of sonar, radar, gunplot, computers, etc ad nauseum.
I have little idea whether TFS and TFA are accurate portrayals of the situation in Ohio, but I can say that the ships I served aboard had some interesting anomalies in navigation gear, tracking gear, and computers when the hull was highly magnetized.
And, that doesn't touch on preservation. A steel hull, and an aluminum superstructure poses a real challenge in the prevention of corrosion. Shipbuilders use a bimetal thing to join the aluminum to the steel, but even so magnetic and electrical charges in the hull tend to cause problems. Electrical more than magnetic, but still, the magnetism is something that they take into account.
To bad I didn't really study all this stuff when I was in. I am merely aware of the concern that the ship's officers and the hull tech people had about this stuff.
TL/DR part - all that I'm certain of, is that we routinely passed through a degausing station when we returned to port. A couple times, we turned around and passed through it again.
Re:Why replace? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think checking alleged haunted houses for magnetic fields is standard procedure. The problem is, when they find the field, they decide it's evidence of paranormal activity.
Re:Why replace? (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet magnetic crane abuse. A crane with strong electromagnet instead of hook is normally used to transport beams and other heavy elements between storage and cargo, but the duration is not enough to magnetize the beams. But if the operator decided to "have some fun" and waved the electromagnet above the beams in one direction several times, or otherwise abused the process - say, moving the "head" over the same bundle of beams multiple times on return trip after loading a bundle on a trach and going back for another, they could have become magnetized.