When I was in my teens, I'd ride my bicycle down this hill directly under some very large distribution lines. When it rained, I would always get zapped by the screw on my brake lever.... That made me want to become an electrician
I was an electrician for the military for 14 years. The number one thing I learned was to always ground generators! In Iraq, a trailer mounted generator was blowing embers out of the exhaust pipe, so I sprayed the dry grass with a water hose. This stirred up the mosquitoes, and I wound up swatting at one on my head. I knocked my sunglasses off the top of my head. They landed underneath the trailer.... I crawled under to get them, bumped my head on the frame, and I got the hell knocked out of me.
@@mryoung8586 Ah yes grounding. My houses electrical system needs overhauling, the sockets have a ground connection however when I checked there is no ground cable connected anywhere and well touching any metal case of a device gives me a 60hz buzz. Yeah..
I know a guy who had a junk yard with a high tension (11kv) line running over it..he parked an old mobile crane beneath the lines with a longitudinally wound coil made using a large cast iron pipe as the armature he used a tapping switch connected to the coil tappings at the end of the pipe to correct the output voltage..the junkyard run on free but poorly regulated 240V for many years...he never got caught, the system was removed from service in 1993 when he sold the junkyard after almost 20 years..I got to see how the coil was wound when it was being scrapped (a lot of copper) It is a design I will never forget.....the site now sits vacant and overgrown.
I love your description.Thank you. What exactly was the design? Was the coil was wound on the cast iron pipe.Was the pipe hollow? Or was the coil wound on the cranes arm? How was the tap designed? You said a lot of copper.. about how many turns?
The guy knew what he was doing, and the power company just charged all the upstream customers for the "used electricity". He was effectively stealing from all the other power company customers lol. It surprises me that the power company never caught on. Could they not see that the power consumed by their power meters never adds up to the power transmitted out? Or perhaps the power he was using was so tiny that it fell within their margin of error?
@@xokelis0015 There is a HUGE amount of energy lost over transmission lines. Up to 5% of the power generated is lost over wires and through transformers. That's enough electricity lost to power Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama 4 times over. One man stealing electricity to power his junkyard business isn't even going to be noticeable. It would be the equivalent of scooping a shot glass sized cup of water out of an olympic sized swimming pool. There's just no way you could ever detect that.
@@mysterydude1 I get that its small potatoes, but people have clearly been caught stealing power so the power companies do have their ways. My point was that a device that is able to siphon power from the air, especially one that can siphon enough to power something useful (not charging your iphone), creates a power draw higher than the normal losses due to heat, and emf. So for those who claim that you are just capturing and not stealing, they're wrong.
As a home gamer you're usually better off with a tool that detects changing voltages through capacitive means. In the electrical trade they're known as a "volt tick" or ticker. They're basically high gain amplifiers with a light and speaker that go off above a certain threshold. Big Clive did a video on those maybe 6 months ago. It's good. Another arguably better option is to use a sensitive hall effect sensor because those have also become cheaply available. With one of those and a suitable microcontroller like and ESP32 you can put together a bluetooth connected sensor for both AC and DC current detection. That's how DC clamp meters work. To detect DC voltage without significant current flow one can use a JFET with its gate floating. The main trouble there is that low level static charges are all around us all the time so there may be too much noise for that to be useful. YMMV.
Years ago at a local landfill there were several boxes of these 8 or 10' florescent tubes removed from a supermarket that was being renovated. A couple friends and I decided to visit in the evening looking for bike parts for our go-carts.. when we noticed something flickering in the garbage pits.. was it some sort of radioactive stuff? Well, I figured it out right away, but my friends were losing their minds! Eventually I let them in on what was happening with the tubes and the 500KV transmission lines 60' overhead. We left that place with a lot of people left scratching their heads! Those tubes were up in trees and some buried one end in the dirt.. we had the service road under the power lines almost lit up for a 1/4 mile.. it looked eerie, because from a mile away they randomly flickered in pink, yellow and green light.
I still have a big box of those in my garage, new, I broke a few by "accident". What if I were to use four them as the poles in one of those square Chinese kites, do you think it would light up?
I'm going to tape some helium balloons to one and let it go at night, see if it lights up, I'll put a long string on it, so it doesn't float into a plane or anything, don't worry everyone.
Heard a story a very long time ago. A farmer or rancher had a field outlined in barbed wire, looped all the way back to the main gate. The story goes that one day he put his hands on both sides of the gate touching each end of the wire and discovered a shock. Don't recall any statement of voltages or anything else other than a shock. The story goes on to state that the power company had placed power lines NEAR his property. In court he claimed he was trying to dissipate the charge by using some sort of load, be it a light or a pump or something else. The power company wanted to charge him for stealing their electricity. And for those who don't know, pulling power from a magnetic field DOES take away power from the transmission line. In the end the court decided that if the power company didn't like the loss of electricity they could move their power lines some stated distance away from his property. After watching your video - by the way, thanks for an excellent presentation - I find it hard to believe the story I just related. Think I heard that back in the late 1970's. Like I said, it's been some times since hearing that story. What comment do you have if any?
I heard a similar story and that the owner of the powerline could not do anything about it. That is imho why this vid is slightly wrong, since it is not stealing if it is not illegal, merely harvesting from the surrounding fields. Dampening those is actually a good thing, imho.
@@donaldduck830 It may be your opinion, but your opinion is NOT law. Different jurisdictions have different Laws of course but in Europe it is illegal to harvest from power lines. The law has been tested and people have been convicted.
Can be true, because, with the barbed wire, he should have much thicker wire, than this thin wire in the video above; and the coil diameter was then also much bigger. So, he must had have way more amperes flowing through his barbed wire, by significant high voltage.
Back in high school, using an old aircraft VHF dipole on a broomstick that feed a very unoptimized coil, we used to pull some 3/4 inch arcs under a pair of large 750kV transmission lines that cross through my town. I stupidly fried my first multimeter trying to "measure" the induced voltage, it literally screamed with a brief continuity beep as it died - still haunts me. 😅 All the contraptions we made to pull power off those lines were just goofy experimental guesses. We barely understood Ohms Law and knew nothing of the difference between E and H fields. We'd always bring long fluorescent bulbs with us because they readily glow with a neat throbbing pattern from the strong ELF magnetic fields under those high tension lines. Good times! :-)
@@markkennard861 AC for sure on the lines passing through my town. That's why we could pull off energy and make sparks with our coils. The high voltage DC lines like you have are quite a bit more efficient because they don't have any dynamic magnetic fields coupling bits of energy into every conductive bicycle, sign, pipe, car, box, manhole cover, whatever that happens to be along their miles of path. Each of those tiny power losses really add up over long distances. HVDC is a more complex system. It has losses too, but parasitic magnetic coupling into random crap isn't one of them.
If had thought about that a little longer i would have come to the same conclusion. But a standard clip on amp meter does have a dc measurement so the magnetic field around dc cables can be induced into an inductor. As a Ham i have a ferrite that i can clip onto a coax feeder cable to measure radiated current in the shield.. often wanted to run a decent length of conductor under 110kv line and do some testing.. just to satisfy my own curiosity.
My father was an electrical engineer back in the 1940s and 1950s. He later opened a TV repair shop in California in the early 60s. He told me a story about a time when he strung wires under a high-tension powerline that ran across his backyard in Illinois. I don't know the details. Sorry. Long story, short. He powered the house for two years before the power company found out about it. He was a smart man. He designed equipment for the old AM music stations of that era. He invented many circuits for Ham radio operators. He even did some stuff for the Military. When he got caught with his " Free Energy" equipment, he got sued and had to pay back two years of estimated electric usage. Besides being an electrical genius, he was an asshole.
Meanwhile the family gets health problems from being under the power lines, and nobody sues the power company. Edit So I learned this wasn’t true. See my other post.
@@JP-wp1vi While such a thing isn’t impossible, I haven’t seen a technically feasible explanation for it, nor have I seen any statistically significant evidence to suggest it might actually happen. Assuming we’re not talking about RF burns but rather about lower-power electric field interactions with human tissue, I can only really see that sort of thing happening at much higher frequencies. Frequencies where a human body has multiple wavelengths inside them in order to span across some organ structure, or where the frequency matches up with some molecular resonance in a biological molecule. I’d be far more worried about cell-towers than mains frequency transmission lines.
There was a guy that got caught doing this on a nearby Indian reservation. He was lucky he didn't kill himself as he ran it directly into his panel unregulated.
Back in the 70s, there were these fellows that had an arrangement involving 55-gallon drums with wire coiled around them set up under high-tension power lines that ran through the hills in the middle of nowhere that powered a still. Since there was no fire, I don't believe they ever got caught! The only reason I knew about it was I lived on a small farm on a ridge top a few miles away and once in a while on a still summer night, I would get a whiff of that distinctive smell of the mash cooking. In those days, everybody kept their mouths shut!
Really fighting that inverse cube law there. If you aim for AM radio stations you might be able to get more power, even though they’re much further away. A mW or two is enough for a low-power microcontroller circuit waking from sleep with a PFET circuit running off a capacitor, energy harvesting is real neat for distributed sensor applications.
He should be able to couple a lot of power if he impedance matched to the load. It's better to try to capture the electric field with a resonant electrically small straight antenna. The efficiency of the antenna will be only a few percent, but the electric field is much higher than the magnetic field due to high voltage, low current on power lines. Someone else's father in these comments got into trouble powering their home by coupling to the electric field wirelessly.
This crossed my mind too,… but what I’d be interested in knowing, is what would happen if you put a whole bunch of these joule thief’s, subsequently, into series and parallel circuits, in something like a server rack, and used a highly optimized, commons antenna to ‘feed’ them? Also, what happens if you do the same, but attuned to natural background radiation of space, or if you could integrate a processing system to attenuate the whole system optimally, as desired? I guess, you’d have more than one mega ‘joule thief,’ but potentially, one hell of a sophisticated radio telescope antenna, component, by dually applying it to that end.
I occasionally gave some casual thought to these issues when reading electrical theory, but it was very nice to see them demonstrated experimentally, and with explanations I could more or less understand. The comments were interesting as well, and sometimes a hoot!
A few decades ago a friend of mine lived about 200 metres from an AM Radio transmitting tower. He had run loops of wire around his fence line and used the electricity generated to trickle charge a car battery which he used as part of his Ham radio setup. It seemed to keep the battery constantly topped up. I think he managed to save about $1 a month in electricity costs. 😀
2 года назад+23
I lived about 10km away from a AM station and a simple untuned transistor circuit worked to hear radio. So it definitely could have worked.
@@jkmacgyver I've heard stories about people who live close to high power transmitters. Like 500 kilowatts. Barbed wire fences would vibrate from the signal and one who was standing near one of the fences could hear the broadcast.
@@jkmacgyver I know, I have seen reports about tools and cooking spoons demodulating AM. Our transmitters have shut down in 2015 I believe, only DWD, ORF and SRF sometimes broadcast on AM SW, with a few smaller stations.
My grandfather had a light in a shed in his field that was powered by the top wire of the fence that ran about 150 feet under a 15kv powerline. It was a low power bulb but it did light up and stayed lit all the time
I discovered early in my career as an electrician that a neon screwdriver was pretty useless at telling you whether a circuit was live or dead. If the wire you are testing ran through trunking with other cables the neon would light even though there was no voltage. Also if you remove the lid of a trunking and hold the screwdriver next to the insulated wires it lights up. After discovering this I threw the neon screwdriver in the bin but did wonder about any potential uses.
Since you are working with low frequency of 60 Hz, you could use a core of laminated iron. It would increase the inductivity per turn. In exchange you could reduce the amount of turns and take thicker wires to reduce the resistance. This could increase the sensitivity of the coil by alot.
I read comments here just to find out if somebody has already written this. Using ferrite core for LF is totally unefficient and I would really like to know measured values with the iron one.
You clearly put a lot of work into the project and the video - kudos! Ah, but the dangers of EMFs!! I started at a Fortune 100 electric company as a comm tech in 1984. Very soon after I started the warning came out of electrical workers having double the risk of two nasty brain cancers - gliomas and astrocytomas - compared to average Joes. D'oh! The finding, from data mining in various studies, drove two decades of EMF regulations, particularly in Europe. Around the turn of the century a much larger study found no correlation; the previous one had been a data cluster. That made me feel better. As I became more senior more and more of my job centered around protection systems (think of circuit breakers that coordinate with the far end of 200 mile lines) for 69KV to 500KV. The three 500KV substations in my AOR were becoming very familiar to me. Touching anything grounded - poles and fences - in most of the yard produced an unpleasant shock. Doing it under the capacitor banks produced a memorable experience! Now in retirement, I am enjoying great health with no sort of advers^&%^()*&)*(#&@)(&@#)(&)(
The FCC doesn't regulate below 300 kHz but the IEEE C.95 recommends a 1800 V/m and 0.35 Tesla limit at low frequencies. I can see how the near-field of power lines could get above that limit, but not for the general population. I participated in the 2005 C.95 standard and you're right, technicians have a demonstrated higher risk. So do Scandinavians, I don't know why.
Back in the sixties there was a guy who lived near high tension power wires. He filled a 55 gallon drum with nuts and bolts and wrapped wire around it and used the power it sucked away from the lines. The power company sued, and the court ruled that even though there wasn't a direct wire connection, he was still "taking" the power without paying and ordered him to stop.
@@1st_ProCactus No; at best, it's an air-core transformer. The one made in this video has too much impedance to be useful, nevermind the fact that you won't glean much power from a single conductor as opposed to a coil.
I took 3 years of electronics training in a tech school. I was with you up until 4:11. Lol. It was always my lack of aptitude for the math that held me back. Great video!!
Many years ago we were camping in The “los Algodones” sand dun dunes. And within 200 feet of some very high voltage transmission lines feeding San Diego from Arizona I was able to light a 4 ft fluorescent lamp by holding one hand in the palm of my hand and the other simply in the air. By the next day/ nite there were other campers running coax cable to their camps. Needless to say, after some of them wiring their whole fixture up, several got tagged. By the weekend there was chain-link and Barbed wire fencing around the towers. lol
Yeah nobody cares about the lightbulb demonstration which is pretty cool, or even using a millionth of a watt to run some sensor, but don't take any real amount of power, that's not cool
@@thewhitefalcon8539 Do you have steel power poles on the 14KVA (+ - ) ? If not, read later. Try sinking a ground rod near said pole, use #6 or better to your home Then for the other lead to your home “uffer” Every situation is different but I was able to Pull 2 amps with various voltages. That is your ground potential and can be deadly, so be safe.
My grandpa had a rig that pulled power from right before his meter. He had a master switch in the basement that would switch between the meter and the 2 120vac lines that feed the meter. He kept quiet about it and we didn't find out about it until we were replacing the old screw in fuse panel, w a proper □D breaker panel. Even when they put in a new "smart meter" no one said a word about the extra cables running thru the meter box. We don't use it any longer as the wires are old (but very heavy gauge) aluminum type, and we did not connect them to the new panel. The switch is a huge knife style switch from a steel refinery where he used to work. I've been thinking about using it hooked up to a genny to disconnect mains and switch to 220vac genny. Luckily the transformer is on a power supply line located in a back field surrounded by about 10 acres of wood lot and a .22lr is just right for blowing the fuse to the transformer, and power company has to have us open gates for access. So rewiring if needed is relatively safe. This is in nw Arkansas and most of our neighbors have the same setup. It's been 4 generations of my family there now, and we have never been questioned about it. It used to drive my grandmother crazy because he would switch to the free power legs when she was running the stove and 3 ovens! Wich would reset her radio/timer. I remember one Xmas he bought her 4 wind-up timers for the kitchen 3 for ovens 1 for stove top. I thought she would be pissed but she LOVED THEM! I don't think she even ever asked why he would goto basement every afternoon and then the power would drop out and come back on one fuse at a time. Original don't ask don't tell policy lol. And since all the neighbors had same system the power company must have just assumed the people on that rural route were just very very frugal. Also most neighbors still run wood burning stoves for heat in winter. He also had a hot water pre heater (an old hot water tank on its side with insulation removed, painted matte black and a curved aluminum reflector behind it). In summer u didnt even need the real water heater running and in winter it had a bypass valve plumbed in (permanently) w a set of coils that ran thru the sides of the chimney that was fed by the wood burner. There is still a black bakelite dial (pulse) telephone on the wall, it no longer works and says property of bell systems on a plate on the back, apparently back in the day the phone company owned the actual phones and charged a small fee to rent them. Until the early/mid 1990s it was a party line. To call them I would dial their number let it ring 4x hang up and then call back, and my grandma would answer. On occasion if you were jaw flapping a long time a neighbor would pickup their phone and politely ask you to clear the line so they could make a call. Thank god for good country neighbors! They have always been like extended family members. Which is a good thing to have when you live on a mountain 45 min from town on a dirt road. No one drives 4wd bullshit. If road washed out or became un-passable u just stuck the triangle 🔺️ on back of tractor and took that to town (the tractors are all 4wd or tracked). The main road is paved now and they have a spur road that goes directly into town and the highway. Also pro-tip if u don't want to pay high fuel prices u can buy red dyed farm fuel (diesel is red gasoline is green) and run it thru a 30 gallon drum packed w charcoal (broken up hardwood is the best and the guy w the charcoal converter (a giant oven) basically gives away the fines (tiny peices and dust) if u help him empty the oven and clamps (a clamp is a big hole in the ground that u stack wood into then cover w mud/clay to make charcoal). Can't wait to go back this fall!
A friend had some high voltage power lines running across his property (93K I believe) and I told him to do something similar. He attached it to the end of about 30 feet of bamboo lashed together. It was anchored to the roof is a shed he had standing out in the field under the power lines. The bamboo pole naturally waves side to side and it generates enough voltage to power some LED bulbs and a WiFi access point!
that stuff at the end where you charge the capacitor from 5 ft away was amazing. and where you made that metal circle spin and ring on the floor, that would legit get you burned at the stake a couple hundred years ago. so cool
@@mcmerry2846 😂 maybe. could go either way. sometimes it hard to tell which genocidal space demon is making the magic. zues? or Cthulhu or the Christian one. I imagine the verdict depends heavily on their first impression of your personality lol
3:57 “slightly more scientific approach” ?! LOL!! Bro my brain has already been fried!! The first 4 minutes are full of science! Who are you? I respect your knowledge 🧠 👏👏👏
Wow, an honest free power video on YT.. that is rare, but great work. Something I did a few decades back that got me a few of solid watts of free power was to tap a pole ground wire that stood in my front yard, I ran it through a fairly heavy gauge cable then up near the shed it went through the filament winding of a large valve television transformer before continuing up the garden to where my air conditioner drain exited from the house. Here I dug and lay in in a large sheet of copper plate from an old water heater which made an excellent low impedance ground, and so the neutral tie point at the pole that supplied several properties along with a Macdonalds restaurant on the opposite side of the street preferred my current custom path to the permanently wet soil (irrigated from the AC drain) versus the bone dry ground around the pole. I rectified the primary side of the transformer (working as a secondary) and fed it through a buck boost regulator with some crude neon and zener clamping at the input, that gave me a fairly stable output voltage, only endlessly varying in its current delivery. It changed minute by minute and with the seasons, the time of day, the day of the week and the outside temperature, at best in summer I could get a solid half an amp at 12V (around 6 watts) and it would bounce all over the place, at other times it would drop to a few milliamps with the odd spike (probably motor start loads). I ran the final DC output through an analogue amp meter and To turn it into something useful it trickle charged a large SLA battery that ran some low voltage lights for blackouts and a UPS, later also a couple of LED night lights running at around 5mA each. It ran for at least ten years until I sold up there and in that time it never got discovered or disconnected by the power company, and it was in deliberate plain view. They probably thought I was just sharing their earth stake for safety reasons... lol. In essence I was improving their supply quality to the tune of about a thousandth of a percent.
Man this is interesting to watch. The biggest reason you don't see any reasonable power around the subs/lines is because they design it that way. Could you imagine every fence, every car driving by all the sudden picks up a noticable amount of current rolling down the street? Would be a problem. (i mean it actually is a problem, fences around substations have to be carefully grounded because they WILL induce noticable and significant current, especially if a fault ever occurs. In reality, this is actually an extremely important effect to consider in power transmission systems and makes our jobs a lot harder. Those massive HV transmission lines aren't spread out for voltage reasons(the big insulators that hold them apart are all we need), they are spread out so far because with the amount of current we put on them the inductive coupling shown here across the whole length of wire can have some significant implications on both voltage at the recieving end and current capacity of the line.
Growing up our landlord was a coal fired power plant and our house was inside the fence (in retrospect they probably should not have been renting that out lol) utilities were of course included but I could see this affect being the reason behind a lot of BSODs.
Bring some long florescent lights with ya next time and play StarWars with your friends after dusk! (Just don't actually hit your "lightsabers" together.) 😅
Oh yes!!!! What fun!!! Encourage all folks not to mess around near to HV lines….one slip and you will really be toast…I worked for a while in a live 400kV outdoor sub on the coast and just walking under the busbars was enough for me 😎😎 ⚡️ ⚡️⚡️
@@adrianshingler9783 I don't think anyone is recommending going inside a substation. Just going underneath the big transmission lines that are high up off the ground
@@thewhitefalcon8539 my simple safety message is this…..steer well clear of any HV power lines/substations regardless of the distances and voltages involved. The power transfer will be very limited in any event, it’s simply not worth the risk.
@@adrianshingler9783 Walking on a trail that crosses underneath transmission lines is not dangerous at all. (At least not as far as we know. Might be found to cause cancer in the future)
cool to see it explained, I was playing around with something similar after I discovered wires in my old workplace were live even though they were unplugged, took me a while to work out that it was a very small charge and not dangerous but still quite a surprise when you are trying to trace live wires in a cupboard and they all test live even though you know for a fact only one is switched on.
@@calthorp lol not good is it, when your test screwdriver is lighting up all over the place....then later the volt meter comes out and you think ....Ooh good grief its the transformer effect...lol
From an EE - this is good solid EE stuff, thanks for uploading it. Might be interesting to stand under >500kV lines, where the three phases are roughly in line vertically with the lowest line much closer, to see how much power you can pick up from the magnetic field. Also, I have heard of people taking a 'zap' from their cars parked under such lines, presumably as a result of capacitive coupling of the unbalanced e-fields. Electric fields and magnetic fields together - now you are talking power!
I grew up around some high voltage transmission lines, and would ride my bike under them frequently. When riding under them I could easily feel 60hz by lightly rubbing my thumb on the metallic part of the handle bars. Getting "zapped" sounds a bit like a dramatic person felt the same thing when brushing their car door. The sensation is painless. Just a buzzing feeling at the interface of skin and metal.
Wish I was an EE - honestly, I started learning Real Electronics when I watched PCB lectures about twisted Wire Pairs and how that everything is a transmission line. Electrical energy is flowing around the wires, something that was high-lighted by Veritasium last year, and the youtube meltdown following that video.
@@Dazza_Doo I took a 2 year EE course, and it wasn't difficult, but they definitely exaggerated about how "in-demand" my skills would be in reality. Still, I'm glad I did it.
I just discovered your channel from the CNC video and it's awesome ! I had this kind of idea of stealing electricity but I never thought about making it and I didn't think about the resonant frequency of such a circuit.
Thank you for doing this, I've had this thought for many years since reading about Nikola Tesla's work and sitting at a train station with a nearing dead source of entertainment and no ability to charge. Then wireless charging came along and confirmed my thoughts but been somewhat lacking of focus to play enough to try it. You're awesome
In olden times a person would stand under a high voltage transmission line with a fluorescent tube and light it up. That's the electric field gradient where your device intercepts the magnetic field. Some youtube videos exist about doing that but I haven't found one with sufficient quality to recommend it.
I held an 8-foot fluorescent light bulb high overhead, pointing up at the local very-high-voltage lines, one night a few years ago. It lit very dimly. To look impressive, you'd have to do it away from suburban homes and do it on the night of a new moon or when the Moon is not overhead and take a photo using long exposure. (Maybe higher voltage somewhere else would have lit it brighter.) (Adding aluminum foil to the high end might have collected more current and increased the brightness, but I didn't try it.) If it lit brightly I would be tempted to attach it to a stake and leave it there.
Excellent primer on AC power and induced fields using coils… young engineers take note. I use a portable am radio to detect noisy power lines that interfere with my amateur radio station … same principal at higher frequencies
Using your coil/led sniffer outside of a circuit panel or power boxes at work is outside the metal boxes meaning any fields powering your coil and led are on the ground field and most likely stray neutral floating fields and not the power fields around the mains power cable conductors (inside the box behind the breaker lid/cover) as this acts like a faraday cage shield. Remove the panel lid and then try your coil, and be ready to have your led circuit make s’mores.
I heard a while back that in British Columbia they have Hydro Electric dams with high-voltage lines to the grid. These lines are in very remote locations. A Certain Bike gang have located these lines and wrapped wires around them producing their own electricity. They haves buried shipping containers and can now grow their own Dope. BC Bud is the brand name.
In CA, Chinese and Mexican drug dealers steal power all the time (* info from a Sheriff deputy who went after them - Chinese got a lawyer, sued for “invasion of privacy” when Sheriff dept used infrared scanners to detect unusually “hot” basements (growing rooms); they then asked power company for info about “ mansions” or houses with more-than- usually high power usage. One outfit buried 6 school buses to hide their “heat signature”. -- then CA legalized recreational use of marijuana, then a few Years later China-Mexico brought Fentanyl! ( The love of money if the root of all evil)
I always wondered about this, could you take electricity pre-meter using the magnetic fields that are generated by the AC mains. Thanks for making this video as it answered my question. I was expecting that it would generate more though
My knowledge of electromagnetism is limited to what was taught in my engineering physics 2 course so this is beyond what i know, but you are explaining it in a way that i can mostly follow along
I've overheard that farmers used old bed springs under high tension power lines to heat chicken coops for free. They were cough because the power company could detect additional loads of leakage on the lines and was forced to pay up for damages and power theft. I doubt powering up an LED or even charging a phone while doing this would cause an investigation into theft.
Sounds like a pub story; The case against: transmission lines work by having fields which cancel out very close to the line, so coupling is very difficult, unless you can get very close to the lines. Air breakdown voltage is around 3kV/mm, or 30kV/cm, so when you are close enough to couple to the field, you risk a flash-over, and death, or if you are lucky, merely permanent life-changing burns. Heating requires at least hundreds of watts to make any difference to even a small container, and chicken houses are not well insulated in general. If they were well insulated, the chickens would heat the coop with their own body heat. Chicken coops (well, the one I had at least) had separate compartments for each hen, with some bedding in them, so the warmth of the animal was sufficient. Is there are case for? Do you have a reference?
Every time someone post one of these free energy from power lines videos the farmer and the bed springs comes up… I’ve heard that one before the internet was around … next round is on me mate
This is how security access cards and FOBS work. The card reader puts out EMI , a coil in the card amplifies the EMI through capacitance, when the charge gets high enough, it activates the transmitter in the card, which puts out the signal to be read by the card reader. Pretty cool
In my city electrical poles are very near to buildings. On the third floor electrical wires are near the porch. Some people use umbrella frames to steal the electricity.
The power loss from the mains is detectable by the power company. They can even localize it. So while it's fun for lighting up an LED or powering some small device, if you draw anything significant this way, they'll come down on you pretty hard. That said, I think that if they don't want people receiving their magnetic fields, they should be on the hook for keeping the fields on their own property.
Sounds like you have shares in a power company! Next you'll be telling us it's possible to tell if you're watching telly without a licence, just by parking a van up the street with a TV aerial on top 😂😂😂
@anothersquid I should hope so! But in Britain it's a criminal offence not to pay the licence fee, which costs something like £180 a year last time I checked, and is forced upon all households in the UK, which funds the whole of the BBC and all of its offshoots worldwide, as well as 80% of its bast4rd offspring regardless of whether or not they show commercials (e.g Channel 4, FilmFour). You do get a £12/year discount if you're blind though 🤣 They used to park up their 'detector vans' in streets all around England, as recently as the early 2000s, which were literally just transit vans with a TV aerial crudely bolted to the roof, pretending to sniff out anyone using an unlicensed television. I know this sounds like surrealist comedy, but I assure you it's true - they really did it, for decades. Then sometime around 2004, long after most people had cable and satellite, they changed their advertising campaign to "We don't need detector vans anymore, because now we have this new thing called a list", because people kept laughing at them and slamming the door in their face. I still have never paid one, but they've literally sent people to jail not doing so, on a great many occasions.
I remember a story of a farmer running a parallel cable to a high voltage line on his field. With a suitable transformer he was able to extract some useful power. Capacitively coupled in that case.
There is DC in the air, 100V per meter. Very low current, but it's there. Also the ground carries currents: bury two earth rods as far apart as possible, and some power will be found between them.
actually I remember in the 80s, we have 22kv lines above the standard 240 3 phase on the streets. They arrested some people who had built a transformer in the roof and were growing....that stuff in the house using stolen electricity
Farmers in NZ used to power their electric fences by stringing collector wires alongside power lines. When. They figured out how to power their houses and cowsheds too the power board started picking up losses significant in their grid. And shut them down. Your aerial is too short for the frequency.
What's the wavelength of full wave 60 hz antenna? lol 300k m/s / 60 = 5000m ... this antenna appears to be about 20 cm long, so I believe it is 1/25000 of the wavelength.
Over a years time, how much electricity can you recover and place into batteries for use? Standard family home, in a median market and collectors set up in optimal places. If your paying for it, it is not stealing. You can't get to net zero in anything, but there may be at least maintenance charge built up so your operating cost go down. Pennies over time become dollars.
Your videos should be a must watch for al students. I like how conceise, objective, and very very breve are your explanations. It's exactly the amount I like. I keep pausing your videos al the time because I need time to process the info you put on-screen. I learn so much from your videos. I have a question. Are you good in programming arduino ? Or python?
3:35 "...but it is electricity..." This is the point of view of the famous Nikola Tesla, when he proposed "powering the world" with one or more transmission towers. Perhaps he meant powering the world's wristwatches (but explicitly not your air conditioner). Eco-mentals also adopt the same "but it is electricity" when they propose spending vast resources to "harvest" inconsequential amount of electrical power from such nonsense as pedestrians walking on piezo-electrical sidewalks. Same with the utterly-idiotic Solar Roadways nonsense, burying solar panels below traffic. Numbers matter, as you've been very clear here, explicitly defining the magnitude of the power. Nicely done. Cheers.
During a rainy season, When I was crossing a railway track holding an umbrella fully open above my head, I noticed a tiny continues spark between my thumb and the umbrella shaft as I stood on the tracks (There was a buzzing sound, that's what made me notice). The high voltage power lines for the train was passing above me. At that time I too thought whether it was possible to harness this "free-energy". Free in the sense 'free for anyone to use'.
Train electrification is typically 16 Hz (in Europe) and high voltage around 60 kilovolts. Because there is no parallel but opposite phase conductor, the magnetic and electric fields will not be canceled in the vicinity.
@@thomasmaughan4798 NYC area train power gets fun. NE Corridor has 25Kv and 12Kv on overheads(also at 25hz or 60hz), Metro North has trains that can run on those overheads or on 750VDC third rails as Grand Central is third rail.
60 Hz (or 50 Hz in Europe) is a very low frequency for a core consisting of ferrit. Wouldn't it be more effective to use an iron or steel core for the coil instead?
The ferrite he used in this video is optimized for low frequencies, I think. I've seen some ELF stuff done with huge coils wound around DIY steel laminate cores built by bundling lengths of steel stock (like 1" by several feet, 1/8" thick). The individual pieces are coated with a nonconductive paint/epoxy/whatever to minimize eddy currents.
@@flapjack9495 most ferrites were more permeable than steel. Ferrites do not use any "paint/epoxy/whatever" to adress eddy current issues. Ferrites were nonconductive by themselves, just like metal oxide ceramics were non conductive. Non conductive coating is verry common in transformer sheet metal core
You could definitely get far more power from a radio station with the right circuit, but you'd need to build a new device that's optimized to resonate at the station's frequency.
It's an extremely tiny load on the AC system - probably too small to even be measured. The magnetic fields are radiated regardless, but without being captured by a device like this, they're just potential energy that goes back into the system.
It is a bit of both. Most of this radiated energy goes into space or is absorbed in the ground as heat. Not much, but more than zero. If the amount you absorb is less than what the Earth absorbs, the net effect is beneficial. But if your collection is more efficient than Earth, it will be felt as a slight load. Since this circuit is resonant, if you are not drawing power from it, then it will actually return some slight power to the grid.
A very perceptive question. At long distances from transmission lines, the fields cancel out, so there is no far-field, hence no radiation. At short distances, there is a near-field which can be coupled to, which is not fully cancelled out, so some power can be collected, although not a great deal of power unless you get very close, or have an enormous sensor. Some power is also always lost in the permittivity and permeability of the area around the transmission line, as the EM fields try to re-arrange any nearby molecules just a little, which is also one reason why overhead lines may not be insulated, they are more efficient that way.
In the early 1900's some farmers ran an insulated wire down a fence line under or adjacent to a major power line and around the section to the farm house where the wire began. They ran the farm house on the powering, the lights and a radio. Ron W4BIN
I live within 100 metres of high voltage transmission lines. You know, the big cross-country ones. I wonder if it's possible to make this experiment a little bigger and set something up to charge batteries with 'free' power. I think the transmission lines are 66 thousand volts. Something on a wooden pole to get it closer to the lines but not close enough to get electroboomed.
@@Chimonger1 which is still a conductor of electricity. The fence acts as a “half/shitty faraday cage” but it will still block some of the electromagnetic waves
@@Coolgiy67 I thot chain link should surely block EMFs, but had heard so many saying to use very close-knit mesh, like window screen, or even solid sheets of metal. There’s also conductive paint (spendy) that gets grounded by embedding a wire into it…it used to only come in black, but, any other paint can go on top of it, protecting the layer of conductive paint. For doing just a room, I’d likely use the paint, then hide it under light paint. But if redoing exterior of house as we’d like, I’d go for aluminum window screen, or maybe 1/2” mesh, as much less costly, & much easier to handle, & can layer over new insulation, under siding…& use a boat-grounding thing…I think those are zinc…they are just a lump or disk of metal you can connect to the grounding cord, & set under the crawlspace on the dirt. Make it easy to reach, because, eventually, those need replaced, same as the grounding rod for the house Mains panel.
@@Chimonger1 it doesn’t block all. For a faraday cage to work it has to be fully surrounding the thing it’s trying to protect from the emi and even still some will still get through. If you watch a video from professor lewin he shows that it makes the am radio stop working but the mike to the room still works.
@@Coolgiy67 If that, then, what are folks s’posed to do, the protect at least a space in home that reliably might protect themselves during rest, or, protect their electronics?
@7.40 I love the coil plugged into AC wall current laying in water on the concrete! If you're going to play with Electricity (and it starts to get boring), you might as well add some excitement!🤣🤣🤣 Cool Video! Ya'll Take Care and be safe, John
I grew up in a rural community, our neighbours had 765kv transmission lines across their property. Needless to say our neighbour was able to erect a electric fence for their cattle by extending the wire in parallel with the towers. Those things crackled and buzzed like crazy even when it didn't rain.
,hello I do the same , very high voltage line , on a hot day there no need to to tell the cattle its on , had one line for 20 years never connected to a electric fence powered unit, ireland not the best place to try to do this type of experiments ,
I was OIC in charge of a USGOV HF radio transmission facility in the Philippines….many moons ago. The antenna field was about 85 acres of land that gave home to about 40 antennas of differing shapes, sizes and in compass bearings from 0 degrees azimuth, all the way back around to 360 degrees once again. The antenna field was home to a number of farmers who would raise crops of rice and teams of caribou, who were the “engines” that drove the plowing of the fields. The farmers were technically not allowed to occupy the antenna field, but as long as they stayed out of my way, I stayed out of theirs. To my point….all of the grass and mud nippa huts had free lighting at night, which consisted of four-foot florescent light tubes (unconnected at both ends of the tube) that glowed because they siphoned enough electricity to make the phosphorescent coating in the tubes to glow. The only downside was that there was no way to turn off the light off at bed-time. I figured I could afford to lose a few watts from the original 50KW the transmitter was putting out. Oh….somewhere in time I found out they were using fluorescent tubes that had been stolen from US base supply warehouses, and that is when I stomped my foot and made them pay for the tubes, or be kicked off the field. They grudgingly agreed. At least the tubes lasted for many years, so I wasn’t all grinch about it.
Word of advice, instead of Ferrite, use a powdered iron core. Ferrite is conductive and designed to absorb power for RFI and electrical noise suppression. This converts the energy into heat and reduces the output. A powdered Iron core on the other hand is designed to be magnetic, but have very little parasitic losses. This is the material used in Switch Mode Power Supply transformers. It looks like ferrite, but the difference is conductivity and thus the amount of power absorbed as heat.
No, he should be coupling to the electric near field, not the magnetic near-field. The power company transports power via the electric field with as little energy as possible in the magnetic field.
@@chrisfuller1268 The electric field is only present in non insulated overhead wires as underground wires and insulated overhead wires are either coaxial, or twisted with the neutral so the field is very small. The current from coupling is very small unless you have a mile of uni-nsulated fence near high tension lines.
@@isettech there is no electrical power distribution infrastructure which uses coaxial wire or twisted pair. I worked as an electrical engineer in power distribution design early in my career. Where are you getting your information?
Now try by capacitive coupling. Using myself as a capacitor I can just put my hand around cable with 230V mains flowing through it and see the LED faintly glow. (Meter shows 11V, if I increase impedance to 1GOhm, it's even 76V!) How my circuit works: ~100nF output cap, one side attached to earth ground. The other side of output cap has a diode (1N4448) to my body (so current can only flow from myself into the output cap), then another diode from earth ground to myself (so current can only flow from earth ground to myself). Now somebody has to try that with a tinfoil umbrella under a power line.
Would have been interesting to see it in the power range of a few Watts and actually measuring the "theft". How can it affect the transmitter if the receiver oscillates at the same frequency? Wouldnt the receivers magnetic lines add to the existing ones, magnifying the total amount of flux present?
You're a real (Nerd) in a good way.Your understanding of math skills are far superior to the average person .I,m trying to understand this but half of it is over my head .We all have strengths and weaknesses. I just squeezed by in math class but once you're out of High School or College we usually only need the basics of addition,subtracting, multiplying and division to balance a monthly/yearly budget ect..But great work.I was always amazed how far short wave radio signals can travel so far across countries in the right conditions.
A guy in Australia did this under the power lines on his property with buried coils. The power company detected the theft and I think the fine was not insubstantial.
@@nickcoppard5335 you are stealing electricity. By drawing power from the coil, you are pulling energy from the magnetic flux, which in turn pulls energy from the primary current source. This is exactly how a transformer works. If you pull energy from the secondary side, the primary side energy input increases!
This is the only totally correct video I have seen on RUclips about "free power". Your research is thorough and conclusions are accurate. I just don't understand why you use ferrite for the core instead of soft iron. On 60 Hz soft iron seems a better conductor for magnetics.
Avoiding cancellations and getting a good coupling is difficult when the transmitter is a straight wire and the receiver is a coil. By tuning the coil to resonate at 60Hz, seems that you're collecting more weak radiated VVVLF EM energy than by the magnetic induction used in a transformer. Maybe running a single strand along a length of an unpaired live cable will give better coupling, especially if that was looped with the other side of the loop far away.
The tale I heard was a rancher had property with a very long border which a power line ran along. So he put up a fence on the property line with an electric fence wire that was actually set up to convert the magnetic field from the power line to AC.
Was ordered 55 years to go to a 18 Acer farm and help . There to remove 6 phone poles. And cable to barn. In the barn was a dyna motor. (All scraped) The lines went in 3 loops on the length of poles..Near by was. A power co high power transmission(dormant) line in use in the 40.s and 50/60s now moth balled. The neighboring farm folk told us the barn had lights when the local power was out.. but being a ham it looked to me more like a radio xmiter for 160 meters .long gone is the owner. Could this be similar?
I am already thinking about the applications for these. I would be impressive if you could build one powerful enough to say trickle charge a cell phone or a radio.
Try this under a high tension line. Stick a copper pipe into the ground so that it stands as high as you are tall. (Better to make the tip pointed, use a screw) Next; stand or sit on a sturdy plastic pail next to copper pipe, but stay below the height of the pipe. While you are insulated from ground, reach up and place your finger just above the pipe’s tip. You will draw an arc, probably about 1/4 inch long *through your finger, to the pipe.* In this video you are using Joule thief through induction (Electro Magnetic Fields) it is better to use an Electro Motive Force (Voltage) siphon.
Would the power lines have a slight drop in power or is it purely from magnetic flux? If so I guess it's not really stealing as it's a wasted bi-product anyway lol
I'd like to see you test under the large 50kvolt transmission lines that ho from sub station to sub station. There are usually up on very large steal towers.
I’m putting a giant copper coil onto my trailer now so I can park under a power line and charge my coach batteries. Thanks for the tip! I can’t believe didn’t even think of this! I already thought about designing a balloon to generate power using the Earth’s own voltage differential, but this is significantly cheaper.
Reminds me of what my dad told me, he has a colleague who is from kazakhstan, he told them that his parents or grandparents would literally throw a metal hock up to a power line (it was rural btw) with a metal wire attached to get electricity whenever they needed it, i dont know if it they were high voltage cables (unlikely considering they would need to use a transformer), but still impressive to need to risk your life to get power.
Can I ask what may be a stupid Question pal?? What u did neat the end of the video was to plug into the mains?? That was interesting to see it shift metal on the floor. I knew nothing about this stuff before beginning a new career in the electronics field. I know nothing really my friend but ur videos are giving me a whole new appreciation for Electricity and the electronics field tbh.. Thanks for all these videos man. I'm really enjoying learning new things. I'm the guy who is about to embarlk on his biggest proiject ever by building my own CNC Router.. It probably would've been a lot cheaper to buy one straight out of the box, plug and play if u will, but where's the fun and games in that.. LOL. Ur videos are awesome dude. Do u have any more videos on CNC mahines? I need a lotta help with the electronics. I'm going to use Arduino to run the whole thing. I have bought the CNC Shield and I have 5 X TB6600's but I'm lost as to how to connect them to the Arduino and that tyoe of thing. I got those smaller drivers in a small kit with another Shiled, Uno board and those little purple coloured Stepper drivers. I cannot for the life of me recall the number on them.. LMAO. U can see now how dumb I really am when it comes to this stuff but I will not be deterred my bro. I'm pushing ahead with the build and please God I don't burn my house down.. My workshop is my Garage..lol.. Happy Xmas and best of everything in 2023 pal,, Salute from IRELAND!
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
When I was in my teens, I'd ride my bicycle down this hill directly under some very large distribution lines. When it rained, I would always get zapped by the screw on my brake lever.... That made me want to become an electrician
So, did you?
@@cyberp0et yep!
@@mryoung8586 How do you like it? What are some things you've learned?
I was an electrician for the military for 14 years. The number one thing I learned was to always ground generators! In Iraq, a trailer mounted generator was blowing embers out of the exhaust pipe, so I sprayed the dry grass with a water hose. This stirred up the mosquitoes, and I wound up swatting at one on my head. I knocked my sunglasses off the top of my head. They landed underneath the trailer.... I crawled under to get them, bumped my head on the frame, and I got the hell knocked out of me.
@@mryoung8586 Ah yes grounding. My houses electrical system needs overhauling, the sockets have a ground connection however when I checked there is no ground cable connected anywhere and well touching any metal case of a device gives me a 60hz buzz. Yeah..
I know a guy who had a junk yard with a high tension (11kv) line running over it..he parked an old mobile crane beneath the lines with a longitudinally wound coil made using a large cast iron pipe as the armature he used a tapping switch connected to the coil tappings at the end of the pipe to correct the output voltage..the junkyard run on free but poorly regulated 240V for many years...he never got caught, the system was removed from service in 1993 when he sold the junkyard after almost 20 years..I got to see how the coil was wound when it was being scrapped (a lot of copper) It is a design I will never forget.....the site now sits vacant and overgrown.
I love your description.Thank you. What exactly was the design? Was the coil was wound on the cast iron pipe.Was the pipe hollow? Or was the coil wound on the cranes arm? How was the tap designed? You said a lot of copper.. about how many turns?
What a great story 👍🇬🇧
The guy knew what he was doing, and the power company just charged all the upstream customers for the "used electricity". He was effectively stealing from all the other power company customers lol.
It surprises me that the power company never caught on. Could they not see that the power consumed by their power meters never adds up to the power transmitted out? Or perhaps the power he was using was so tiny that it fell within their margin of error?
@@xokelis0015 There is a HUGE amount of energy lost over transmission lines. Up to 5% of the power generated is lost over wires and through transformers. That's enough electricity lost to power Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama 4 times over. One man stealing electricity to power his junkyard business isn't even going to be noticeable. It would be the equivalent of scooping a shot glass sized cup of water out of an olympic sized swimming pool. There's just no way you could ever detect that.
@@mysterydude1
I get that its small potatoes, but people have clearly been caught stealing power so the power companies do have their ways.
My point was that a device that is able to siphon power from the air, especially one that can siphon enough to power something useful (not charging your iphone), creates a power draw higher than the normal losses due to heat, and emf. So for those who claim that you are just capturing and not stealing, they're wrong.
You could use this to find underground or in wall wires. Just run a decent load on the other end and you could potentially trace the entire path.
Yeah there's tools built for that too
yeh most have machines have passive Radio frequencies n 50/60hz modes.
i always give them a wanding be4 i leave an area
As a home gamer you're usually better off with a tool that detects changing voltages through capacitive means. In the electrical trade they're known as a "volt tick" or ticker. They're basically high gain amplifiers with a light and speaker that go off above a certain threshold. Big Clive did a video on those maybe 6 months ago. It's good.
Another arguably better option is to use a sensitive hall effect sensor because those have also become cheaply available. With one of those and a suitable microcontroller like and ESP32 you can put together a bluetooth connected sensor for both AC and DC current detection. That's how DC clamp meters work.
To detect DC voltage without significant current flow one can use a JFET with its gate floating. The main trouble there is that low level static charges are all around us all the time so there may be too much noise for that to be useful. YMMV.
A multimeter that could check this cost much less than a 3-pound coil of copper wire.
@@Bob_Adkins classic,
i use to use concrete gprs with 50hz detectors in them but yeh it was a job 😀
Years ago at a local landfill there were several boxes of these 8 or 10' florescent tubes removed from a supermarket that was being renovated. A couple friends and I decided to visit in the evening looking for bike parts for our go-carts.. when we noticed something flickering in the garbage pits.. was it some sort of radioactive stuff? Well, I figured it out right away, but my friends were losing their minds! Eventually I let them in on what was happening with the tubes and the 500KV transmission lines 60' overhead. We left that place with a lot of people left scratching their heads! Those tubes were up in trees and some buried one end in the dirt.. we had the service road under the power lines almost lit up for a 1/4 mile.. it looked eerie, because from a mile away they randomly flickered in pink, yellow and green light.
Frumooase povești aveți ,sunteți un popor înteligent.
@@lauradobre7735 mulțumesc foarte mult.
Hopefully nowadays they don't throw those in landfill because mercury
I still have a big box of those in my garage, new, I broke a few by "accident". What if I were to use four them as the poles in one of those square Chinese kites, do you think it would light up?
I'm going to tape some helium balloons to one and let it go at night, see if it lights up, I'll put a long string on it, so it doesn't float into a plane or anything, don't worry everyone.
Heard a story a very long time ago. A farmer or rancher had a field outlined in barbed wire, looped all the way back to the main gate. The story goes that one day he put his hands on both sides of the gate touching each end of the wire and discovered a shock. Don't recall any statement of voltages or anything else other than a shock. The story goes on to state that the power company had placed power lines NEAR his property. In court he claimed he was trying to dissipate the charge by using some sort of load, be it a light or a pump or something else. The power company wanted to charge him for stealing their electricity. And for those who don't know, pulling power from a magnetic field DOES take away power from the transmission line. In the end the court decided that if the power company didn't like the loss of electricity they could move their power lines some stated distance away from his property.
After watching your video - by the way, thanks for an excellent presentation - I find it hard to believe the story I just related. Think I heard that back in the late 1970's. Like I said, it's been some times since hearing that story. What comment do you have if any?
That's because the story is fake.
I heard a similar story and that the owner of the powerline could not do anything about it.
That is imho why this vid is slightly wrong, since it is not stealing if it is not illegal, merely harvesting from the surrounding fields. Dampening those is actually a good thing, imho.
@@donaldduck830 It may be your opinion, but your opinion is NOT law. Different jurisdictions have different Laws of course but in Europe it is illegal to harvest from power lines. The law has been tested and people have been convicted.
Can be true, because, with the barbed wire, he should have much thicker wire, than this thin wire in the video above; and the coil diameter was then also much bigger. So, he must had have way more amperes flowing through his barbed wire, by significant high voltage.
Back in high school, using an old aircraft VHF dipole on a broomstick that feed a very unoptimized coil, we used to pull some 3/4 inch arcs under a pair of large 750kV transmission lines that cross through my town. I stupidly fried my first multimeter trying to "measure" the induced voltage, it literally screamed with a brief continuity beep as it died - still haunts me. 😅 All the contraptions we made to pull power off those lines were just goofy experimental guesses. We barely understood Ohms Law and knew nothing of the difference between E and H fields. We'd always bring long fluorescent bulbs with us because they readily glow with a neat throbbing pattern from the strong ELF magnetic fields under those high tension lines. Good times! :-)
Yeah sure you did 😂
Do you know if those lines were DC or AC. Here in NZ there are 500kv DC lines connecting South Island to North.
@@markkennard861 AC for sure on the lines passing through my town. That's why we could pull off energy and make sparks with our coils. The high voltage DC lines like you have are quite a bit more efficient because they don't have any dynamic magnetic fields coupling bits of energy into every conductive bicycle, sign, pipe, car, box, manhole cover, whatever that happens to be along their miles of path. Each of those tiny power losses really add up over long distances. HVDC is a more complex system. It has losses too, but parasitic magnetic coupling into random crap isn't one of them.
That's due to CEMF when you open the circuit that charges the inductor. It's a function the inductor, not the power lines.
If had thought about that a little longer i would have come to the same conclusion. But a standard clip on amp meter does have a dc measurement so the magnetic field around dc cables can be induced into an inductor. As a Ham i have a ferrite that i can clip onto a coax feeder cable to measure radiated current in the shield.. often wanted to run a decent length of conductor under 110kv line and do some testing.. just to satisfy my own curiosity.
My father was an electrical engineer back in the 1940s and 1950s. He later opened a TV repair shop in California in the early 60s. He told me a story about a time when he strung wires under a high-tension powerline that ran across his backyard in Illinois. I don't know the details. Sorry. Long story, short. He powered the house for two years before the power company found out about it. He was a smart man. He designed equipment for the old AM music stations of that era. He invented many circuits for Ham radio operators. He even did some stuff for the Military. When he got caught with his " Free Energy" equipment, he got sued and had to pay back two years of estimated electric usage. Besides being an electrical genius, he was an asshole.
That last bit was highly amusing.
True American Hero
Meanwhile the family gets health problems from being under the power lines, and nobody sues the power company. Edit So I learned this wasn’t true. See my other post.
@@JP-wp1vi
While such a thing isn’t impossible, I haven’t seen a technically feasible explanation for it, nor have I seen any statistically significant evidence to suggest it might actually happen. Assuming we’re not talking about RF burns but rather about lower-power electric field interactions with human tissue, I can only really see that sort of thing happening at much higher frequencies. Frequencies where a human body has multiple wavelengths inside them in order to span across some organ structure, or where the frequency matches up with some molecular resonance in a biological molecule. I’d be far more worried about cell-towers than mains frequency transmission lines.
There was a guy that got caught doing this on a nearby Indian reservation. He was lucky he didn't kill himself as he ran it directly into his panel unregulated.
Back in the 70s, there were these fellows that had an arrangement involving 55-gallon drums with wire coiled around them set up under high-tension power lines that ran through the hills in the middle of nowhere that powered a still. Since there was no fire, I don't believe they ever got caught!
The only reason I knew about it was I lived on a small farm on a ridge top a few miles away and once in a while on a still summer night, I would get a whiff of that distinctive smell of the mash cooking. In those days, everybody kept their mouths shut!
Really fighting that inverse cube law there. If you aim for AM radio stations you might be able to get more power, even though they’re much further away. A mW or two is enough for a low-power microcontroller circuit waking from sleep with a PFET circuit running off a capacitor, energy harvesting is real neat for distributed sensor applications.
He should be able to couple a lot of power if he impedance matched to the load. It's better to try to capture the electric field with a resonant electrically small straight antenna. The efficiency of the antenna will be only a few percent, but the electric field is much higher than the magnetic field due to high voltage, low current on power lines. Someone else's father in these comments got into trouble powering their home by coupling to the electric field wirelessly.
@@chrisfuller1268 You can legally take the power, if you simply charge them for the electric field intruding into your land.
This crossed my mind too,… but what I’d be interested in knowing, is what would happen if you put a whole bunch of these joule thief’s, subsequently, into series and parallel circuits, in something like a server rack, and used a highly optimized, commons antenna to ‘feed’ them? Also, what happens if you do the same, but attuned to natural background radiation of space, or if you could integrate a processing system to attenuate the whole system optimally, as desired? I guess, you’d have more than one mega ‘joule thief,’ but potentially, one hell of a sophisticated radio telescope antenna, component, by dually applying it to that end.
My dad is the landlord of a radio company and he literally has an antenna in his yard.
Oh yes! You touched a formerly sensitive subject there. Let's just say 'national secrets'?
Pax and respect.
I occasionally gave some casual thought to these issues when reading electrical theory, but it was very nice to see them demonstrated experimentally, and with explanations I could more or less understand.
The comments were interesting as well, and sometimes a hoot!
A few decades ago a friend of mine lived about 200 metres from an AM Radio transmitting tower. He had run loops of wire around his fence line and used the electricity generated to trickle charge a car battery which he used as part of his Ham radio setup. It seemed to keep the battery constantly topped up. I think he managed to save about $1 a month in electricity costs. 😀
I lived about 10km away from a AM station and a simple untuned transistor circuit worked to hear radio. So it definitely could have worked.
@ LOts of really cool thiings happen near AM TX. Some structures will even demodulate it.. probably where some ghost stories come from! :)
@@jkmacgyver I've heard stories about people who live close to high power transmitters. Like 500 kilowatts. Barbed wire fences would vibrate from the signal and one who was standing near one of the fences could hear the broadcast.
What is the equivalence of that $1 dollar now?
@@jkmacgyver I know, I have seen reports about tools and cooking spoons demodulating AM. Our transmitters have shut down in 2015 I believe, only DWD, ORF and SRF sometimes broadcast on AM SW, with a few smaller stations.
My grandfather had a light in a shed in his field that was powered by the top wire of the fence that ran about 150 feet under a 15kv powerline. It was a low power bulb but it did light up and stayed lit all the time
I discovered early in my career as an electrician that a neon screwdriver was pretty useless at telling you whether a circuit was live or dead. If the wire you are testing ran through trunking with other cables the neon would light even though there was no voltage. Also if you remove the lid of a trunking and hold the screwdriver next to the insulated wires it lights up. After discovering this I threw the neon screwdriver in the bin but did wonder about any potential uses.
Cheap LED light bulbs do this too. They can light up just from being connected to one power lead, in an open circuit.
Since you are working with low frequency of 60 Hz, you could use a core of laminated iron. It would increase the inductivity per turn. In exchange you could reduce the amount of turns and take thicker wires to reduce the resistance. This could increase the sensitivity of the coil by alot.
I read comments here just to find out if somebody has already written this.
Using ferrite core for LF is totally unefficient and I would really like to know measured values with the iron one.
Also, ungrounded. It`s not as though we are trying to pull RF energy here.
*a lot
You clearly put a lot of work into the project and the video - kudos!
Ah, but the dangers of EMFs!! I started at a Fortune 100 electric company as a comm tech in 1984. Very soon after I started the warning came out of electrical workers having double the risk of two nasty brain cancers - gliomas and astrocytomas - compared to average Joes. D'oh! The finding, from data mining in various studies, drove two decades of EMF regulations, particularly in Europe. Around the turn of the century a much larger study found no correlation; the previous one had been a data cluster.
That made me feel better. As I became more senior more and more of my job centered around protection systems (think of circuit breakers that coordinate with the far end of 200 mile lines) for 69KV to 500KV. The three 500KV substations in my AOR were becoming very familiar to me. Touching anything grounded - poles and fences - in most of the yard produced an unpleasant shock. Doing it under the capacitor banks produced a memorable experience!
Now in retirement, I am enjoying great health with no sort of advers^&%^()*&)*(#&@)(&@#)(&)(
The FCC doesn't regulate below 300 kHz but the IEEE C.95 recommends a 1800 V/m and 0.35 Tesla limit at low frequencies. I can see how the near-field of power lines could get above that limit, but not for the general population.
I participated in the 2005 C.95 standard and you're right, technicians have a demonstrated higher risk. So do Scandinavians, I don't know why.
Is that a stroke you had at the end there? I would say that's definitely an adverse effect. You should sue them for punitive damages.
@@chrisfuller1268
Chernobyl, maybe? Haha
Now in retirement, I am enjoying great health with no sort of advers^&%^()*&)*(#&@)(&@#)(&)(😆😅🤣😂🤣😅😆😅🤣😂🤣😂🤪😜🥴😵😵💫🤯💀☠ *i Like, OLE'!* 💃
@@Gideon_Judges6😂
Bros microphone is powered by his neighbours microwave
😂 too much noise
Ha!😂
Back in the sixties there was a guy who lived near high tension power wires. He filled a 55 gallon drum with nuts and bolts and wrapped wire around it and used the power it sucked away from the lines. The power company sued, and the court ruled that even though there wasn't a direct wire connection, he was still "taking" the power without paying and ordered him to stop.
That's right, so using this in your own home is not free like the yank here says... Anything after the meter is payed for
@@1st_ProCactus That's why you stick the thing before the meter.
@@RAndrewNeal bottom line is, it's stupid.... At best, it's simply a tuned magnetic sensor.
@@1st_ProCactus No; at best, it's an air-core transformer. The one made in this video has too much impedance to be useful, nevermind the fact that you won't glean much power from a single conductor as opposed to a coil.
@@RAndrewNeal what, how is a carbon rod an air core ?
I took 3 years of electronics training in a tech school. I was with you up until 4:11. Lol. It was always my lack of aptitude for the math that held me back. Great video!!
Many years ago we were camping in The “los Algodones” sand dun dunes. And within 200 feet of some very high voltage transmission lines feeding San Diego from Arizona I was able to light a 4 ft fluorescent lamp by holding one hand in the palm of my hand and the other simply in the air.
By the next day/ nite there were other campers running coax cable to their camps.
Needless to say, after some of them wiring their whole fixture up, several got tagged. By the weekend there was chain-link and Barbed wire fencing around the towers.
lol
Yeah nobody cares about the lightbulb demonstration which is pretty cool, or even using a millionth of a watt to run some sensor, but don't take any real amount of power, that's not cool
@@thewhitefalcon8539 Do you have steel power poles on the 14KVA (+ - ) ? If not, read later.
Try sinking a ground rod near said pole, use #6 or better to your home Then for the other lead to your home “uffer”
Every situation is different but I was able to Pull 2 amps with various voltages. That is your ground potential and can be deadly, so be safe.
My grandpa had a rig that pulled power from right before his meter. He had a master switch in the basement that would switch between the meter and the 2 120vac lines that feed the meter. He kept quiet about it and we didn't find out about it until we were replacing the old screw in fuse panel, w a proper □D breaker panel. Even when they put in a new "smart meter" no one said a word about the extra cables running thru the meter box. We don't use it any longer as the wires are old (but very heavy gauge) aluminum type, and we did not connect them to the new panel. The switch is a huge knife style switch from a steel refinery where he used to work. I've been thinking about using it hooked up to a genny to disconnect mains and switch to 220vac genny. Luckily the transformer is on a power supply line located in a back field surrounded by about 10 acres of wood lot and a .22lr is just right for blowing the fuse to the transformer, and power company has to have us open gates for access. So rewiring if needed is relatively safe. This is in nw Arkansas and most of our neighbors have the same setup. It's been 4 generations of my family there now, and we have never been questioned about it. It used to drive my grandmother crazy because he would switch to the free power legs when she was running the stove and 3 ovens! Wich would reset her radio/timer. I remember one Xmas he bought her 4 wind-up timers for the kitchen 3 for ovens 1 for stove top. I thought she would be pissed but she LOVED THEM! I don't think she even ever asked why he would goto basement every afternoon and then the power would drop out and come back on one fuse at a time. Original don't ask don't tell policy lol. And since all the neighbors had same system the power company must have just assumed the people on that rural route were just very very frugal. Also most neighbors still run wood burning stoves for heat in winter. He also had a hot water pre heater (an old hot water tank on its side with insulation removed, painted matte black and a curved aluminum reflector behind it). In summer u didnt even need the real water heater running and in winter it had a bypass valve plumbed in (permanently) w a set of coils that ran thru the sides of the chimney that was fed by the wood burner. There is still a black bakelite dial (pulse) telephone on the wall, it no longer works and says property of bell systems on a plate on the back, apparently back in the day the phone company owned the actual phones and charged a small fee to rent them. Until the early/mid 1990s it was a party line. To call them I would dial their number let it ring 4x hang up and then call back, and my grandma would answer. On occasion if you were jaw flapping a long time a neighbor would pickup their phone and politely ask you to clear the line so they could make a call. Thank god for good country neighbors! They have always been like extended family members. Which is a good thing to have when you live on a mountain 45 min from town on a dirt road. No one drives 4wd bullshit. If road washed out or became un-passable u just stuck the triangle 🔺️ on back of tractor and took that to town (the tractors are all 4wd or tracked). The main road is paved now and they have a spur road that goes directly into town and the highway. Also pro-tip if u don't want to pay high fuel prices u can buy red dyed farm fuel (diesel is red gasoline is green) and run it thru a 30 gallon drum packed w charcoal (broken up hardwood is the best and the guy w the charcoal converter (a giant oven) basically gives away the fines (tiny peices and dust) if u help him empty the oven and clamps (a clamp is a big hole in the ground that u stack wood into then cover w mud/clay to make charcoal). Can't wait to go back this fall!
I can't believe I read all this
Me too
Great story… but someone was paying for the electricity there is no free lunch on the grid
@@audioworkshop1 I mean a for profit company was.
I'll have to test that method of filtering out the color from diesel, some day. I don't run diesel anyways.
A friend had some high voltage power lines running across his property (93K I believe) and I told him to do something similar. He attached it to the end of about 30 feet of bamboo lashed together. It was anchored to the roof is a shed he had standing out in the field under the power lines. The bamboo pole naturally waves side to side and it generates enough voltage to power some LED bulbs and a WiFi access point!
that stuff at the end where you charge the capacitor from 5 ft away was amazing. and where you made that metal circle spin and ring on the floor, that would legit get you burned at the stake a couple hundred years ago. so cool
You just had to tell it was "God" sending a message and they would have you speared
@@mcmerry2846 😂 maybe. could go either way. sometimes it hard to tell which genocidal space demon is making the magic. zues? or Cthulhu or the Christian one. I imagine the verdict depends heavily on their first impression of your personality lol
so you deny the salem witch trials? and the spanish inquisition?@Based_transition_Clocker
Well, I'm off to the restaurant to pick crumbs off the floor.
I know it's tedious, but I eat for free!
"The Great Reset" is upon us.
3:57 “slightly more scientific approach” ?! LOL!! Bro my brain has already been fried!! The first 4 minutes are full of science! Who are you? I respect your knowledge 🧠 👏👏👏
That’s an awesome demonstration of wireless electricity. Very impressed at the simplicity of everything too!
Wow, an honest free power video on YT.. that is rare, but great work. Something I did a few decades back that got me a few of solid watts of free power was to tap a pole ground wire that stood in my front yard, I ran it through a fairly heavy gauge cable then up near the shed it went through the filament winding of a large valve television transformer before continuing up the garden to where my air conditioner drain exited from the house. Here I dug and lay in in a large sheet of copper plate from an old water heater which made an excellent low impedance ground, and so the neutral tie point at the pole that supplied several properties along with a Macdonalds restaurant on the opposite side of the street preferred my current custom path to the permanently wet soil (irrigated from the AC drain) versus the bone dry ground around the pole. I rectified the primary side of the transformer (working as a secondary) and fed it through a buck boost regulator with some crude neon and zener clamping at the input, that gave me a fairly stable output voltage, only endlessly varying in its current delivery. It changed minute by minute and with the seasons, the time of day, the day of the week and the outside temperature, at best in summer I could get a solid half an amp at 12V (around 6 watts) and it would bounce all over the place, at other times it would drop to a few milliamps with the odd spike (probably motor start loads). I ran the final DC output through an analogue amp meter and To turn it into something useful it trickle charged a large SLA battery that ran some low voltage lights for blackouts and a UPS, later also a couple of LED night lights running at around 5mA each. It ran for at least ten years until I sold up there and in that time it never got discovered or disconnected by the power company, and it was in deliberate plain view. They probably thought I was just sharing their earth stake for safety reasons... lol.
In essence I was improving their supply quality to the tune of about a thousandth of a percent.
That's a hell of a lot of work just to get a small LED to light up!
Welcome to green energy.
🤣🤣🤣
its the work which is the fun and interesting part, not the result,
practical leakage flux energy harvesters powering diodes? I'll put one on your wall near your microwave and record you speaking.
Man this is interesting to watch. The biggest reason you don't see any reasonable power around the subs/lines is because they design it that way. Could you imagine every fence, every car driving by all the sudden picks up a noticable amount of current rolling down the street? Would be a problem. (i mean it actually is a problem, fences around substations have to be carefully grounded because they WILL induce noticable and significant current, especially if a fault ever occurs.
In reality, this is actually an extremely important effect to consider in power transmission systems and makes our jobs a lot harder. Those massive HV transmission lines aren't spread out for voltage reasons(the big insulators that hold them apart are all we need), they are spread out so far because with the amount of current we put on them the inductive coupling shown here across the whole length of wire can have some significant implications on both voltage at the recieving end and current capacity of the line.
Growing up our landlord was a coal fired power plant and our house was inside the fence (in retrospect they probably should not have been renting that out lol) utilities were of course included but I could see this affect being the reason behind a lot of BSODs.
I love these experiments!
There is a 750kV transmission line near me. It is always fun to bring coils to it and scavenge power :P
Bring some long florescent lights with ya next time and play StarWars with your friends after dusk! (Just don't actually hit your "lightsabers" together.) 😅
Oh yes!!!! What fun!!! Encourage all folks not to mess around near to HV lines….one slip and you will really be toast…I worked for a while in a live 400kV outdoor sub on the coast and just walking under the busbars was enough for me 😎😎 ⚡️ ⚡️⚡️
@@adrianshingler9783 I don't think anyone is recommending going inside a substation. Just going underneath the big transmission lines that are high up off the ground
@@thewhitefalcon8539 my simple safety message is this…..steer well clear of any HV power lines/substations regardless of the distances and voltages involved. The power transfer will be very limited in any event, it’s simply not worth the risk.
@@adrianshingler9783 Walking on a trail that crosses underneath transmission lines is not dangerous at all. (At least not as far as we know. Might be found to cause cancer in the future)
cool to see it explained, I was playing around with something similar after I discovered wires in my old workplace were live even though they were unplugged, took me a while to work out that it was a very small charge and not dangerous but still quite a surprise when you are trying to trace live wires in a cupboard and they all test live even though you know for a fact only one is switched on.
yes it always has me scratching my head when I see small amounts of voltage in wires that are supposed to be off.
@@calthorp lol not good is it, when your test screwdriver is lighting up all over the place....then later the volt meter comes out and you think ....Ooh good grief its the transformer effect...lol
@@TalRohan Or could be a faulty switch that is not really opening properly.
this is usually "phantom voltage" in homes. Caused by capacitive coupling from other wires in the walls.
From an EE - this is good solid EE stuff, thanks for uploading it. Might be interesting to stand under >500kV lines, where the three phases are roughly in line vertically with the lowest line much closer, to see how much power you can pick up from the magnetic field. Also, I have heard of people taking a 'zap' from their cars parked under such lines, presumably as a result of capacitive coupling of the unbalanced e-fields. Electric fields and magnetic fields together - now you are talking power!
Yep, grew up next to one and had electric fences set up for cattle. Next morning we had us a dead cow.
I grew up around some high voltage transmission lines, and would ride my bike under them frequently. When riding under them I could easily feel 60hz by lightly rubbing my thumb on the metallic part of the handle bars. Getting "zapped" sounds a bit like a dramatic person felt the same thing when brushing their car door. The sensation is painless. Just a buzzing feeling at the interface of skin and metal.
Wish I was an EE - honestly, I started learning Real Electronics when I watched PCB lectures about twisted Wire Pairs and how that everything is a transmission line. Electrical energy is flowing around the wires, something that was high-lighted by Veritasium last year, and the youtube meltdown following that video.
@@Dazza_Doo I took a 2 year EE course, and it wasn't difficult, but they definitely exaggerated about how "in-demand" my skills would be in reality. Still, I'm glad I did it.
I just discovered your channel from the CNC video and it's awesome !
I had this kind of idea of stealing electricity but I never thought about making it and I didn't think about the resonant frequency of such a circuit.
Thank you for doing this, I've had this thought for many years since reading about Nikola Tesla's work and sitting at a train station with a nearing dead source of entertainment and no ability to charge. Then wireless charging came along and confirmed my thoughts but been somewhat lacking of focus to play enough to try it. You're awesome
In olden times a person would stand under a high voltage transmission line with a fluorescent tube and light it up. That's the electric field gradient where your device intercepts the magnetic field. Some youtube videos exist about doing that but I haven't found one with sufficient quality to recommend it.
I held an 8-foot fluorescent light bulb high overhead, pointing up at the local very-high-voltage lines, one night a few years ago. It lit very dimly. To look impressive, you'd have to do it away from suburban homes and do it on the night of a new moon or when the Moon is not overhead and take a photo using long exposure. (Maybe higher voltage somewhere else would have lit it brighter.) (Adding aluminum foil to the high end might have collected more current and increased the brightness, but I didn't try it.) If it lit brightly I would be tempted to attach it to a stake and leave it there.
Excellent primer on AC power and induced fields using coils… young engineers take note. I use a portable am radio to detect noisy power lines that interfere with my amateur radio station … same principal at higher frequencies
Using your coil/led sniffer outside of a circuit panel or power boxes at work is outside the metal boxes meaning any fields powering your coil and led are on the ground field and most likely stray neutral floating fields and not the power fields around the mains power cable conductors (inside the box behind the breaker lid/cover) as this acts like a faraday cage shield.
Remove the panel lid and then try your coil, and be ready to have your led circuit make s’mores.
I heard a while back that in British Columbia they have Hydro Electric dams with high-voltage lines to the grid. These lines are in very remote locations. A Certain Bike gang have located these lines and wrapped wires around them producing their own electricity. They haves buried shipping containers and can now grow their own Dope. BC Bud is the brand name.
In CA, Chinese and Mexican drug dealers steal power all the time (* info from a Sheriff deputy who went after them - Chinese got a lawyer, sued for “invasion of privacy” when Sheriff dept used infrared scanners to detect unusually “hot” basements (growing rooms); they then asked power company for info about “ mansions” or houses with more-than- usually high power usage.
One outfit buried 6 school buses to hide their “heat signature”. -- then CA legalized recreational use of marijuana, then a few Years later China-Mexico brought Fentanyl! ( The love of money if the root of all evil)
Also, if you run a long wire a couple feet of the ground under a hv powerline, you can even drag little arcs from it!
Walking under 400kv power lines with a flourescent tube in your hand is always a neat trick!
I always wondered about this, could you take electricity pre-meter using the magnetic fields that are generated by the AC mains. Thanks for making this video as it answered my question. I was expecting that it would generate more though
Well... you're actually just taxing them for using your airspace
@@mcmerry2846 🤣 you make a good point
if optimized you can get a lot more. this is technically illegal.
@@jamoecw yeah firmas and government robbing you = legal
You getting what's yours = illegal.
Sad reality
@@jamoecw Stealing generally is illegal 😃
My knowledge of electromagnetism is limited to what was taught in my engineering physics 2 course so this is beyond what i know, but you are explaining it in a way that i can mostly follow along
I've overheard that farmers used old bed springs under high tension power lines to heat chicken coops for free. They were cough because the power company could detect additional loads of leakage on the lines and was forced to pay up for damages and power theft. I doubt powering up an LED or even charging a phone while doing this would cause an investigation into theft.
Sounds like a pub story; The case against: transmission lines work by having fields which cancel out very close to the line, so coupling is very difficult, unless you can get very close to the lines. Air breakdown voltage is around 3kV/mm, or 30kV/cm, so when you are close enough to couple to the field, you risk a flash-over, and death, or if you are lucky, merely permanent life-changing burns. Heating requires at least hundreds of watts to make any difference to even a small container, and chicken houses are not well insulated in general. If they were well insulated, the chickens would heat the coop with their own body heat. Chicken coops (well, the one I had at least) had separate compartments for each hen, with some bedding in them, so the warmth of the animal was sufficient.
Is there are case for? Do you have a reference?
I call BS. LOL
Every time someone post one of these free energy from power lines videos the farmer and the bed springs comes up… I’ve heard that one before the internet was around … next round is on me mate
@@audioworkshop1 That was my feeling, it sounds like total bollox to me.
"Are you from the power company?"
"I told you this river don't go 'ta Aintree."
Now squeel like a pig! :)))
This is how security access cards and FOBS work. The card reader puts out EMI , a coil in the card amplifies the EMI through capacitance, when the charge gets high enough, it activates the transmitter in the card, which puts out the signal to be read by the card reader. Pretty cool
In my city electrical poles are very near to buildings. On the third floor electrical wires are near the porch. Some people use umbrella frames to steal the electricity.
The power loss from the mains is detectable by the power company. They can even localize it. So while it's fun for lighting up an LED or powering some small device, if you draw anything significant this way, they'll come down on you pretty hard.
That said, I think that if they don't want people receiving their magnetic fields, they should be on the hook for keeping the fields on their own property.
The minuscule power absorbed by the circuit is not detectable at the power company side. Power surges represent more power.
This is categorically false.
Sounds like you have shares in a power company!
Next you'll be telling us it's possible to tell if you're watching telly without a licence, just by parking a van up the street with a TV aerial on top 😂😂😂
@@Sally-x8d hold on... watching TV without a licence?? Doesn't everyone?
@anothersquid I should hope so! But in Britain it's a criminal offence not to pay the licence fee, which costs something like £180 a year last time I checked, and is forced upon all households in the UK, which funds the whole of the BBC and all of its offshoots worldwide, as well as 80% of its bast4rd offspring regardless of whether or not they show commercials (e.g Channel 4, FilmFour).
You do get a £12/year discount if you're blind though 🤣
They used to park up their 'detector vans' in streets all around England, as recently as the early 2000s, which were literally just transit vans with a TV aerial crudely bolted to the roof, pretending to sniff out anyone using an unlicensed television. I know this sounds like surrealist comedy, but I assure you it's true - they really did it, for decades. Then sometime around 2004, long after most people had cable and satellite, they changed their advertising campaign to "We don't need detector vans anymore, because now we have this new thing called a list", because people kept laughing at them and slamming the door in their face.
I still have never paid one, but they've literally sent people to jail not doing so, on a great many occasions.
"It's like picking crumbs off a restaurant floor" 🤣
I feel im on some kind of list now
Don't worry, everyone is, which makes the whole idea of a list kind of moot.
Same bro
Yeah, lists are fine. What you gotta worry about is getting your ass in a spreadsheet.
Urgent message, Fearless Leader! Hyperspace Pirate is onto us. We had better get our names on the list or they will know who we are!
@@whatelseison8970 and if you're in a pivot table you're fucked
I remember a story of a farmer running a parallel cable to a high voltage line on his field. With a suitable transformer he was able to extract some useful power. Capacitively coupled in that case.
What would be the result if you wound that amount of wire back and forth between to power poles a hundred meters apart ?
There is DC in the air, 100V per meter.
Very low current, but it's there.
Also the ground carries currents: bury two earth rods as far apart as possible, and some power will be found between them.
actually I remember in the 80s, we have 22kv lines above the standard 240 3 phase on the streets. They arrested some people who had built a transformer in the roof and were growing....that stuff in the house using stolen electricity
Farmers in NZ used to power their electric fences by stringing collector wires alongside power lines. When. They figured out how to power their houses and cowsheds too the power board started picking up losses significant in their grid. And shut them down.
Your aerial is too short for the frequency.
What's the wavelength of full wave 60 hz antenna? lol 300k m/s / 60 = 5000m ... this antenna appears to be about 20 cm long, so I believe it is 1/25000 of the wavelength.
I think less turns, bigger capacitor and higher Q
Over a years time, how much electricity can you recover and place into batteries for use? Standard family home, in a median market and collectors set up in optimal places. If your paying for it, it is not stealing. You can't get to net zero in anything, but there may be at least maintenance charge built up so your operating cost go down. Pennies over time become dollars.
Your videos should be a must watch for al students. I like how conceise, objective, and very very breve are your explanations. It's exactly the amount I like. I keep pausing your videos al the time because I need time to process the info you put on-screen. I learn so much from your videos.
I have a question. Are you good in programming arduino ? Or python?
I like it. Learning disguised as doing something naughty. Brilliant!
3:35 "...but it is electricity..." This is the point of view of the famous Nikola Tesla, when he proposed "powering the world" with one or more transmission towers. Perhaps he meant powering the world's wristwatches (but explicitly not your air conditioner). Eco-mentals also adopt the same "but it is electricity" when they propose spending vast resources to "harvest" inconsequential amount of electrical power from such nonsense as pedestrians walking on piezo-electrical sidewalks. Same with the utterly-idiotic Solar Roadways nonsense, burying solar panels below traffic.
Numbers matter, as you've been very clear here, explicitly defining the magnitude of the power. Nicely done. Cheers.
It anorher way at word of somewere.
Tesla was documenting the systems left in the 1800s, after the mud flood.
7:12 Is this ring made of aluminum? If so, is it possible to make an electromagnet that attracts non-magnetic metals, such as copper, aluminum?
During a rainy season, When I was crossing a railway track holding an umbrella fully open above my head, I noticed a tiny continues spark between my thumb and the umbrella shaft as I stood on the tracks (There was a buzzing sound, that's what made me notice). The high voltage power lines for the train was passing above me. At that time I too thought whether it was possible to harness this "free-energy". Free in the sense 'free for anyone to use'.
Train electrification is typically 16 Hz (in Europe) and high voltage around 60 kilovolts. Because there is no parallel but opposite phase conductor, the magnetic and electric fields will not be canceled in the vicinity.
@@thomasmaughan4798 NYC area train power gets fun. NE Corridor has 25Kv and 12Kv on overheads(also at 25hz or 60hz), Metro North has trains that can run on those overheads or on 750VDC third rails as Grand Central is third rail.
One can run a small motor with five volt and generate more. Awesome work, thank you. Wishing nothing but good for you.
lol. no.
@@theobserver9131 Not enough power. I was hoping.
@@nctunes you can never get more out than you put in. Conservation of energy. Physics 101.
@@theobserver9131 Yep, Just wishfull thinking.
You just use a dynamo on a bike and you got yourself free energy (as long as you have food to convert it into energy, or a waterfall :)
60 Hz (or 50 Hz in Europe) is a very low frequency for a core consisting of ferrit. Wouldn't it be more effective to use an iron or steel core for the coil instead?
The ferrite he used in this video is optimized for low frequencies, I think. I've seen some ELF stuff done with huge coils wound around DIY steel laminate cores built by bundling lengths of steel stock (like 1" by several feet, 1/8" thick). The individual pieces are coated with a nonconductive paint/epoxy/whatever to minimize eddy currents.
In South America we use 50 Hz or cycles!
@@flapjack9495 most ferrites were more permeable than steel. Ferrites do not use any "paint/epoxy/whatever" to adress eddy current issues. Ferrites were nonconductive by themselves, just like metal oxide ceramics were non conductive. Non conductive coating is verry common in transformer sheet metal core
@@bobboscarato1313 We use 60 hz because it translates better for our clocks
@@drd1924 In many places they use 50 Hz like in South America and they're happy!
Finally, an actual free energy device!
I'll stick to stealing car batteries tho.
audio quality: 😱😭
I guss his mic also exposed into electromagnetic field 😅
This video makes it clear how powerful knowledge is.
You should try this under the wire antenna of a high power radio transmitter, something like a 1kw radio station. That would be interesting :)
Not it's stealing and radio stations won the lawsuit and criminal charges followed. ,73
KDKA was the radio station. 73
A friend of mine had a ham radio and all the critters in the ground disappeared.
@@bobboscarato1313 Pest control! 🐭🐀
You could definitely get far more power from a radio station with the right circuit, but you'd need to build a new device that's optimized to resonate at the station's frequency.
@@ronb6182that's bullshit. Show me the court case 😂
Interesting, does the device represent a load on the AC system or is it collecting power that would be radiated regardless of it's existence?
It's an extremely tiny load on the AC system - probably too small to even be measured. The magnetic fields are radiated regardless, but without being captured by a device like this, they're just potential energy that goes back into the system.
It is a bit of both. Most of this radiated energy goes into space or is absorbed in the ground as heat. Not much, but more than zero. If the amount you absorb is less than what the Earth absorbs, the net effect is beneficial. But if your collection is more efficient than Earth, it will be felt as a slight load.
Since this circuit is resonant, if you are not drawing power from it, then it will actually return some slight power to the grid.
A very perceptive question. At long distances from transmission lines, the fields cancel out, so there is no far-field, hence no radiation. At short distances, there is a near-field which can be coupled to, which is not fully cancelled out, so some power can be collected, although not a great deal of power unless you get very close, or have an enormous sensor. Some power is also always lost in the permittivity and permeability of the area around the transmission line, as the EM fields try to re-arrange any nearby molecules just a little, which is also one reason why overhead lines may not be insulated, they are more efficient that way.
In the early 1900's some farmers ran an insulated wire down a fence line under or adjacent to a major power line and around the section to the farm house where the wire began. They ran the farm house on the powering, the lights and a radio. Ron W4BIN
As opposed to stealing 20 cents worth of electricity I would recommend you use your voice for radio and or voice over.
It isn't theft. He's having fun. He's making money here. He's teaching.
I love everything about this, awesome work!
I live within 100 metres of high voltage transmission lines. You know, the big cross-country ones. I wonder if it's possible to make this experiment a little bigger and set something up to charge batteries with 'free' power. I think the transmission lines are 66 thousand volts. Something on a wooden pole to get it closer to the lines but not close enough to get electroboomed.
Thanks for showing us all the stuff we’d forgotten, I feel quite thick now !
When you were near the substation taking readings, Did you factor in the aluminum fence grounding the emf emissions?
Aluminum? Not many fences are aluminum…more fencing is galvanized steel.
@@Chimonger1 which is still a conductor of electricity. The fence acts as a “half/shitty faraday cage” but it will still block some of the electromagnetic waves
@@Coolgiy67 I thot chain link should surely block EMFs, but had heard so many saying to use very close-knit mesh, like window screen, or even solid sheets of metal.
There’s also conductive paint (spendy) that gets grounded by embedding a wire into it…it used to only come in black, but, any other paint can go on top of it, protecting the layer of conductive paint.
For doing just a room, I’d likely use the paint, then hide it under light paint.
But if redoing exterior of house as we’d like, I’d go for aluminum window screen, or maybe 1/2” mesh, as much less costly, & much easier to handle, & can layer over new insulation, under siding…& use a boat-grounding thing…I think those are zinc…they are just a lump or disk of metal you can connect to the grounding cord, & set under the crawlspace on the dirt.
Make it easy to reach, because, eventually, those need replaced, same as the grounding rod for the house Mains panel.
@@Chimonger1 it doesn’t block all. For a faraday cage to work it has to be fully surrounding the thing it’s trying to protect from the emi and even still some will still get through. If you watch a video from professor lewin he shows that it makes the am radio stop working but the mike to the room still works.
@@Coolgiy67 If that, then, what are folks s’posed to do, the protect at least a space in home that reliably might protect themselves during rest, or, protect their electronics?
@7.40 I love the coil plugged into AC wall current laying in water on the concrete! If you're going to play with Electricity (and it starts to get boring), you might as well add some excitement!🤣🤣🤣
Cool Video! Ya'll Take Care and be safe, John
I grew up in a rural community, our neighbours had 765kv transmission lines across their property. Needless to say our neighbour was able to erect a electric fence for their cattle by extending the wire in parallel with the towers. Those things crackled and buzzed like crazy even when it didn't rain.
,hello I do the same , very high voltage line , on a hot day there no need to to tell the cattle its on , had one line for 20 years never connected to a electric fence powered unit, ireland not the best place to try to do this type of experiments ,
"Speaking of the power company, let's pay them a visit." Subbed.
Knew a guy who used electric blankets under high tension transmission lines to charge his rack of car batteries it worked.
woah,
I was OIC in charge of a USGOV HF radio transmission facility in the Philippines….many moons ago. The antenna field was about 85 acres of land that gave home to about 40 antennas of differing shapes, sizes and in compass bearings from 0 degrees azimuth, all the way back around to 360 degrees once again. The antenna field was home to a number of farmers who would raise crops of rice and teams of caribou, who were the “engines” that drove the plowing of the fields. The farmers were technically not allowed to occupy the antenna field, but as long as they stayed out of my way, I stayed out of theirs. To my point….all of the grass and mud nippa huts had free lighting at night, which consisted of four-foot florescent light tubes (unconnected at both ends of the tube) that glowed because they siphoned enough electricity to make the phosphorescent coating in the tubes to glow. The only downside was that there was no way to turn off the light off at bed-time. I figured I could afford to lose a few watts from the original 50KW the transmitter was putting out. Oh….somewhere in time I found out they were using fluorescent tubes that had been stolen from US base supply warehouses, and that is when I stomped my foot and made them pay for the tubes, or be kicked off the field. They grudgingly agreed. At least the tubes lasted for many years, so I wasn’t all grinch about it.
Word of advice, instead of Ferrite, use a powdered iron core. Ferrite is conductive and designed to absorb power for RFI and electrical noise suppression. This converts the energy into heat and reduces the output. A powdered Iron core on the other hand is designed to be magnetic, but have very little parasitic losses. This is the material used in Switch Mode Power Supply transformers. It looks like ferrite, but the difference is conductivity and thus the amount of power absorbed as heat.
No, he should be coupling to the electric near field, not the magnetic near-field. The power company transports power via the electric field with as little energy as possible in the magnetic field.
@@chrisfuller1268 The electric field is only present in non insulated overhead wires as underground wires and insulated overhead wires are either coaxial, or twisted with the neutral so the field is very small. The current from coupling is very small unless you have a mile of uni-nsulated fence near high tension lines.
@@isettech there is no electrical power distribution infrastructure which uses coaxial wire or twisted pair. I worked as an electrical engineer in power distribution design early in my career. Where are you getting your information?
ELECTRICITY IS VERY INTERESTING TO ME, YOU MAKE IT
SOUND SO EASY
Now try by capacitive coupling. Using myself as a capacitor I can just put my hand around cable with 230V mains flowing through it and see the LED faintly glow. (Meter shows 11V, if I increase impedance to 1GOhm, it's even 76V!)
How my circuit works: ~100nF output cap, one side attached to earth ground. The other side of output cap has a diode (1N4448) to my body (so current can only flow from myself into the output cap), then another diode from earth ground to myself (so current can only flow from earth ground to myself).
Now somebody has to try that with a tinfoil umbrella under a power line.
You need more impedance matching. A fluorescent lamp works pretty well for this since has high impedance.
Yes the power company delivers energy vial the electric nea-field, you are right.
Would have been interesting to see it in the power range of a few Watts and actually measuring the "theft".
How can it affect the transmitter if the receiver oscillates at the same frequency? Wouldnt the receivers magnetic lines add to the existing ones, magnifying the total amount of flux present?
I find this shocking!😁
You're a real (Nerd) in a good way.Your understanding of math skills are far superior to the average person .I,m trying to understand this but half of it is over my head .We all have strengths and weaknesses. I just squeezed by in math class but once you're out of High School or College we usually only need the basics of addition,subtracting, multiplying and division to balance a monthly/yearly budget ect..But great work.I was always amazed how far short wave radio signals can travel so far across countries in the right conditions.
Wow dude, this is a very interesting video.
A guy in Australia did this under the power lines on his property with buried coils. The power company detected the theft and I think the fine was not insubstantial.
But nothing is stolen , it is an induced current
@@nickcoppard5335 He probably built it on power company land directly under the lines
@@nickcoppard5335 you are stealing electricity. By drawing power from the coil, you are pulling energy from the magnetic flux, which in turn pulls energy from the primary current source.
This is exactly how a transformer works. If you pull energy from the secondary side, the primary side energy input increases!
Love the constant static sound throughout the video.
This is the only totally correct video I have seen on RUclips about "free power". Your research is thorough and conclusions are accurate. I just don't understand why you use ferrite for the core instead of soft iron. On 60 Hz soft iron seems a better conductor for magnetics.
After watching this video I have a picture in my head of 23 Henrys standing by some power lines and 250 micro sized ferrets running all around them 🤣🤣
Avoiding cancellations and getting a good coupling is difficult when the transmitter is a straight wire and the receiver is a coil.
By tuning the coil to resonate at 60Hz, seems that you're collecting more weak radiated VVVLF EM energy than by the magnetic induction used in a transformer.
Maybe running a single strand along a length of an unpaired live cable will give better coupling, especially if that was looped with the other side of the loop far away.
The tale I heard was a rancher had property with a very long border which a power line ran along. So he put up a fence on the property line with an electric fence wire that was actually set up to convert the magnetic field from the power line to AC.
Was ordered 55 years to go to a 18 Acer farm and help . There to remove 6 phone poles. And cable to barn. In the barn was a dyna motor. (All scraped) The lines went in 3 loops on the length of poles..Near by was. A power co high power transmission(dormant) line in use in the 40.s and 50/60s now moth balled. The neighboring farm folk told us the barn had lights when the local power was out.. but being a ham it looked to me more like a radio xmiter for 160 meters .long gone is the owner. Could this be similar?
I am already thinking about the applications for these.
I would be impressive if you could build one powerful enough to say trickle charge a cell phone or a radio.
Try this under a high tension line. Stick a copper pipe into the ground so that it stands as high as you are tall. (Better to make the tip pointed, use a screw)
Next; stand or sit on a sturdy plastic pail next to copper pipe, but stay below the height of the pipe.
While you are insulated from ground, reach up and place your finger just above the pipe’s tip.
You will draw an arc, probably about 1/4 inch long *through your finger, to the pipe.*
In this video you are using Joule thief through induction (Electro Magnetic Fields) it is better to use an Electro Motive Force (Voltage) siphon.
You are not stealing! Air is owned by no one! Everyone has the human right to free access to energy to live!
I didn't understand much of the formulas and diagrams, but this was very interesting -- thank you for posting this info. 👍
Would the power lines have a slight drop in power or is it purely from magnetic flux? If so I guess it's not really stealing as it's a wasted bi-product anyway lol
I'd like to see you test under the large 50kvolt transmission lines that ho from sub station to sub station. There are usually up on very large steal towers.
did you mean steel towers or are you up to something exciting....
I’m putting a giant copper coil onto my trailer now so I can park under a power line and charge my coach batteries. Thanks for the tip! I can’t believe didn’t even think of this! I already thought about designing a balloon to generate power using the Earth’s own voltage differential, but this is significantly cheaper.
Reminds me of what my dad told me, he has a colleague who is from kazakhstan, he told them that his parents or grandparents would literally throw a metal hock up to a power line (it was rural btw) with a metal wire attached to get electricity whenever they needed it, i dont know if it they were high voltage cables (unlikely considering they would need to use a transformer), but still impressive to need to risk your life to get power.
good isolated lasso, and no risk at all, my friend.
Can I ask what may be a stupid Question pal?? What u did neat the end of the video was to plug into the mains?? That was interesting to see it shift metal on the floor. I knew nothing about this stuff before beginning a new career in the electronics field. I know nothing really my friend but ur videos are giving me a whole new appreciation for Electricity and the electronics field tbh.. Thanks for all these videos man. I'm really enjoying learning new things.
I'm the guy who is about to embarlk on his biggest proiject ever by building my own CNC Router.. It probably would've been a lot cheaper to buy one straight out of the box, plug and play if u will, but where's the fun and games in that.. LOL.
Ur videos are awesome dude. Do u have any more videos on CNC mahines? I need a lotta help with the electronics. I'm going to use Arduino to run the whole thing. I have bought the CNC Shield and I have 5 X TB6600's but I'm lost as to how to connect them to the Arduino and that tyoe of thing. I got those smaller drivers in a small kit with another Shiled, Uno board and those little purple coloured Stepper drivers. I cannot for the life of me recall the number on them.. LMAO.
U can see now how dumb I really am when it comes to this stuff but I will not be deterred my bro.
I'm pushing ahead with the build and please God I don't burn my house down.. My workshop is my Garage..lol.. Happy Xmas and best of everything in 2023 pal,, Salute from IRELAND!