Personal experience with a digital electric meter
The electronic meter on my house doesn't even have the RF signal turned on yet, and already causing a lot of grief.
My house had an analog meter when I moved in. It was replaced with a digital meter without my knowledge a few years later. At the time, I didn't suspect it was causing trouble, but shortly after it was installed, I started having many unusual symptoms which I later realized were improved when I moved my bed to another part of the house, where it so happens that there's no wiring in the wall near the bed.
Only in the past week or so has it occurred to me that all the problems started when my meter was switched out. Before moving my bed, I was dealing with:
-- extremely severe, long-lasting, immobilizing leg cramps during the night. It was terrifying!
-- waking up nauseated every morning. I've always had what they call "an iron stomach"; I have to literally consume poison to get nauseous. Thus, to suddenly start experiencing nausea on a daily basis was very strange.
-- waking up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding hard and very fast. It would happen on waking up, too, sometimes.This was quite worrisome because I already have a weak heart. I thought I was dying....
-- extreme fatigue, wanting to sleep all day, every day... which of course I could rarely do, so I dragged myself around feeling half dead most of the time.
-- joint pain from old injuries, worse than it had been when the injuries were fresh. I can't handle opiates or NSAIDs, and I didn't know of any other ways to kill the pain. The agonizing pain went on for years.
-- episodes of incontinence, both bladder and bowel. I couldn't go anywhere unless I had quick access to a restroom.
-- frequent headaches.
-- inexplicable weight gain.
-- thinning of hair, and it went from slightly gray to almost totally grey in a matter of months.
-- rapid decline in visual acuity.
-- high-pitched sound in the ears.
-- inability to concentrate or focus. I spent far too much time looking for things I had misplaced. I'd forget what I was talking about in mid-sentence or where I was going in mid-stride.
-- frequent appearance of bruises with no obvious cause.
Moving the bed helped alleviate the symptoms, but I still suffer to a lesser extent. I would really like to get the old analog meter back and see what happens... I have asked the city to put the old meter back on the house, and twice I was told they would do it, but I still have the digital meter. I've taken measurements of the EMI fields throughout the house, and they are WAY higher than what building biologists consider safe.
My pets have suffered as well. I lost a fairly young cat to congestive heart failure soon after the meter was changed. Another died about a year later of pancreatic cancer. He wasn't very old.... Nine months later, one died of sudden heart failure. She was only 2.5 years old.... Another has an intestinal condition that the vets can't find a cause for, and he is dying slowly because he can't absorb nutrients. And one has a chronic infection that does not respond to any drug. All this heartache on top of my own health issues was very, very difficult.
I've spent thousands of dollars (that I couldn't really afford) on various remedies in an effort to stave off the decline in my health, and countless hours researching what could be wrong before finally realizing it's probably the digital meter. I've never owned or used a cellular phone. I don't even have a cordless phone. I don't use wireless for the internet and have never owned or used a microwave oven.
The only "high-tech" devices in my home are a room air conditioner unit that I can't afford to turn on, and the computer and modem -- and, as I said, I don't use the wireless. My life has been turned upside down!
In researching the meter brand and model that's on my house, I find it can operate in several modes and be upgraded for data to be sent to collection hubs on the grid and then transmitted from there to a data storage facility.
It hasn't been continuously spewing microwaves 24/7 yet. However, even when used with a mobile collection device in "wake up mode", it still produces "dirty electricity".
In addition to its RF transmitter, each wireless digital meter also has a switching-mode power supply (SMPS) that ‘steps down’ the 240v alternating current from the utility pole power lines to the small amount of direct current needed to run the meter’s digital electronics which record the electricity usage data. The SMPS function emits sharp spikes in millisecond bursts continuously. These spikes have been measured up to 50,000 Hz and higher.
This constant pulsing of high frequencies, in addition to the RF function, causes interference with other electric and electronic equipment, and it wreaks havoc with any biological systems -- human, animal and plant -- in its field of exposure. It is well known that SMPSs can generate spikes of electromagnetic interference (EMI), or high frequency transients, which travel along the wiring in the walls, radiating out into the wiring’s electromagnetic field.
Such spikes are known as ‘dirty electricity’. This function is on ALL electronic meters. Dr. Sam Milham's book, "Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization" provides further understanding of the problem.
This ‘dirty electricity’ is a major contributor to the symptoms being reported by growing numbers of people in connection with electronic meters. Opt-out arrangements in which the wireless meter has its RF transmitting function turned off does NOT eliminate the spikes going into the building's wiring, and so would not prevent negative EMI health effects in the occupants.
For details please read
Is Dirty Electricity Making You Sick? and the January 2010 article,
Is Electrosmog Harming Our Health?
Engineer Rob States gave an outstanding thirty-minute presentation,
Expert Debunks Corporate 'Smart' Meter Craze, at a town meeting in early 2011 in Cotati, CA. He laid out the risks to privacy, safety, security and human health posed by mass installation of electronic meters.
States is one of two engineers in California who have been diligently investigating electronic meter dirty power and RF issues. The combined team has two MS degrees from MIT, a California Professional Engineer license and a PhD from Stanford in Electrical Engineering. They concluded that since people with no history of EMI sensitivity are experiencing symptoms the first day the electronic meter is installed, before the RF network is turned on, it can be assumed that RF emissions are not the only problem.
The digital meters are also gaining quite a reputation as a cause of house fires, regardless whether the RF function is turned on or not. (Watch
Smart Meter Fires Explained on YouTube.) This alone is good reason to declare a moratorium on their deployment.
Since the technology that is being dismantled has shown none of the risks of electronic meters, an aggressive plan to offer an analog meter opt-out would be a judicious step. A more prudent course would be to treat the whole project as a major risk and reconsider its deployment.
