My friend Stanley Fishman, author of the acclaimed cookbooks Tender Grassfed Meat and Tender Grassfed Barbecue, lives in California and, like many folks around the United States, has been dealing with the physical stress of having a smart meter installed at his home against his will.
The option to use an analog meter and have this health sucking device removed from one’s home has only recently become available in some localities. Unfortunately, the pace of getting them removed has been painfully slow in some cases.
Whether you are waiting your turn to get your smart meter removed or still fighting for the right to opt out in the first place, here are some steps you can take based on what Stanley discovered to proactively protect yourself from a smart meter’s harmful effects.
1. Q-Links. A Q-Link is a pendent that has been designed to strengthen the electromagnetic field of the body. The electromagnetic field generated by our bodies does protect against emissions. It was designed by a Stanford academic who specializes in the study of fine energies.
The Q-Link contains certain metals and a computer chip, and is powered by being worn. This sounds strange, and some may consider it to be hokum. But it really did help Stanley, who ended up wearing it almost 24/7.
There are a variety of Q-Links available. Some can be quite expensive, as they are made for decorative purposes as well, though the basic no frills model is much cheaper. All models work the same, except there is the classic version and a more modern version that is supposed to work better.
In Stanley’s opinion based on his research, the difference between the two is hard to find. In summary, the cheapest model is very helpful, and there is no need to buy the expensive decorative models. The link comes with a cord that works fine, and there is no need to get a gold or silver chain. Stanley feels the Q-Link was the most effective protection he and his wife found against the smart meter installed at their home.
2. Metal. Find out where the meter is and place a lot of metal between it and your home. This is difficult to do, as the meter is usually attached to one of your walls. The idea is to place some metal shielding between yourself and the meter. The meter emits dangerous EMFs in a fan shaped curve, so it is best to have metal for a number of feet to the sides of your wall directly opposite the meter.
Stanley’s meter was opposite the kitchen, directly opposite some kitchen cupboards. He tried foil, that did no good. Eventually, he placed a number of old aluminum pans in the cupboards opposite the meter, propping them up so they formed a shield. This did help, but not as much as the Q-Link.
3. Distance. The closer you are to the meter, the more emissions you get. Every foot makes a significant difference. Be sure that everyone sleeps as far from the meter as possible, and spend as little time in close proximity to the meter as possible. This can be quite difficult, depending on the layout of your home. It is also best to stay away from the meter when you are outdoors. Stanley ended up spending most of his time in the end of his house that was furthest from the meter. The further away you are from the meter, the better.
Ultimately, Stanley tried many other things as well, but the above three strategies were the only ones that made a difference.
None of them solved the problem completely, but using all three of them did help a great deal. There are a lot of expensive devices that are supposed to protect against smart meters and dirty electricity. After evaluating them, Stanley was not confident that they would help, so he did not try them. Other people may have found other ways that help, but this is what he found.
The best protection is, of course, to get the smart meter removed or never have it installed in the first place – to opt out. The more of your neighbors that opt out, the better for everyone, as smart meters bounce signals from house to house. At least getting the smart meter out ends the dirty electricity problems, and will usually put you a lot further from a smart meter, and ends the transmission of your power usage.
This is not true for everybody, as people who live in apartment buildings can be near too many smart meters, as often the meters for every apartment in the building are placed together, often concentrated near one or two apartments.
Thank you Stanley, for providing your wisdom to all of us. There are many people out there struggling with health issues related to their smart meter, and hopefully these strategies can help them until they are able to move or opt out of those unhealthy devices once and for all!
Note: If the health dangers of smart meters is new to you, click here for information on smart meters from a Harvard MD who has worked in the area of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and public health for over 18 years.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
More Information
Are AMR Devices Safer than Smart Meters?
Reducing Exposure to Dirty Electricity
The Health Hazards of Wireless Baby Monitors
Harvard MD Speaks Out about the Health Dangers of Smart Meters
If you people are getting freaked out about a smart meter, I hope you have also gotten rid of your cell phones, wireless phone, ipad, laptop computer, wireless internet connection, pager, don’t live within a mile or so of a cell tower, no TV, radio, or any wireless communication devices of any kind. Unless you live in the Yukon region, you will be bathed in RF energy all day long. All these devices work in the same frequency bands, 433MHz (weather stations, etc.), 850MHz (cell phones pagers), 1900MHz (cell phones & pagers), or 2.4GHz (garage door openers, wireless phones, etc). You can’t escape RF. You are all going to DIE! Or you can just not worry about it, because it is harmless. As an EE and RF Engineer responsible for the installation of thousands of cell sites, I did have to take care of the safety aspects of the tower crews and make sure the RF energy levels were within safe guidelines. It is only harmful of you are within a few dozen meters of the antennas of a cell site and you just stay there all day.
Have a safe, rational day. Or tighten up the tin-foil caps.
jpm32526, where is your PhD or MD from again? Which experiments on the effects of radiofrequency radiation on human physiology were you a part of again? I would sure like to know, because many MDs and PhDs who HAVE actually assessed the effects of radiofrequency radiation on the human body, AND actually understand the finer points of human physiology, beg to differ with you. Actually, many EE and RF engineers also disagree with you, but they are likely not being paid by cell phone companies. No one said the other things you mentioned are safe–we are all perfectly capable of understanding the electromagnetic spectrum and reading the specs on the backs of devices, but thanks for your condescending comments! The “guidelines” you speak of and purport to be “safe” are a joke and are based on the thermal aspects of RFR only. The non-thermal dangers of RFR are well-established, well documented, and involve deadly damage such as disruption of heat shock proteins (as in those proteins that repair errors in our DNA and keep us cancer free) . . . only I bet you do not have time for such heavy scientific reading given all of the cell towers you are being paid to erect. Call us “irrational” and crack jokes if you like. I call you a “bought boy,” and consider your salary to be “blood money.” P.S., If you really do believe what you wrote, then I suggest you do some reading. Start with the Bioinitiative Report!
Dana, I have no idea whether or not such devices work as they claim. I also do not have the knowledge of physics and/or electrical engineering required to evaluate them in an educated manner. The fact that they largely claim to employ patented, proprietary technologies makes it even more difficult to evaluate them–even if one had the time or know-how to self-teach the physics and engineering necessary to evaluate them. Due to the preceding, in our home, my husband and I have chosen to try and eliminate exposures at the source, rather than rely on protective devices. When it comes to the DECT baby monitor’s of today, they are literally like having a CELL TOWER next to your baby (this coming from PhD scientists, not just me), so I would no personally rely on any device to mitigate that risk. I too was nervous about not having a monitor on my child. I am a NICU nurse. We are as Type A/control freak as they come. Every time I go to work I am charged with taking care of babies who should still be protected in the womb. It tends to leave us a bit hyper-vigilant if you know what I mean. I am used to seeing my tiny patient’s vitals at all times on a large screen. It was a scary thing for me to let go of the idea of “needing” a baby monitor. I feel your pain. Our mothers never had baby monitors though, nor did our grandmothers. We may have cried a bit, but at least our brains and bone marrow were not being exposed to DNA scrambling radiofrequency radiation. Plus, moms of today know to not have bumpers, pillows, stuffed animals, or loose blankets in the crib with the baby, so our kids have that advantage over previous generations. I looked at giving up WiFi, cordless phones, and our baby monitor as just another prong of my family’s desire to regain the health we were created to have by making choices such as eating traditional foods. In the case of baby monitors, it seems that in order to keep our babies truly safe we may have to relinquish the baby monitor. If you are going to, or have to, use a cell phone, then you may choose to use the diode for the chance it works–but do not expect it to protect you and your family from cell phones. Along with the diode, take the measures of buying only low SAR cell phones, using them mostly for texting, using them on speaker only if a call is truly necessary, and not using them near your kids, who are much more susceptible to radiofrequency radiation than adults. However, I would not risk a baby monitor next to my baby’s head knowing what I now know–diode or not.
Thank you for your quick response, Nicole. That is helpful! I wonder what your opinion would be on these EMF neutralizing diodes… http://www.energpolarit.com/details.aspx?pid=619&cid=218
have you ever heard of them and do you think they work? I found out about them from a homeopathic doc we’ve been do a few times. The one I linked to is for the circuit breaker to cover the whole house. I’ve thought about getting it but haven’t yet. I currently have a couple cell phone diodes – 1 on my phone and 1 beneath my infant’s monitor. I do like being able to see her with the video monitor but not if it’s putting her at risk. Hoping this might be a good solution. What do you think!?
Dena, that is wonderful that they came out and replaced it right away! The facts that there is no FCC notation and that someone will have to come out and read it monthly are great signs that they are not trying to pass off a smart meter as a regular analog meter. However, I would make sure that someone actually gets out of the car, walks up to the meter, looks at the meter, and copies numbers from the meter each month. I say this because I have a smart meter, but the type I have requires a meter reader to drive through my neighborhood with a special device that “reads” my meter from the road. My power company calls this “someone coming out to read the meter.”
Knowing what I now know about wireless devices, I have boxed up my DECT baby monitor and will be disposing of it along with my cordless phones. Even if your monitor is not a high-frequency/”DECT”-type monitor, it is still operating in a range that has been found to have effects on human health. Actually, the baby monitors I have looked at fall in the same range as the frequencies emitted by the various transmitters in smart meters, AND baby monitors are typically right next to our children the whole time they sleep:-( Some monitors are sound-activated and transmit only when activated by sound, but most just broadcast the entire time they are on–like a wireless router does.
I now make sure I am within earshot while my 2.5-year-old daughter is napping. If I have another child, I will not use a baby monitor. I just cannot justify the risk.
Here is a video, by Magda Havas, PhD, which reveals what our baby monitors etc. would sound like if we could hear the radiofrequency waves we have allowed in our home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAnrmJ3un1g .
Nicole,
I called this week and had our company remove the smart meter. They came out right away which I appreciated but the one they replaced it with is still digital. I called back to inquire and they said it is an analog meter with a digital face. Someone will still have to come read it monthly and there is no FCC that I can find anywhere on it. Do you think this seems right? I have alerted all of my neighbors and am trying to get as many of them to have theirs removed as well! Also, is it your opinion that we should not be using any type of wireless video monitors like we have since our son was born 2.5 years ago (and now with our daughter who is 6 months).
Awesome plan of action Beth! Thanks for posting the text of the bill. I was going to try to do that later today, but follow-through can be a bit hard with a two-year-old who wants me to play all day:-)
Yes, even though your smart meter is a water meter I would not doubt that the RFR is affecting your health if it is in your house. They theoretically emit less RFR than the electric meters, but even small amounts of lower frequency RFR is known to have effects on human physiology:-(
Janice (and Nicole), that’s interesting because the smart meter that I referenced earlier is for water and to my knowledge it’s the only kind we have on our property so far (if the electric one is still analog, which I think it is because it has the spinning wheels and no digital readout). The water smart meter is installed in our basement (I never should have let that guy in the house!). It is the thing that, in retrospect, seems to coincide with my waking up for several long hours every night, a pattern that started a couple of years ago. The smart water meter was also installed a couple of years ago.
So, I agree, I wouldn’t just sit passively by. It’s time to ask your state legislators to pass the law that Vermont did. Here is the bill that was passed there:
http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/2012/bills/Senate/S-214.pdf
(the old language is crossed out and the new language, now enacted, is underlined).
Contact your senator and representative for your local neighborhood district (state level legislators, not national level) and give them a copy of this bill and tell them the reasons you want them to pass one like it, and then send the same thing to your governor. Give them copies of the sources Sarah cited, including the one linked in her last post on this, from the Environmental Medicine Doctors. Then follow up with phone calls and emails and ask others to join in the effort.
We ALL need to do this. It’s the way local government works… if or when it works FOR the people, which it does sometimes.
Janice, from what I have read, the water meters are a bit less of a threat than the electric meters. This is because the water meters should never have ZigBee chips in them and are not designed to be a player in the coming Home Area Networks (HANs). Also, water meters tend to be farther away from the house, rather than attached to the house. The preceding said, it is not something I would want on my property. If they can read them without walking up to them, then they are emitting radiofrequency radiation. Contact your legislators. Vermont just passed S214, which allows Vermonters to always have the ability to opt out of smart meters and to not have to pay a monthly fee. I think it can be done, it is just going to take lots of phone calls, letters, and e-mails to law-makers–like they did in Vermont.
They won’t unless enough people raise a fuss about it. Like anything else, it sometimes takes some forthright and enlightened souls to stand up and effect positive change.
Anybody know if smart meters for water usage pose the same threats? The local authority came through the neighborhood and installed the smart meters on everyone’s property without any notice. We came home one day and there it was…they are all installed in the front of the houses so the meter readers can read them from the street without having to walk up to the houses…..From the local chatter that I heard, we have no option. They will not reinstall any old meters….