Oprah, plug in your toaster. Most appliances don’t use energy when turned off.

If you count what amount is saved per day, just on switching off your appliances on standby in the whole of the US, it adds up to $7 500 000. At 10 cents per KWH it adds up to 750 000KWH saved per day. If you look at it in this way rather than on the small scale you are doing in this article it is actually worth switching off these appliances!

Then the changing of light bulbs, it does initially cost a hell of a lot of money, but these bulbs often come with a ten year guarantee and if you look at the saving over a ten year period, it adds up nicely; $1872 to be precise. Then if you do this calculation on a bigger scale again it adds up to $93 600 000 000 saved over the ten year period. 9 360 000 000KWH, in my book, is a lot of coal burning saved!

Thanks, Edgar.

Yes, Oprah’s show specifically claimed small appliances are the cause for this “vampire power”.

While I’m not even sure the 40% would be achieved by big appliances, that was not the focus of my experiment.

I assume your microwave has a clock on it. If so, how is it possible that it draws zero watts when turned off (i.e. not cooking)?
How long was each device plugged into the Kill-O-Watt?
I find it hard to believe that your whole entertainment center including your TV draws only 85watts. TVs (even LCDs) draw around 125-300watts alone not including cable box, amp, sound surround, DVD. Would you considering revising or explaining the details of your assumingly average entertainment center. Thx.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6475_7-6400401-3.html

An important outcome of these types of discussions is to get people thinking about issues that they never considered before. Especially with environmental issues that may take changing peoples living habits to have a positive effect. But why oh why do they have to talk bungus like unplugging the toaster (etc) will save tons of electricity? Maybe it makes more sense to talk about why the industry doesn’t lower the consumption on standby items like TVs, cable boxes, DVDs which are the worst offenders generally. Or why so many office buildings leave all the lights on over night. Lets educate smartly with facts not with TV talk show half truths.

Reference study.
http://standby.lbl.gov/data.html

Hi Andy,

We now know that even though we turn off the appliances, they are still drawing some electricity if plug in.

Does this still apply if the switch on the wall socket is turned off as well?

Your “great musician” was merely echoing the wisdom of four of America’s greatest philosophers.

I understand that the amount of “vampire power” is indeed very very small, as you put it, but that’s just ONE household…now multiply that by hundreds of millions of households in the USA alone, not including other countries. We are still sucking a lot of power for things we aren’t even using all the time. Regardless of how much money one person saves or doesn’t save, the total amount of wasted enery for the nation and the total POLLUTION because of that wasted energy is unacceptable in my book.

Talk about skepticism… It is virtually impossible to dispute manufacturer power usage info. on the flat-screen TV specifications listed in the above-referenced CNET reviews or, for that matter, in the user manual for various home theater components. A home entertainment center that uses less wattage than a light bulb just doesn’t seem right unless said home entertainment center consists of a boom-box style receiver paired to a small TV without satellite or cable box, no powered sub, and without separate VCR, Digital Recorder, Tape Deck or Record Player (some people still have all of the above) . If your home theater consists of two or three components (besides the TV), it *might* use very little power. If there are more than two or three components, however, I would suspect a faulty Kill-O-Watt power consumption reading. (Maybe it’s defective?)

In order for your readers to draw any applicability to their own situation, it would help to specify what you mean by home theater. For example, are you talking about one of those home theater packages that come with the tiny satellite speakers or are you referring to 4 tower-style speakers for a pro-logic system, or are you talking about a self-assembled 5.1 or 7.1 system (not to be confused with the all-in-one packages with the mini speakers)? You see, “Home theater” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people — from a $199 JVC or Sony to a genuine high current amp built by Harman/Kardon, McIntosh or similar. Moreover, some people may own a separate VCR, DVD player and CD changer, whereas another person might have an all-in-one VCR/DVD/CD/Recorder. That’s one digital LCD vs. three or four separate ones. Others have the DVD player built into the TV set. The variations are so innumerable that it is hard to define “average” in this instance. So why not specify exactly how many devices your home theater consists of?

You are dead wrong on the toaster – mine is pulling .24 amps sitting their 24*7 *365 days a year. In Illinois the bottom line 1000 watt per hour charge is 12.5.

This equates to 183,341 watts – kilowatts are 183.341 times – annual lost money is $22.92. If 100,000,000 toaster are doing this over the year that equates to 2,292,000,000 dollars per year.

Over two years that enough to buy 100% of the common stock of General Motors and have over a billion left over.

I’m just wondering… where did you get a microwave that consumes no power when not being used? Don’t most modern microwaves have a clock display that requires power to function? Also, how does a clock radio consume no power? The same would apply for this as well. Another thing… unless your coffee maker is some cheap $1.99 walmart piece of crap, its probably going to have an automatic brew setting which would require a clock on board to know when to start the brewing and said clock would in fact use power when the coffee maker itself is not in use. As for the cell chargers and baby monitors… how do those consume no power even when being used? That is plain wrong. Baby monitors and cell phones require the power to be converted to DC for them to function and charge respectively. This conversion does in fact use electricity and its more than you would imagine for no more than what its doing. Did you stop to think for a minute that your handy little gadget can’t pick up the DC current being used by those devices? Your little story has all kinds of holes in it, and you think you have the right to criticize someone else for not having their facts straight?

Great article! When I saw the Oprah episode I was very skeptical about the viewers claim that her electricity bill plummeted when she unplugged her appliances. Thanks for doing the leg work I thought it was too good to be true.

Thanks for the support, Renee.

And I also thought about criticism before I even ran the test itself – I designed the experiment so that it can be replicated by anyone! Any criticism is fine, but if someone really doubts anything that I said, they can run the same experiment themselves to validate my results.

Andy

Thanks for the kind words, Mark.

>Is there a way to calibrate it with something considered reference to verify its accuracy? Or did you just see if it matched watt usage listed on appliances.

Yes, this is exactly what I did. I was able to verify it on enough devices (I forget the detail, perhaps 10), that I was confident it was calibrated well enough to give accurate readings for this test. It’s accurate enough that I discovered that some devices are very stable in their power draw (like light bulbs and laptop computers), while others have more of a fluctuating wattage draw (like toasters and space heaters). However, the behavior of the Kill-A-Watt was consistent enough that I didn’t question the calibration.

Andy

Alexandre,

Thank you very much! Nice to know my effort is appreciated.

I hope you are a teacher or a researcher or something along those lines.

Nope, sorry: I’m just a guy.

(and probably not paid to write it)

Correct. DBSkeptic operates at a loss, and while I pay all the other writers, I don’t pay myself any money when I write articles. This is why I hope fans will support the site. This will help ensure the site will stay alive and articles like this will continue to be written.

And if you’re not happy, try it with another device of your choice; I’m pretty sure you’ll have the same result.

You got it. Tests like these, claims like I made, claims that Oprah’s guest made – these are all worthless unless you have evidence and repeatable proof for others to analyze. Hopefully my efforts here have met those requirements.

Andy

Do I understand that the use of a lamp or a simple toaster (no lights or timer) left plugged-in is zero use of power?
Reducing energy usage may not lead to $avings for us. The utility companies may charge us more to make up the difference when we cut down on our power usage, as DWP did in CA when we cut our water usage lower than expected last drought.

The equation I don’t understand, rarely addressed, is Global Swarming. How can families having 4, 6, 8, 10… children expect to reduce the use of resources and on a national scale the large immigration to the US. In California we are being told to reduce our use of power and water, near me large condo complexes are being built… because “all the people who are coming here need homes”. Having them unplug their toasters does not seem to me sufficient to balance our population growth. Typical of the media to focus on the wrong side of the problem. Sound bites.

Andy,

Thank you for your efforts to raise the technical competence of the public. This is a big problem, technical considerations are replaced by heresay and misinformation.

One of my favorite experts, a metallurgist working for GM, wore a button on his shirt that said “Show me your data”. That cuts through the unsupported ideas that get promoted in the masses.

Think of an equal sign, with savings on one side, cost on the other.
Unplugging saves a few dollars, replacing worn out receptacle costs more, this fails to save!

Multiplying the pennies you save, while ignoring the costs you incur does not make it more economical. That’s why the equal sign is there.

I have seen people make it all the way through our educational system and still not realize we are governed by basic principles. If this is not your strong point, stay out of science, become an actor, or a politician, or a news reporter… (Wait a minute…is that our problem?)

Justifying hopeful actions in the name of a bigger cause, such as “saving the environment” seems wonderful. You may even get a Nobel Peace Prize for your efforts to save the environment by eliminating carbon dioxide. But what about when we realize the Earth is cooling, not warming? Oops, we needed that carbon, can we get it back?

Luckily the impact is small so we can get rich from addressing fear with our unscientific actions, hopefully we don’t trash the world too much. What I am concerned about is when we get better at these scams, what if we actually affected something?

So hang in there Andy, we need all the technical minds we can get, even though scamming is a more attractive profession. If I were in charge, I would appoint “Technical Czars” to major activities, along with continuous improvement of the “Czars” knowledge of his activity.

Keep up the good work, we haven’t lost yet! Mother Nature is on our side.

What about electro magnetic Polloution? (rather than pollution as a result of the production of electricity for consumption) someone had mentioned to me about unplugging appliances even when turned off but it was to attempt to reduce (however little) the amount of electro magnetic ‘energy’ in my home environment. I know this would likely be only a small amount but accumulatively it’s something i can control, asides from turning off electric supply for whole property – as presumably there is a ‘charge’ running all through the walls etc where the electrical wires are situated. And of course would still be being affected by the neighbours appliances/wi-fi/cordless phones/babymonitors etc, that i don’t really have any influence over. So your article caught my interest but it was with the consideration of reducing my exposure to EMP rather than my utility bill!

Seems like there is no end to the misunderstanding of electricity. Too bad, they should teach this in school…

So Electro-Magnetism 101:
A magnetic field is generated around a wire when current flows through it. When there is no current, such as when the switch is open, there will be no magnetic field.

In most applications two wires are run together, such as “romex” wiring in the walls, or “zip” cord to an appliance, or “SJO” cord, a heavy duty covering over a pair of wires. When current flows in one wire, excatly the same current flows in the other wire, in the opposite direction. These two magnetic fields essentially cancel each other out, because they are the same strength, but opposite polarity. If you have an imbalance between the wires, then you have a problem with somne current flowing to ground, this is what a ground fault interrupter sees and trips the circuit breaker if this exceeds 5 thousands of an amp.

As far as the danger of magnetic fields, we live in a magnetic field, caused by the spinning of the molten core of our earth, developing an electrical flow because it is spinning in a magnetic field. The magnetic field is caused by the current flow. It is unclear how it got started, but one causes the other. Without this field many bad things would happen to our Earth, its atmosphere and its water. Scientists have expressed that Mars may have been much like Earth, but lost its magnetic field, and became the cold dry planet it is today. But I regress, if living things on Earth haven’t adapted to the magnetic field we live in by now, then it must be meaningless. Magnetic fields have very little effect on the body, even in much higher concentrations, because our molecules are essentially non-magnetic.

You can magnetize our molecules with an extremely strong magnetic field, but the magnetic properties are soo poor that the molecule loses its magnetism in a very short time. Different compounds take different times, and this is how MRI machines “see” into our body, harmlessly.

If you are concerned, get a compass and note that it responds to the Earth’s magnetic field. Now set it down near an appliance, and turn it on. If the appliance produces a magnetic field as strong as the Earth’s, you would see the needle move. Remember this is the level you are subjected to 100% of the time even if you lived in 4000 BC.

When you do this you will note that the magnetic field is so slight, by comparison to the Earth’s, that you have to move the compass real close to the appliance. Never mind the appliances with a metal cover, that shields all the magnetic field, go pick on the plastic ones. This leaves out most of the toasters by the way.

I work with spot welders for the automotive assembly lines, the magnetic fields are so strong they suck the picture of a TV sideways, and they don’t hurt anybody.

Still not convinced?, how about looking at the plant life under the power lines outdoors. These lines are separated by a wide distance, so the magnetic cancelling effect is not too great. Actually they have a strong electric field, and not a lot of magnetic field, because the current is low and the voltage is high. The electric field is so strong there it will light up a 4 foot flourescent tube, I have done it. So the plants live there 100% of their life, do they look any different to you? They don’t to me…

An electric field is different from a magnetic field. It is due to the division of voltage from some high potential (300,000 volts is common) to the ground potential, where you are standing. The air is a slight conductor and an extrtemely slight current flows to ground. The potential from one end of this “air conductor” to the other is what the electric field is. An electric field can exist with no current flow, because the side that has a lot of electrons, the negative side, effects the other side by repelling electrons at a distance, and this would be the positive side. A capacitor stores this electric field, in the form of a charge. The insulator between the positive and negative plates of a capacitor is affected in that the insulator’s orbits of its electrons is distorted by the push of the negative potential on the negative plate. This push wants to spring back like a rubber band, and will “discharge” into an external load applied across the capacitor. This is why the mad scientist can chase you around his lab with a charged capacitor, maybe zapping it once for effect. That one zap probably completely discharged the cap, but he chases you anyway.

With a large enough capacitance you can power something. The electronic memory in a weld controller I invented was powered by a capacitor, and never needed a new battery, I though that was pretty cool. The new electric cars have huge capacitors to augment the acceleration of the motor, which draws more current than the batteries can supply by itself.

So I hope you come to understand that electric and magntic fields are harmless, and only exist in small amounts in the home.

I understand what it is like to pick up bits and pieces, as I train people in resistance welding, and most of the people in this industry have just “picked up pieces” on the job. What I have to do for them is make all the pieces fit. Sometimes the shape of a few of these is not right, and so the whole thing doesn’t quite fit in their minds. It gives me great joy when I help them to correct and rearrange the pieces to fit, and you can see it in their expression when it all comes together!.

So let’s work on those pieces, we’ll start with the terms you used:

1. electro-magnet fields:
Actually the term is “electromagnetic fields” and it is two fields, the first is an electric field which exists between a positive and negative potential, or “charge”, and the second is
a magnetic field which exists around the flow of electricity, OR around a “permanent” magnet.

These two fields are different, and the fact that they are commonly lumped together makes it harder to get a good understanding. Add that to the fact that you can’t see either one, and it becomes downright spooky.

So let’s start with the electric field. This exists wherever there is a difference in electrical potential between two points. If I have a battery of 12 Volts, that means that one post has more electrons than the other. The chemicals inside the battery are acting like a pump, trying to push electrons out one post and trying to pull some in the other post. If I attach some path between these posts, such as a light bulb and the necessary wires to complete the circuit, then it can push electrons through it, and you see the effect because light is generated from the electrons bashing their way through the high resistance of the filament, heating it up. Energy is given off in the form of photons from the “excited” filament. See somebody thinks this is exciting, even if they are just dumb old electrons…

So the chemical energy inside the battery has been converted to light energy from the bulb, and off it goes into space. There is also heat energy given off, and it doesn’t go to far, but it can harm you more that any of these other forms of energy in our little demonstration. The body’s cells are easily damaged by heat, as it destroys their structure, boils the water in the tissue, etc. The light energy can have a bad effect, and a good effect. The bad effect on your skin is that it can cause a sunburn, and it can deplete your body of folic acid, a necessary chemical for growth and life processes. Mothers who sunbathe too much can reduce their folic acid and the baby can get Spinal Bifida, I hope I spelled that correctly. There is no post-editing on this website.

The good effect is that your body can make vitamin D from this, an essential chemical for life also. There aren’t too many other animals that can do this, so that makes us lucky. The trick is to get the right balance, and if you stand around in the sun long enough, say a thousand generations, you skin will develop a shading pigment that adjusts this level of activity in your skin.

The light energy can also harm your eyes, which have nerves that can detect the photons striking them. Too much damages them, just like any other sensor, there is a range of acceptable operation. Another thing lucky thing for us, these nerves can tell more than just the amount of light, they can tell the “frequency” of the light too. I am getting a bit ahead of myself, because that is a term coming up, but lets go to item three and then come back here. I’ll mark your place *** how’s that?

Oh, you’re back? Good, now we can consider that the nerves in the eye, at least some of them, can actually sense the frequency of the light, and send a different sensation to the brain of “color”, and they have an infinite precision on that, they don’t send back just “teraHertz” numbers, they send back the information in an analog format, mixed with digital, much better than computers do, but that is another subject…

So back to electric fields, another way of having this field is with the way clouds “rub” against the air as they flow around. They actually gather a “charge” which is either a bunch of extra electrons, or a great lack of them. As the clouds move around, the electrons get dropped off on Earth, making the clouds a positive charge. Here is a link to some of that discussion: http://ibis.nmt.edu/nmt_lms/steps_2000/examples.html
Anyway, this “potential” can be as high as 100 volts for every inch of height from the ground. You need a very sensitive meter to measure this, most meters suck up too many electrons to get the pointer on the meter to move, and destroy the charge without measuring it. Kind of like asking your dog to tell you which is better, round steak or T-bone. He gulps it down so fast it is hard to see the difference between the two. He does this so that you will let him try again…

This high potential is a stored charge. The air, when dry is a pretty good insulator, and the ground and clouds, both wet, are a (sort of) conductor, so you can visualize two plates, separated by an insulator, with a bunch of electrons on the lower one, and a “lack” of them on the upper one. This “lack” means that there are a lot of atoms up there that should have an electron for every proton they have, but they are missing, and they want them back. Now if the air gets moist, such as it starts raining, this electrical potential can even itself out by passing some current between the two. This is called lightning, and every now and then someone will say lightning actually travels up. This is said this way because the electrons come from the ground and go up to the clouds. But what we see as lightning is the flash of photons getting all excited by the current flowing through their air and water molecules. This is why he lightning leads the front of a storm, the potential or “static charge” wants to get evened out and takes the first opportunity it can. Lightning will also happen when a volcano spews forth a cloud of conducting gas into the sky, then sneaky little electrons are always wanting to get back to their molecules that miss them, and will take any ride they can get. Heat is not a conductor, there is no heat lightning, that is a storm far away. Throw that piece of the puzzle out, it is crap. We can’t make this fit if there are mis-information pieces clogging the puzzle up.

So my long-winded point is that this electric field of 100 volts per inch, times how tall you are (sorry if you are metric) doesn’t seem to hurt you, and it is way more than any 110 Volt appliance could ever throw at you. The 110 Volt source has way more electrons to donate to your pain than the charge in the air, but we are talking “charge” here not “current”.

Magnetic fields are the other half of this huge discussion, some of which I touched on in the previous discussion. This is a force that surrounds a magnet. The magnet can be a flow of electrons as in an electrical current, or a permanent magnet like in your toy car motor. In the permanent magnet, the magnetic polarity of all the little orbiting electrons has been induced to line up in one direction. Some materials will stay that way, like iron, some won’t, like copper. But if they do stay that way, they all add up and make a field that you can observe by sticking paper clips or tiny screws to, like in that screwdriver that became magnetized and drives you nuts every time you try to start a tiny screw, it pulls it out of the hole and turns it sideways.

This steady field can be duplicated with a steady flow of current, like you get from a battery, called “DC” or “Direct Current”, where the polarity is the same and the electrons all flow the same direction. This gives you a nice steady magnetic field. This is like the Earth’s magnetic field. Since we live in that nice steady field, if there was a magnetic effect it would accumulate now because it is always in the same direction. And it does accumulate. In a project I was on as a Welding Engineer for GM, we found that bearings, sitting on the shelf for a while gained a slight magnetism from the steady influence of the Earth’s magnetic field. Bearings in an assembled gear box, which we “degaussed” (removed the gauss, another word for magnetism) had less or zero residual magnetic field with them. We degaussed them with an AC (Alternating Current) magnet, where the current changed direction causing the magnetic field to change direction. This scrambles the alignment of those itsy bitsy magnetic domains in the steel, and restored their random-ness giving them no magnetism at all.

So the kind of field surrounding power wires is AC, and if you like to have “no magnetism” then you could actually consider this beneficial, but if you used a compass to see how much there is in a normal appliance, you would see that the effect is almost nothing. My point is that it is not damaging, it is actually the opposite, but so slight as to be negligible.
You can thank Tesla for getting us to standardize on AC power, Edison wanted DC as a standard and had a lot of money invested in DC equipment, generators, motors and such. But AC has some advantages when you want to convert a low voltage, high current circuit to a high voltage, low current circuit. This has to get into power transmission,
another big subject. So the standard that won was Nickolas Tesla’s, and he invested a small fortune to get us to standardize on this better way. He did not profit from it in any way, by the way, for all of you out there who think profit is evil… Read about him, he was quite a guy. So was Edison.

2. technology induced electromagnetic pollution/smog;
Wow, here is a long term. “Technology induced” would mean that smart guys are doing something, and when associated with those awful things like smog, it seems to blame smart guys for bad things. That is unfair, because smart guys have elevated us from our animal existence to the life we have, cruisin’ around, building our street cred… But smart guys come in different types, you need smart smog-guys to help us with that last aspect of this term. And they are out there, inventing things like cat converters, lean burn engines, give em a chance, this is a new market for clean things, only recently did people start to want to actually pay money for this. Be careful of the scams, some are world-wide and very clever, like blaming human activity for normal climate changes. Do your homework before you start fixing things, you could end up fixing global warming so good that we actually get colder, oops that happened? Sorry about that, another scam is about to be exposed, and bigger than Bernie’s Wall Street scam. Boy will some of us feel stupid when this all comes out, especially the Swedes who gave him the award… ha ha ha. In all fairness the main scammer couldn’t possibly have had much of an effect on the climate, more effect on showing what you can do in life if you pass the blame, and keep the credit, a method of operation that is getting a little boring to me, I have seen too much of it.

And we discussed the electromagnetic thing, now we must consider, is it pollution, or is it a clean-up? If your (old style) color TV gets “polluted” with magnetism and shows red and green patches, and the service man comes out to “degauss” it with his AC magnetic field, did he cause “pollution” or did he remove it? I hope you feel he removed it, because this function has been installed in all the TVs and it does this on start-up now. The serviceman had to find another job… I guess if we define “Pollution” it is a lot like defining “weeds” in a garden, it is the proliferation of something you don’t want. So this is a subjective thing in some cases, and hard to apply science to. If you could, then you could clearly classify plants as either weeds or flowers, but it depends on what you call “weed” It also depends on whether you got any and what the arresting officer calls “weed”. There are some “flowers” he is interested in too.

And then there is Smog, which I cannot relate to electricity, but Oprah’s toaster may contribute to it, if she is one of those cooks that uses the smoke alarm as a timer… but I don’t think so. Can we leave smog out of it for now? That’s just too distant to try to cover here, besides I don’t know much about it.

3. oscillation and the frequencies:
Oscillation is the movement of something back and forth, like the pendulum of a clock. Frequency is a measurement of how often it completes its full movement, say from almost bumping the left side of the clock housing, through the right and back again to the left side.

If you put your finger there, and counted how many times it touched, and timed it, you would have the “frequency”. Trouble is, the units that your particular culture dreamed up for things would cause you to express it in different ways from someone else. You would probably count in “decimal” which is pretty universal here on Earth, except for computers, which would count in “binary”.

As far as how long you would count; “time” and the goofy way we count it up (60 increments of seconds = 1 of minutes, etc) is very universal in all Earth cultures, never could figure that one out, did somebody give away free watches the instant time was considered by humans? If only other standards could be settled so quickly, wasting time and
money with competing standards would be saved, like in the VHS and Beta format for video tapes, and many other things. Very strange how we all adopted the same format at once…

So lets say we saw that some photon of light didn’t travel a straight line, but instead “oscillated” back and forth as it travelled. We could count those oscillations and see that it is somewhere around 400 to 790 “teraHertz” meaning; “tera” or a trillion of something, and “Hertz” is the new yuppie-induced way of saying “cycles”.

Someone thought it would be way cool to rename a common term, that way they would sound smarter than anybody else, until they got used to that term. So they picked the last name of a dead German physicist, Rudolf Heinrich Hertz, just to slow the understanding of the term, extending how smart the new term appears for a long time. I think it was
stupid, but what do I know… I worked many years in a weld control company where we would get a new national sales manager every year. The first thing the new guy would do is re-name all the controls, now he was smarter than us, for a while…

There are many other ways of measuring the frequency of visible light, such as “wavelength” or how far it travels for each “cycle” and these are expressed as parts of a meter. or “degrees Kelvin” which is a temperature scale, a way of expressing how “hot” this color of light is, or just color, my favorite. The light can be red, which is low frequency, yellow, or green, or even blue, which is high frequency.

I like the colors best, but scientists prefer the wavelength, because they like to use their fancy little meters on everything.

Anyway this gives us an idea of what “oscillations” and “frequency” mean. So go back to the place mark (***) You don’t know what I mean by that? That means I caught you, you were just “skimming” the article. Well go back and start at the beginning, you are going to just generate more fragments of knowledge on this subject that don’t fit together. How do you think you got this way anyway? Gezzssh…

Here is a good (and complicated) description of “the electromagnetic spectrum”, where they deal with all frequencies of this, which is called different things depending on its frequency, such as “radio waves”, “microwaves”, “light (waves)”, “gamma waves” (maybe, I am not sure that may be a particle, but wait, light is a particle…) I think the lowest frequency is just called a “wave” and you see it in the ballpark. Laugh if you want, but it is as much a wave as all the others, energy is transferred, it has a “wavelength”, propagation speed, and everything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_spectrum

4. accumulation of charged energy:
This is the accumulation of electrons if you are talking about electrical energy, and clouds do it, rubbing a balloon on your head does it, unless you are Yul Brynner. Some materials want to grab electrons, some want to shed electrons when rubbed together, this causes an “accumulation of charged energy”, and you can use it to zap the cat on a dry winter day indoors. The cat now has that charge, and I hope he fixes you by walking over and zapping your keyboard with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yul_Brynner

5. naturally occurring magnetism of the earth:
That was in my last discussion, caused by current flowing in the molten iron core of the Earth, creating a magnetic field. The rotating core then induces current into the iron, causing the current flow. It is a “chicken or egg” puzzle, which happened first? (Actually that puzzle is easy, the egg happened first, the chicken is a development that allows another egg to be produced. Earlier versions just make egg from the original egg – one celled animals, the chicken is just a newer model, more complex.) The energy input is the rotation of the Earth, which is a huge store of kinetic energy imparted to the Earth early in its formation.

6. and magnets and electricity:
Magnets, as described earlier are two types, but in each case they exist because all the little magnets, which are electrons whirling around the atom, (a form of current flow) are all aligned by various means to display a unified magnetic force. So there is the; permanent magnet, electromagnet, and chick-magnet (like I used to be…)

7. The 2 energies electricity and magnetism being combined
They are consider combined already, as any current flow forms a magnetic field, and any magnetic field can induce current flow if it moves across an electrical conductor. This is how a transformer works (Decepticons excluded…) A primary winding (where the energy goes in) supports a magnetic field, preferably AC, and that moving magnetic field cuts the conductors of the secondary (where the energy comes out) inducing a current flow. We can have a different number of “turns” wound in the secondary, and it will give you a different Voltage out, along with a difference in current capacity. If you supply a 10:1 ratio transformer with 120 Volts in, through a 1 Amp fuse, then it will produce 12 Volts out, but you can draw 10 Amps before it blows the primary’s 1 Amp fuse. Same energy in = same energy out, in this case a max of 120 Watts (Volts times Amps)

I capitalize these terms because they are named after scientists, Voltza, Ampere, Hertz, Watt, but it can still get confusing, because Louis Marie Ampere named his newly described measurement “Intensitie” (sounds Italian doesn’t it?), so we use the letter “I” for amps, go figure. We use “E” for Volts, because some snob decided it was
“Electro-Motive Force”, even trying to get us to call it “EMF”, but I think it was just a new national sales manager, renaming things to look smart.

8. being very prevalent in the urban environment and definitely much more increased in recent times (esp last 20 years)
Yes, the man-made component has increased in the last century from zero, to just barely above zero when you compare it to the huge forces naturally occurring. Or in the case of AC magnetism, is it an offset, actually degaussing some of the background magnetism? You decide, mileage may vary… Hey there is AC voltage too, does it add to the DC
forces in Nature, or subtract? Oh the unanswered questions we expose. This is why the smarter you get, the less you know. Because the knowledge you gain grows like a bubble, and the wall of that bubble represents the edge of your knowledge, beyond that is what you don’t know. So the larger the bubble, the larger the perimeter…

9. the accumulation of these effects, both in increased quantity at one particular time and place, and over a course of time?
Hmm, we discussed does it actually accumulate, or does the AC component actually remove the DC component by scrambling the alignment. Kind of like this long discussion, it actually helping you align your thoughts, or is it scrambling them further? Hey, if you reduce the bubble, you reduce the perimeter, that will make you think you are smarter,
works for me…

10. too much exposure to anything is eventually going to have some effect? especially as our bodies cells and their membranes use electrical impulse, isn’t it likely we would experience some effects from proximity to an excess of artificially produced electro-magnetism?
I think we have had so much exposure to my ramblings that there has been an effect, hopefully positive. Depends on what you can accumulate and store.

As far as your molecules storing magnetic fields, they don’t. If forced to become magnetic in an MRI machine, they lose it in microseconds after the magnetic pulse is over. So accumulative effects just don’t happen.

Also with the electric field, you don’t accumulate that either. It is true that you generate your own electric current flow, as the nerves carry signal electrically, and if a large current (anything 5 milliAmps or more) is induced from another source, it may trigger bad things, such as stopping your heart, or if enough energy is involved, it may cook something, from just the nerve to the whole muscle, or your whole body. Luckily your skin is a poor conductor, and if you don’t touch anything above 70 Volts, not enough current can enter your body to mess things up. If you puncture your skin, such as acupuncture, very small voltages can cause enough current flow to do things. In Chinese medicine, they have found ways to do beneficial things, so this application can be good.

But again there is no accumulation of electric current. Now if this current damages things, there can be an accumulation of bad things, such as loss of nerves, etc. But just stay away from 70 volts, that is considered the threshold for skin contact. If you stay below that threshold, there is no damage.

Hope this helps, or entertains, or even helps you overcome that case of insomnia that made you ask all these questions at night like you did, it cured mizzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I can shed a bit of light on this, no pun intended. I have been using a lot of CFLs, since they are so readily available at Sam’s club. I find that some don’t last very long at all, and I have ruined a few at first by putting them in places where I had X-10 modules for remote control.

Now, for the same amount of money LED lights are available, and they save at the rate of about 30:1 over incandescent. I find a few problems, which are they are very directional, they are limited so far to about 1.5 to 3 Watts, but this equals 30 to 50 Watts in an incandescent.

I calculated that the $5 bulb will pay for itself in 1.5 years, in a spot that is heavily used. They don’t get hurt by the light dimmer, but they don’t go out completely, because the dimmers pass a few milliamps all the time. (Not enough to get all in an uproar about…)

I would like to see more styles offered, presently they are all a cluster of LEDs mounted so they point away from the socket, so not too good in table lamps, unless you do like I just did. I took the glass cover off, and bent all the LEDS to the side, so it throws light out, like a table lamp should. WITH POWER OFF!

I redid the chandelier in the kitchen to hold the bulbs base-up, and it does well with four 1.5 Watt LEDs, almost as good as the four 40 Watt bulbs did.

I don’t find them at KMart, Walmart, and just a few at Home Depot, and when I look on-line they are still $35 a bulb. So Sam’s Club is the leader here, at about $5 each, and they have “PAR” spots, regular clear bulbs, and miniature candelabra base bulbs.