Less Radiation

Okay, you’ve banished all internal forms of electrosmog from your own home. So how do you now stop stray RF entering from Masts & neighbours WiFi & DECT?

First, you need to buy, borrow or beg the use of an Electrosmog Detector. You can buy a basic model for around £50 in the UK. It looks rather like a taser gun that an alien might carry.

The Electrosmog detector emits an audible noise when close to a source of pulsed radiation. Once your ears become accustomed to the various different noises, you’ll be able to differentiate between DECT, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G, GSM & Tetra. It doesn’t have a digital readout, and isn’t a true professional measuring device – but then these can cost £500. That said it’s perfectly good enough for figuring out whether you need shielding & where.

The obvious places to test first are: your bedroom, your home-office, your lounge. All the places you spend most time. If the detector gives out a background hiss you don’t need shielding. If you hear aggressive noises, then you have a strong RF presence. WiFi AP beacons sound like a fast-ticking metronome, GSM sounds like an angry wasp in a can, and 3G sounds like a high-pitched whistle.

Then you need to decide how you are going to shield the room from the Electrosmog – when I say shield, in most cases we’ll just be reducing it massively, rather than completely eliminating it.

The cheapest way to shield a room is to cover the walls in standard supermarket grade aluminium foil – the stuff you wrap Chickens & Turkeys in. You can make 2ft square sheets and then apply them to the wall using standard wallpaper paste – any larger and they get difficult to handle. Make sure you iron out the inevitable air-bubbles using a smoothing brush and don’t leave any gaps.

If the front of your house faces a Mast, you want to shield the wall that separates it from your bed. When the whole wall is covered, you need to attach an earth wire to the wall, and in turn to the earth pin in a standard household plug (consult an electrician if you don’t know how a plug is wired!) leaving live & neutral disconnected. Safer still, remove the Live & Neutral pins from the plug and cover the holes with insulation tape.

When this is done, you can paper over the foil using standard lining paper.

Of course, this still leaves the windows unshielded. You can either attach foil to plyboard and erect these panel over the window at night, or you can use the see-through Bobbinet material to permanently shield the window spaces. You attach the bobbinet by applying double-sided sticky tape around the edge of the window, and then just press the material into place – being careful to leave no gaps.

If you don’t fancy cladding your nice living room walls with Bacofoil, the more expensive option is to buy special wallpaper that has two layers of paper with an aluminium foil sandwich in between. This is much more expensive, but it’s a very good quality lining paper and is completely indistinguishable from regular wallpaper. Once up, it can be painted any colour you like.

If you live in a modern building, it might be that the walls have already been insulated with Kingspan, Celotex or a similar product. Kingspan is a foam-based heat insulation product that has layers of aluminium foil on both sides. If your property has Kingspan wall insulation you’ll know because the Electrosmog detector will only get noisy when you’re near the windows (assuming you don’t have a DECT phone or WiFi Router in your home). If that’s the case you only need attend to the windows.

By shielding a room in the way described you’ll be making a basic Faraday Cage, within that room. If you made a perfect version of this, it would stop WiFi, for example, escaping from that space.

When you hear military types talking about Tempest Shielded Rooms, this is what they mean, rooms that are completely RF shielded. If you didn’t know already, it’s possible to read what is being displayed on a CRT monitor from outside a building, using some special equipment – I think Peter Wright may have mentioned it in his book Spycatcher, certainly Marcus Kuhn authored a more recent paper on it here.

In most properties the Electrosmog detector will be silent (once you’ve turned off all your own gadgets). It will pick up signals from masts at 500 metres, but once you get around 700m you won’t really pick up anything. If the Electrosmog detector picks up just static (sounds a bit like a seashell against your ear) , there’s no point shielding anything. And at least you got yourself some peace of mind!