About 200 customers of the Central Maine Power Company
recently noticed something odd after the utility
installedsmart meters in their homes: in some cases other
wireless devices stopped working, or behaved erratically.
The 425,000 installed smart meters all broadcast in the
2.4GHz frequency range. Unfortunately, so do many of the
consumer gadgets we take for granted these days including
routers, electric garage doors, fire alarms, clocks,
electric pet fences, answering machines, and baby monitors.
“We have asked CMP to do a better job informing customers
about these potential problems, and while CMP’s website does
refer to the issue, we don’t think it goes far enough,” said
Maine’s Public Advocate Richard Davies in an online
statement. “My agency is troubled by the possibility that
people may be spending their time and money fixing a problem
that may be caused by CMP’s meters, and that can and should
be fixed by CMP.”
The utility’s Web site does include a FAQ addressing
interference. Their recommendations are to change the
location of the affected electronic device or the channel
used by the device. In the case of garage door openers,
physically relocating the garage is not an option. In the
case of baby monitors, there is often only one frequency
choice.
The electromagnetic congestion in the home is in some ways
similar to the growing electronic congestion in hospitals as
they acquire more and more electronic monitors all operating
within a few feet of each other. Medical equipment has been
known to shut down or give erroneous results when positioned
close to another piece of equipment. Such interference is
not new, just getting worse–rapidly.
As early as the 1940s, there waselectromagnetic interference
within the home. Radios and TVs broadcast at various
frequencies but they were configured to co-exist. The
electric vacuum cleaner was not. Nor the electric hair
dryer. The worst offender, however, was perhaps the
microwave oven, which, even in the 1940s, bombarded food
with radio waves at or near the 2.4GHz range. Sensing there
would be more congestion in the future, organizations worked
to protect radio and TV, while carving out blocks that can
be later used for consumer gadgets.
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