JaxDad wrote:
A farmer near here got pinched by the nice folks at our electrical utility a while back.
He had a very well lit barn and storage / shop building for his side business.
Then we had a power failure.......
When the linesmen went past they thought it odd that his outbuildings were well lit but not his house or anything else.
Then it dawned on them, there was a 500 KV transmission corridor running across his pasture.
When they discovered he ha buried a huge loop of wire zig-zagging back & forth beneath the transmission lines they handed hm a huge bill based on what they 'estimated' his consumption had been.
So much for 'free' electricity.......
This is a great story to tell because it is a head scratcher. So was it via inductance to the Magnetic Field or capacitance to the Electric Field. Unquestionably it was the latter and here is why:
The power line was severed downstream of the farm so there would be no current flowing (so no Magnetic Field) BUT the upstream portion over the farm was still powered up. So we have a full blown Electric Field over the farmers "capacitance plate" in the field.
A single conductor from the capacitance plate to the primary of his transformer and the bottom of the primary to a ground rod in Earth.
;) ;) :)
On second thought, the towers were on line but the local distribution was down So, it could have been inductance to the Magnetic Field. My bad.
