Electronics → AC Wiring causes wierd chirping sound

No.

There is a world of difference between wires formed into a coil and wires lying parallel in a straight line.

And we are not talking about 0000 conductors. We are talking about household wiring.

There will be no attraction between the two copper wires in a run of romex. Or at least the attraction will be so slight that there will be no movement between the two.

Even if it were somehow induced into the wires there is no way for that energy to be tranduced into sound waves.

I really think that the household wiring in not a likely candidate for the source of this sound.

Gas Meter

Thanks, Jig-that is very much the sound. Sorry, I have no idea what a fft is.

No wiring in conduit here-romex is the standard. Overhead power/telco lines. You might all think I am crazy, but imagine standing in an empty room (aka a house with no furnishings, no electrical draw, no doorbells, no smoke alarms, no fancy gas meters, no nothing other than standard AC wiring, and hear the sound Jig posted. It is very soft, but you can here it.

A normal person might not even notice it-but I am the type to listen to the dishwasher to hear every cycle. I guess it is the repairmen in me. We listen to every sound. . .

I am in the kitchen on my notebook-I have heard the sound several times while typing. Maybe it is the crickets out in the woods

I have lived with this for 10 years-I am trying to remember if I ever heard it outside ( 25% sure I have) But, at least I have a recording of it now,

Thanks for all for you help. At lease I don't feel I am ready for the mental ward.

I'll give you the points for wires in Romex, but you're just flat wrong about about parallel wires in a flat plane.

No, I respectfully disagree.

Copper wires work very well as electro-magnets when formed into coils. But there would have to be a very large current passing through a straight length of copper to produce a magnetic field strong enough to attract another straight piece of copper.

Way more current than would be found in a household circuit.

If you have any dimmer switches, turn off the circuit they are on. If the sound goes away replacing the dimmers with new dimmers might do it. Or replace them with standard switches.

nelamvr6 - just an FYI - the amount of copper in a penny now is too small to test this. If you have a penny minted pre 1982 this would work. The price of copper increased that year - the US Mint changed the penny to a ratio of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper.

as far as the issue at hand, if you find the product on the web link below around the house - someone is messing with you. I cant believe they actually make this:

»www.shomer-tec.com/site/ ··· C99BE7CC

You know I was already aware of this, I was wondering if anyone would point this out! (The penny's copper content that is, not the device in your link.)

But my point was that copper is extremely difficult to magnetize.

cmon now...tell the truth...you own the Mind Molester lol!

ARG, it doesn't matter if the penny is lead, if it weighs a 1000lbs or a mg, all that matter is if it conducts.

CURRENTS EXERT FORCE ON OTHER CURRENTS.

if you don't believe me, crack your undergraduate physics text, go to the section on conduction and prepare to be amazed. i'll go into more detail, if needed, later, at the moment i'm out the door to watch a rocket launch.

If you hear it in any kind of electronics, the radar pulse makes sense. Electronic organs and stereo equipment and I suppose computers can pick this stuff up. A military base, airport, or FCC facility within a few miles can cause this. If it is not an electronically amplified sound, it has got to be something physically causing this. If it is crickets or the like it will only happen at certain temperatures is my experience. I liked the idea of turning off the power in the house, then you would only have to deal with external electrical wiring. If you think it might be an insect or animal of some kind, check with your local university or county extension service, they will know if such things are problems in your area. IT could also be like a creaky step, a creaky house caused by wind changes. It'll drive you nuts now until you find out.

i did a little research and i have two questions?

1) do any of your neighbors have the same problem?
2) does it go on 24/7

the reason is it might be a radar antenna for weather. Doppler tracking uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR3 to be precise). These antennas use a 9300 - 9600 hz range and can utilize a "chirped" (also known as pulse compressed) radar. when in close proximity to a radar station, intereference can occur in home electronics as well as walkie talkies and cordless devices that use this as a carrier signal.

if your neighbors have the same problem, i would say this is the cause

I think you're restricting your thinking to theoretical concepts, whereas I'm focusing on real world applications.

The OP was talking about his HOUSEHOLD WIRING. We're not talking about Miller welding machines.

Most of the circuits in a house carry single phase 110V AC. There are exceptions of course, the electric range, electric furnace and perhaps the Air Conditioner will need 220V AC, but the vast majority of home wiring carries single phase 110V AC.

Most of the circuits will have a 20 Amp breaker on them. Most of these circuits will usually carry substantially less current than that, even during the surges experienced when devices are first energized.

The magnetic field (which actually does the force exertion that your talking about) will not be very strong even on the surface of the conductor. This field will rapidly decrease in strength with increasing distance from that conductor (remember the inverse square?).

The long and short of it is that there will be very little (if any) attraction between the two conductors of a romex run, consequently there will be very little (if any) relative movement between the two conductors.

Guess I'll nose in here. 9.6 Khz is a distant harmonic of A/C current, and happens to be triplen. This would be a rarity indeed, but I'm assuming possible. Especially in a poorly grounded MGN area (sandy soil content). The harmonic could be kicking back and buzzing filaments, dimmers, GFCI's, transformers, relays, coils, etc... Even an empty house could buzz. I've heard of triplens backfeeding into single phase laterals, perhaps someone who works for an electric utility could chime in with real world experience on the utility side.
It's a long shot, but possible. Around here, most of the distribution is 3 phase up to each subdivision and then usually taps off to single pretty close to the end user.

nelamvr6, you are forgetting that current causes magnetic fields. prove this yourself by making a 3in diameter loop out of small gauge copper wire and holding it near the coils on the back of a TV (tube type....der). Nothing happened right?

Now try the same trick with a D cell battery wired up, you can bet that the sweeping of the vertical deflector will cause some nice vibrations in that non magnetic copper. the current from the battery will cause a field and the alternating N/S fields of the tv's coils will cause some nice (but small) oscillations.

With that in mind, there is no telling what may cause the chirp. For what we know, high tension transmission lines have crazy harmonics because of their high capacitance and some sort of beat notes are being produced in step down transformers. I am no utility/physics guru, but I know that copper is pushed and pulled everyday by currents (motors, speakers, etc are all very real examples of this.

I don't doubt at all that the wires themselves are passing some interference from dirty power, possibly interferening with audio equipment as well as rendering itself audible when lines cased in either conduit or loosely cased romex vibrate.

I mean, do speaker not use the same principle to produce sound? (except that one of two fields that do work are usually permanent)

edit: as far as little forces being produced, the force will be very slight. light enough that giving a good knock on the offending wall would likely silence it. kind of like when a picture frame rattles at 2am in a dead still country house from imperceptible vibrations. (not that this has ever happened)

Actually, copper wire can move due to heating or repulsion.
30 years ago, I worked in a GE test lab. We had a "High Current" test facility that was able to dump 1000 amps at 1000 volts (3 phase) into a dead short. When testing at high current, parallel copper wires connected to the same phase were repelled with enough force to brake fiberglass tape used to help route the wiring to the device under test. The control room had a large armor glass window on the wall of the test chamber. We had molten copper from the device under test sprayed on the armor glass on more than one occasion. It was found necessary to put a piece of plexiglass in front of the armor glass to protect the glass from pitting. Naturally, the plexiglass sheet would be very much the worse for wear after one test shot. The test generator had a 25 ton spinning assembly, and was powered with a several thousand horsepower motor. The motor was powered directly with the high line voltage feeding the whole city. There was a solid state controller that controlled the motor spinup to prevent the rotor starting currents from being excessive. Oil pressure on the bearings was about 5000 PSI.

Some possible electrical sources of chirps in a home:
Fire Alarm or Burgler Alarm
Oven or the Fridge
Electromic Thermostat
Answering Machine
Clock Radio
Fan in air handler, outside A/C unit, or furnace during starting
Ceiling Fan
Land line electronic phone when the line is checked
Electronic ballast
Lawn sprinkler system timers
Water softener
(To name a few)

As has already been mentioned earlier in this thread, there is a world of difference between coils of wire and straight runs of wire.Again, these are coils designed especially to be "pushed and pulled".There will be precious little vibration of the conductors in ordinary romex or in couduits used in household circuits.Again, these are coils designed specifically for this purpose.

Surely you're not suggesting that this is similar to the usage of romex in a household circuit? 1000 amps is a lot of juice.

Do you feel that there will be movement in the conductors of a romex run in ordinary household wiring?

Parallel lines can most definitely affect each other... Coils just do so more efficiently because there are many "parallel" lines.

At my old job I used to watch metal shavings leap towards the business line of arc welders. Why could two lines not attract each other, just less so?

»cas.umkc.edu/physics/wro ··· ure6.pdf

Because as I also mentioned earlier in this thread copper is extremely difficult to attract.

Were these metal shavings copper? No.

The house I live in now is the second house that has had the same problem. The first house's chirp was not as loud as the one I am in now. I have the same chirp now but alot louder. My breaker box is next to the refrigerator and can't ever catch it to see which one it is but it is around that area.

for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, not only did the copper welding lead pull on the shavings, the shavings pulled on the lead (just not visibly).

If I ran two wires next to each other, just barely apart, and then fed like currents through them at decent amperage, would you say disagree that they would attract each other, regardless of their material?

Incorrect, totally incorrect. They type of conductor is irrelevant it is the current flowing thru the conductor that is relevant.No so my home is an older structure and it’s wiring is in emt.

Wayne

Wrong! One can actually hear the conductors moving within a conduit run to a standard resiential central a/c unit as the compressor kicks in.

FWIW I am a Florida state licensed electrical contractor and do have a clue as to what I write about.

Wayne

1) an fft is a type of fourier transform. basically, when looking at a signal on a graph, instead of time being the abscissa (x-axis along the bottom), the abscissa is frequency (Hz). you apply an fft algorithm to a 'time' based signal (the other picture in my post called wave.jpg) and you get a plot of the frequency components of a time slice of the waveform. in fft.jpg, you see the peak at the frequency contribution of the chirp.

2) the radar pulses make a lot of sense. they seem to be the right frequency and duration, and any transformer along the route can pick the signal up (they are coils after all), though i thought that the big utility ones were pretty well shielded. and, even if one pics it up, another one later on down the line should filter it a bit (unless it's acting as an antenna as well). however, a doorbell transformer OR a phone line transformer could be the culprit. doorbell transformers generally reside in the attic, so if it was buzzing it might sound like it was all over the house at once, and it could feed back into the house AC (south of the breakers). but, phone transformers aren't usually situated in a place where they might radiate sound easily... and one thing against the doorbell transformer, all the houses experiencing the chirp would have to have one acting as an antenna....

3) on triplen.... i can't really say, but i find it strange that only that harmonic would show up and that it would be so big relative to any others. your description of the poor ground is interesting.. but why would it chirp and not be a constant hum? i suppose a loose ground could be affected by wind blowing...

4) on house AC lines acting as transducers-- we aren't talking about two romex lines throwing themselves across the attic or ripping each other out of the wall, we're talking about enough vibration to propagate a whisper sound wave. in my house, all the ac lines are run to various breakers that are separated in the box, but they are run all bundled together into two conduits, one going up to the attic and the other going to the crawlspace. being that close, they COULD set up the very small vibrations in each other that could travel back to the breakers (through the wires, coherently) and create an audible hum... and, as a matter of fact, they do so in many houses. it doesn't matter what material they are made of, it only matters if they conduct and physically if they are solid or stranded (much easier to propagate the hum in solid wire).

5) i don't know what the hang up is with copper and magnetism. copper is not magnetic (not ferromagnetic anyway), we all agree, but that's completely beside the point. if the copper has currents flowing in it in some organized way, it acts as magnetic as anyone would ever want. same with any material that conducts. and no-one ever said that you needed to make a coil out of said material to exert force on something else (or have force exerted on it). this is not a theoretical argument, and i don't see how it could possibly construed as a restriction of any kind.

that being said, the hum that many households can hear coming from their breaker box is 60Hz. and we all know that the 60Hz is a huge signal... i'm not sure that a small noise signal (we don't have a 50VAC 9800Hz signal, right?) could set up an audible sound vibration in the same way. i'd much more easily believe a small transformer somewhere in the attic could.

i dare anyone to tell me that only aluminum wound transformers vibrate.

anyway, to sum: we have two reasonably possible sources, radar and triplen, but both have problems. we have at least one possible transducer, maybe more.

i would try turning off whichever breaker feeds the doorbell. if that doesn't work, then try the main breaker (whole house). if you still hear the chirp with the main breaker off, then next up is the phone line. after that, it could be something sneaking in with cable tv, and then we're left with a utility meter, maybe water (grounds) or just plain magic.

Carefully read my posts before replying. I never stated meters made any sound what-so-ever. However the conductors within the conduits leading from the meter cans certainly do make sounds as motor and other large loads are applied.

Now with PVC conduit the noise is somewhat suppressed by the plastic pipe but with emt it is quite audible and makes a metallic almost ring type sound that some might call a chirp. Now have that conduit sitting on a rafter in just the right spot and you will have a customer complaining of that noise as the rafter will act as a sounding board.

The cure is easy send the helper into the attic and have him stuff a little fiberglass between the pipe and the rafter noise all gone.

Wayne

GFI outlets will also chirp

ask me how I know....................

ZAP!

Can you not only attract/repel nonferrous materials with magnetic fields if they: A-conduct and B-the magnetic field is FLUXUATING/CHANGING??? As this is my belief this tells me that it doesn't matter much whether the transmission lines are made of Al, Cu, W, Ag, Au... ect. It only matters that current is present and changing (AC) where magnetic force and the possibility of movement are concerned. Static fields will not yield any force on nonferrous materials. While I agree with this I also agree with Nelamvr6. I seriously doubt enough current would ever flow in a typical 14-10 gauge household wire to cause much movement whether from kinetic or magnetic force. Assuming enough current was to flow to cause movement this movement most likely wouldn't appear as continuous vibration but sudden jumps due to the energizing of appliances and the like. Currents high enough to cause continuous vibration would probably melt the conductor quickly.

Let us not forget that this noise was in a frequency range much higher then the 50-60Hz frequency of the power grid. What is this a harmonic 150-167 times (150f-167f) the fundamental (60Hz)? Since this signal was experienced in different houses it would seem to rule out some weird signal reflection. What could cause such a high frequency signal in the power lines? Is this signal induced from outside the power system? We are now coming full circle because an outside induced signal would have to be extremely strong to cause physical vibrations in the lines. The signal is auditory. Something is producing a physical vibration. It’s hard to imagine that the source of this signal is the household wiring.