Why demand switches are now more in demand

Demand switches

The widescale change from using earthed metal conduits for house wiring to using cheaper plastic ones that offer no shielding against electromagnetic fields (EMFs) has exposed us to ever-increasing levels in our homes, with health effects that range from general fatigue to life-threatening cancer. The degree to which you are affected will depend on your own sensitivity and the amount of exposure.

One solution is to replace all house wiring with screened or armoured cables, but that’s very expensive. A much more affordable remedy is to install demand switches.

How demand switches work

A demand switch automatically senses when the last electrical appliance or light is turned off in your bedroom and turns off the electricity supply to that room at the fuse box. This means that instead of being radiated by high EMFs while you sleep, you spend the night in zero EMFs or very reduced fields.

In 2010, when we moved from Bali to the UK, we were fortunate to find a house to rent that had the older type of wiring. The electric field in the bedroom was a mere 1 volt per meter (V/m). We had the most blissful sleep.

But finding another such place to move to when our tenancy came to an end proved to be impossible. We looked at dozens of properties to rent or buy, some urban, some rural, some modern, some dated – and didn’t find one that had tolerable levels.

By tolerable, I mean less than 5 V/m in the areas where we would spend the most time, actively or at rest. Some people can tolerate 10 V/m. Most get exhausted, sick or both when continuously exposed to fields of 20 V/m or higher. Many of the prospective homes we looked at had ambient fields of 40 – 60 V/m, and a few were as high as 180 V/m. I’m astonished this is even allowed, but it is.

Most electricians are unaware of the health effects of prolonged or intense exposure to extremely low frequency (ELF) radiation, and very few countries have legislation to enforce safe ambient levels in homes. Government directives are usually based on the amount of electricity it takes to kill a person outright rather than the level of ELFs that can have health effects over time.

Some elevated fields are caused by electrical equipment, but if you turn everything off and they remain high, the usual reason (assuming there is no external cause) is faulty wiring, damp, dimmer switches, or – increasingly common – halogen ceiling lights in the floor below.

How to fit and use demand switches

After much searching, we finally we found a house to rent that had tolerable fields in the living areas but 20-40 V/m in the bedroom. We discoered this was partly due to the halogen lights in the kitchen ceiling below and partly due to all the mains wiring for the upstairs part of the house passing through our bedroom floor. In most other respects the house was fine, so we decided to take it and slept for the first few nights with the mains electricity turned off until we could get demand switches installed.

They have to be fitted by a qualified electrician but are not ridiculously expensive. Automatic demand switches are the best because you can just forget about them. The type that are operated manually with a remote control cost a little less. By a process of testing with an EMF meter, we worked out that we needed four demand switches – two for the upstairs lighting and wall sockets, and two for downstairs. As in most homes, our kitchen is on a separate circuit, which is good because it means the fridge can stay on all the time.

So each night now, before going to bed, we simply remember to go around switching off any electrical equipment on the circuits to which demand switches have been fitted. This brings the electric field in our bedroom to that wonderful 1 V/m we have come to know and love.

Copyright © Clear Space Living Ltd 2012, updated 2022


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About Karen Kingston

Karen Kingston is a leading expert in clutter clearing, space clearing, feng shui, and healthy homes. Her two international bestselling books have combined sales of over three million copies in 26 languages and have established themselves as "must-read" classics in their fields. Her best-known title, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, is now in its fifth edition. She is best known for her perspective-changing insights and practical solutions that enable more conscious navigation of 21st-century living.
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4 Responses to Why demand switches are now more in demand

  1. In my country people build their house close to telecommunication mast, please i need to know if they can be affected by radiations and how they can be protected from such dangers. thank you.

  2. Thanks for this article – very interesting.

    I am currently renovating our house and have totally gutted it. I am going to follow the advice from this article and the links to reduce the ELFs down.

  3. In Chicago IL USA, all electrical wires must run inside metal conduit. As far as I know, most (or all) other parts of the USA allow the use of the plastic coated wires (Romax) in new construction and retrofits.

    I’ve never heard of demand switches. Thanks for this info.

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