When do you buy shielding?  Does shielding work?  Should I buy shielding for my home?  These are questions that come up a lot.  Many people that are worried about the effects of being exposed to EMF’s have bought some type of shielding.  There are many items that will shield you from some aspects of EMF’s.  Today we are going to talk about a few items that block microwave frequencies.

How does shielding work?

Most of these items are made in a similar way.  You take a piece of cloth and then you line it with a conductive metal.  Many times this metal is silver.  The lines of thread are then woven together and the result is a basic Faraday cage that mitigates microwave frequencies.   These items are good at blocking these frequencies, but this is not the whole picture.

When should you get shielding or where should you have shielding?

If you are in an area that has a lot of wireless activity, or find yourself next to towers that you can can’t do anything about, then this is when you should consider shielding.  The most cost-effective place to shield is your bed.  This is for a few very important reasons:

• You are in the same spot for many hours a night
• Night time is when your body heals
• A good nights sleep is an important part of health

We live in an area that has a lot of wireless activity and because of my sensitivities I purchased a canopy as pictured below.    This is the set up that we were using for a long time.  For the record, this is wrong.  We were doing this wrong because we were only looking at one side of the problem.  I will explain.

WRONG SET-UP:

With this setup, many times during the night, we found different parts of our body (feet, hands, arms, or head) touching the canopy.  This is where the problem is.  Items that block microwave frequencies will do so, and the higher concentration the more it will block.  This is where we failed.  By touching the canopy that is blocking wireless frequencies, it gives that energy someplace else to go, which is into your body.  This is also referred to as contact current.  By mitigating one problem we created another problem.

Key point in shielding: You should not allow the shielding to touch your body.  If you are inside of the shield you are fine. 

In our instance we had contact current passing through as shown by the picture below.  Anything above 18 microamps is considered bad and harmful as can be read here.  At 127 microamps you need to do something.  The question is –which is less bad? To be exposed to wireless frequencies or 127 microamps of contact current?   I honestly don’t know.  So I took down the canopy to try and find out which is worse for me by judging how I slept at night.   Over time I noticed that my quality of sleep started to suffer.  I was not as rested.  I was less patient.  I needed to try something different.  I had to go back to the drawing board.

What we needed was a way to create a defined space for the netting that we would not come in contact with while we slept.  The solution was a four post bed made of wood (not metal because metal is conductive).

CORRECT SET-UP:

Now with our bed we are able to set up our netting without coming in contact with it for long periods of time.  This has led to better sleeping for both my wife and I.   This was something special that needed to be made and we couldn’t have done this without Nordic Custom Woodworking (Eau Claire, WI).  Now we not only have a great looking bed, but we also have something that supports our netting in a functional way.  This in turn has provided us with better sleeping and most importantly we are not coming into contact with the netting in our sleep.

The other option to deal with shielding is to have it grounded.  However you MUST keep in mind that in most cases ground is not zero.  There is contact current there and so by attaching yourself to ground, you can increase your contact current.  This defeats the purpose of grounding.

Here are some key things that you should take away from this:

• If you are going to shield from wireless that you cannot control, the most cost-effective method is to shield your bed.
• By grounding the shielding, you could could increase the contact current present
• Do not use any shielding that will touch your skin because you will increase your contact current.  This includes items like shielding blankets/sheets, shirts, hats, or any other clothing. If you use a canopy, make sure you do not come in contact with it in your sleep.
• Bed frames should be made of wood and not metal
• Metal is conductive and is an antenna for wireless so wear as little metal as possible. This would also include excessive jewelry and metal in under-wire bras