Stealing Power

[L Thorpe]

Let me begin by saying that I do not advocate the stealing of power from the electrical companies. I am just curious about how it possibly could be done and I would never put such knowledge into practice.

Power thieves usually (always?) bypass the power meter and connect directly to the power line.

But what about induction? What about an inductive coupling to the power line?

Electric power, I believe, is distributed to residential areas as 2200 Volt lines. Before entering the home, this voltage is stepped down to 220 Volts with a pole-mounted transformer.

Wrapping an inductive coil around a 2200 Volt line could create a circuit that would deliver power to the home, and the power company would never know it (unless a technician actually spotted the strange coil).

Of course, it would be bit risky to climb a power pole and wrap an inductive coil but we are discussing only what is theoretically possible.

Would this scheme work?

I can't see why it would not.

[invalid unparseable]

Think it has been done and it was caught by the power company. I guess from the power drop.

[Rod Speed]

L Thorpe [e-mail] wrote

We believe you, really truly we do...

Hard to do effectively with just air between the wires.

Some have done it with 330KV massive great overhead transmission lines but it isnt that easy inside a house.

And with aerial lines, that would stand out like dogs balls.

Yes, but not very well given that its an air cored transformer with just the one turn for the 2,2KV line.

[trader_4]

It's actually several times that at the typical utility pole.

The amount of power you can transfer depends on the strength of the magnetic flux and how many coils of wire you have in the flux. A single wire on the electric pole isn't going to produce much flux, which is why transformers and similar use many turns on both sides and are bulky. Aside from that, if I was trying to steal power I'd much rather try to hide what I was doing at or near the house, not up on a pole in full view with wires running back to my house. turns on

[Clare Snyder]

Theoretically it could work as long as you didn't wrap the coil around the power drop to your home. There needs to be lots of CURRENT flowing in the conductor - the voltage doesn't mean anything if there is no current - like plugging only one side of the primary of a transformer into the plug.

[Scott Lurndal]

Generally the primary side of a residential transformer is at from 12kv to 25kv. I wouldn't advocate going anywhere near a 12kv conductor.

Note that many arial primaries are uninsulated. Another reason to avoid them.

[gfretwell]

Most of the induction schemes proposed don't really work. Rod is right, a one turn or worse a conductor running parallel to a line is not going to collect any usable amount of power. I have a 230kv line and two 26kv lines running near my boat house and if you believe the urban legends I could just put a F40 fluorescent tube in there and it would light. The reality is no combination of coils, long wires running under the line or anything else I tried would even get a dim glow out of it. I can get random numbers on my DMM but I get that out in my boat, nowhere near anything electrical.

[hubops]

You'd probably need to feel the charge to get a tube to glow. The 550 kV switchyard <where I once worked> was said to do it. A person walking in that yard would usually feel the hairs on his arms standing up ; plus every piece of solidly grounded structure would give you a static spark when touched with bare skin .. The manually operated < handwheel > circuit ground switches would draw ~ 10 foot arcs when opening ! due to the induced circulating ground current of 2 long lines sharing towers. ... they were subsequently motorized with arc-snuffers. John T.