How to measure distances?

Since it's apparently only a danger to children - and even that's uncertain - why demolish them? Plenty of elderly people might need cheap homes. Or the single homeless. If there was a risk to adults surely it would have shown up by now with grid maintenance staff, etc?

The message from Broadback contains these words:

This is a very cheap instrument at the moment...

If the scale doesn't offer sufficiently high resolution, leave it set at the measured distance then find something you can easily measure and walk away from it till the image lines up properly.

You can zoom to even greater detail, and use a measuring tool on

Chris

Don't skimp on quality though, make sure you get a decent steel tape. Then hook the end of the tape onto one of the high power electric cables, and walk backwards until you reach your house...

You get fields around all mains cables. If a grid line causes cancer at 230ft then ordinary mains will also do it at a few feet. If it were true then there would be thousands of cancers caused by mains. There aren't AFAICS.

TVs have huge fields around them BTW. So its probably the Telly Tubies that are causing the cancers.

Broadback submitted this idea :

Without involving any maths....

A level, childs plastic protractor and a measuring tape.

Use the level vertically to sight up, so as to give you a spot on the ground which is directly below the cables then mark it. Now move away from the cables and use the protractor plus level to a distance which makes looking up towards the cables a 45 degree angle from the horizontal. Mark this second spot on the ground. Now assuming the two marked spots are roughly on the same level, the distance between them will be near enough the height of the cables above the ground - if not you should make some adjustment for the difference in level.

For best accuracy, you should choose an easily identifiable point on a single cable, make the horizontal line accuracy, the other angles as near as possible and perhaps take several measurements to improve the accuracy, but I think even without this it will give you a figure as accurate as you require.

yet the field 25m from 400Kv line is only 25 microteslas. That close to a TV 50 microteslas. Should we not be more wary of TV's and razors than power lines?

Why? You measure the elevation of the cable at the point closest to your house.

In that case triangulate on the ground as well - measure any two angles and one distance, trigonometry will do the rest.

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Owain

Similar to the way they built stuf like the pyramids! And it works!