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Intrism comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: OrphanWilde 22 March 2013 05:24PM

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Comment author: Intrism 24 March 2013 04:09:19PM 5 points [-]

If lights that are turned off are flickering, I recommend getting an electrician in to look at them. That's clearly not supposed to happen (should be impossible, actually), and might be an indication of a potential electrical fire hazard. Just curious, does this house often blow breakers?

Comment author: michael61 24 March 2013 07:03:24PM 3 points [-]

.

one needs to hire a electrician that is somewhat above the mean in their understanding

several possibilities, hot neutral, aluminum wiring[gaping]. somebody cross wiring a neutral and positive

Comment author: OrphanWilde 28 March 2013 04:20:06PM 1 point [-]

It uses fuses, and not unusually often, no, just the usual "Too many things plugged in to an outdated electrical system" situations. If they blew more frequently I'd have yanked the fuse box and replaced it with breakers, as fuses are expensive.

I've fiddled with the electrical system, replacing light switches and a few fixtures - it predates aluminum wires quite considerably, the biggest problem being that many of the fixtures predate grounding wires (which started becoming standardized around the same time as aluminum wires, actually), and there don't seem to be issues with the lines themselves, nor with the fixtures (even new fixtures exhibit this behavior, at least until they stop working). My father, an electrical technician, also took a look, and threw up his hands.

Electromagnetic flux is the only explanation I can come up with for the behavior. (The lights don't flicker to full brightness - you can only tell that it's happening if the room is very dark, and it certainly isn't bright enough to see by. CFL bulbs actually exhibit the behavior significantly worse than incandescent bulbs, another suggestion that it's EMF.)