touchplate dimmer switch oddity

As a scientific wild-ass guess, I'd suggest that when you are reaching from up the staircase, you are moving your body closer to a conductor in the wall, making a better capacitive coupling for the touch sensor.

I wouldn't worry too much about evil low-level E-fields. I have yet to see any compelling data on this. The reports I've seen were either on decidedly non-standard situations (like

60 Hz modulated microwaves focused on cell in a lab dish) or they had serious methodological flaws and results barely above chance.

You could do your own blinded study. Presumably, the fields you are concerned about are from your own house wiring, and would be stopped by pulling the master breakers. The trick is making a blinded study of this; you *have* to make it so there is no way for you to know which position the breaker is in. So you'd have to start by unplugging all the clocks and VCRs that have displays, as well as the fridge, A/C, and stuff that has running motors. An assistant near the breaker box would then throw the switch to one position or the other. You'd probably have to leave the house while this was done, since you could otherwise tell from the sound of the clunk. Use a schedule of so many minutes in each position, using random positions from some standard table that the assistant has but you don't see. Record your feelings in each interval and compare later to the actual breaker conditions. Make sure you have many random repeats, say a dozen or so.

Of course, if you find no effect, you can't rule out that there would have been one if all the applicances had been running normally, changing the evil field patterns.

Best regards,

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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In my front room, I have one of those dimmer switches where you touch a metal plate on the front to turn the light up or down. Sometimes it stops working, which I've always put down to dry skin or something, assuming that it works by sensing your body's capacitance.

I found out the other night that when it's not working, it does still work if I go 3 or 4 steps up the staircase that the dimmer switch is beside, and touch it from there. The only explanation for this I can think of is that I know there's a natural vertical electric field going up from the surface of the earth, so maybe it has something to do with that. Or else it has something to do with my body picking up on the magnetic field of the electric wiring in the house.

Does anyone have any ideas about this? I'm not just asking out of curiosity - I've had a bad feeling about this house, and that room in particular, for some time, and this has started me off thinking that this may be partly caused by electromagnetic interference from badly installed wiring. I had a go at checking this out by holding the probe of an oscilloscope and moving round the room, and the 50 Hz signal from my body does seem to get stronger when I move near that wall. Stronger still when I touch it, which is slightly worrying. Maybe damp in the wallpaper is acting as an aerial. There's also a slight spike in the signal on every half wave, which I guess is from the thyristor in the dimmer. I remember reading somewhere that low frequency EM fields can have effects on mood / mental health, so I'm wondering if that could be the reason. I haven't put on my tin foil hat just yet - just trying to work out if that's contributing to my weird mood swings.