Probably. Our last two houses have certainly had problems. To explain, let me tell you what is going on in our house.

We are trying to build a house that is electrically and magnetically quiet. Quiet enough so we could do radio astronomy from our living room, if we wanted to. To achieve this, we are paying an EMF consultant to help design and test our electrical system. This consultant usually works on commercial projects — for example, hospitals and labs where excess EMF (electric-magnetic frequencies) would be a problem for the equipment. Our electrician was given guidelines on how to wire the house to reduce EMF, and he did a good job following those instructions (delaying the project by a month or two). Then, once the wiring was done, our consultant drove in from New York to test the results.

As I have earlier written, it was good but not perfect. There was over an amp of current leakage somewhere in the system, which causes excess magnetic fields, and which needed to be tracked down and fixed. As of today, the electrician reports that two of the electrical panels now show 0 amps of leakage and the last panel is down to 0.07 amps of leakage (20x better than before). As of end of day Wednesday, we now have 0 amps of leakage on all three subpanels inside the house. Woo hoo!

What caused these problems? In our case its caused by a connection between neutral and ground or a connection between two neutral wires on different circuits. Tracking it down is a time consuming process, since you have to work circuit by circuit, testing and then inspecting the wiring. There is a call with the consultant today to determine whether our current measurement is low enough, but I suspect that it is not.

Anyway, why do I think your house has problems? Well, your electrician and builder never went to these extremes. In fact, our electrician did not even have the right meters needed to detect the problems. I am sure that if you did test your house, you would find similar problems, and miswired plugs, and other issues that do not normally show up as issues in everyday use. In other words, its “good enough” for most electricians. We are trying to do better. In fact, I would argue that the whole impetus for building a custom house from scratch was to have an electrically and magnetically quiet house.

That said, at this point I do not believe that the electrical issues are delaying moving forward with interior finishing work, so that’s good.

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