A wakeupnd DIY project - Homemade Faraday Cage for Smart Meters.

After years of turning off all the wireless devices in my house before I went to bed. I finally decided to do something about my smart meter and the unhealthy radio frequencies it was emitting by building my own DIY Faraday cage.

If you don't know what a Faraday cage is it's conductive metal cage or grid that's used to block electricity and electromagnetic fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

The smart meter on your house emits a pulse of radio frequency a couple times a minute and is transmitting data to the electric company 24/7. That is a problem from what I've research because they only need to be powerful enough to transmit to your neighbors smart meter but these things can transmit just as far as a cell phone. Which sucks because these pulses are strong enough to interfere with getting a good nights sleep similar to why they say you shouldn't sleep with your cell phone near your bed. Only these things are much more powerful than a cell phone.

So I came up with a plan to build a Faraday cage that would block this harmful RF.

First thing I did was figure out how to attach such device to my smart meter. I decided to go with magnets because I didn't want to glue or fasten anything to the smart meter box itself. I also want to be able to attach it and remove it the easiest way possible.

So I took apart a couple old hard drives I had laying around and used a pliers to pry the magnets off the metal brackets

I measured the dimensions of my smart meter and cut out the overall shape of the cage from a single sheet of metal caging that I got from the hardware store.

I folded the sides together to make the shape of a box and twisted the wire sticking out the corners with a pliers to seal up any holes.

I added a lip on the sides and placed the hard drive magnets in the four corners and this is how she turned out.

This is the cage stuck on the smart meter. The magnets hold it firmly in place.

Now I did a little testing with this type of cage because I was worried the grid pattern was to far apart. It blocked out FM signals pretty good but it only reduced AM and cell phone signals. It took my cell phone signal down from 4 bars and bounced around 1 to 2 bars. So I'm assuming this cage will reduce the RF by half and still have plenty of signal to communicate with the electric company.

I do have some aluminum screen door mess laying around and it looks like that's what they use for the RF blockers that you can buy on the internet. Maybe with version 2.0 I'll try the screen door mess.

I hope you enjoyed my DIY project. It was easy to make and only took about 2hrs to complete.

Thanks,
@wakeupnd