Powerless And Fully Dark

The hail was the first thing to wake me up. First a light patter, like pennies falling off the counter and onto the floor, but then it got worse. Thunk. It sounded like someone had thrown a rock at my window. For a second I thought it might shatter, spilling wind and rain into my […]

Plugging In

Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, in […]

Dirty, dirty electricity

In 2010, an epidemiologist was asked by a California school to investigate its high levels of dangerous dirty electricity. When he arrived to take readings, he found that some classrooms contained levels of electrical pollution so intense that they exceeded his meter’s ability to measure them. This story was reported in a major US news […]