I’ve been doing some audio recording in my home, and have encountered a strange electrial noise — Once every 12 seconds (actually, maybe every 12.2 seconds or so) there is a brief “bzzt!” sound that (apparently) infiltrates through the electrical wiring and makes itself past whatever filtering there is in my equipment.
Does anyone have any idea what could cause this?
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Replies
Water heater thermostat? Try running some hot water to see if that is it.
Seems unlikely -- the thing is very regular at 12 seconds, and it keeps it up for hours.
The sound you describe does sound a contact opening under a load. I was just trying to think of something that cycles.
All other things being equal a water heater could settle into a very regular cycle until you used some water.
Radar
It could be radar if you are relatively near a site. What kind of recording setup? How are you grounding the equipment?
Flip the breakers?
Might find one to isolate the problem.
Joe H
Could be a wireless device like a router. Also could be a compact fluorescent.
The strange thing is that it's VERY regular, and, when I looked at the waveform today, EVERY "bzzt!" looked nearly identical:
For instance, all six of those trailing glitches are in the same place every time. I have a hard time believing an arc would do this, so I'm getting more suspicious of some electronic cause. One possibility is a "smart" electric meter that transmits it's reading on every revolution, eg. I've tried to figure if it might be our network router, but that beacons about ten times a second I gather.
dan
Did you reply to yourself intentionally (still trying to figure out this thing...............)
Yeah, I more or less intentionally replied to myself, since I was just adding more info to the original post.
Turn off every breaker but the circuit you need to see this and minimize the load on that one., See if this is you or someone else.
Sounds like it happens every time our President blames somebody else.
Well sir,
I hope you get your 2.50 a gallon.
that should quiet the noise.
Well, figured it out, more or less. The recoding is being done on an Apple "iPod Touch" (if I told you why I'd have to kill you), and apparently the iPod is living up to its name and trying to keep in touch via WiFi. If I put the thing in "airplane mode" (to turn off the WiFi radio) then the noise goes away.
Additional testing shows that it's the microphone (what's known as a "thumbtack mike") that's picking up the noise. No noise at all if the input is dummied, and much less noise with a different mike.