by Troy Riedel
New readers will not recognize my name.
Longtime readers may not recognize my name, but chances are you may remember my story.
I once contributed posts to this Blog … until … ‘the swimming pool’. During COVID, my wife decided she wanted an in-ground swimming pool. The construction started in May 2020 and was completed in May 2022 (note: my pool contractor is now out of business; he ruined another company’s business as a ‘partner’, has many lawsuits filed against him, and I know he’s served time in jail under work release – all subsequent to our project).
No exaggeration.
If you’re interested in reading the entire story of my problem, I’ll refer you to my last two posts here:
- https://swling.com/blog/2021/11/off-the-shortwaves-unhappy-despondent/
- https://swling.com/blog/2022/01/the-conclusion-to-off-the-shortwaves-unhappy-despondent/
For those who don’t have time to catch up, here’s an overview:
Late in the pool construction after the bonding was installed and the concrete deck was poured, I turned on my collection of portable shortwave radios, and I experienced the worst, most horrendous EMI/RFI imaginable. Nothing – and I mean nothing – on the shortwaves was intelligible. 100% uninterrupted static.
The SWLing Post Nation was great. I must have had three dozen? … four dozen? … people comment and offer advice (both on and off the Blog). And I received very detailed opinions, suggestions, and analyses via my personal email. Unfortunately, nothing mitigated my problem. My actions:
- I hired an independent electrician at an hourly rate to check the pool & the entire house – he could not find the problem.
- I called the power company (Dominion). To Dominion’s credit, they dispatched an expert and a ladder truck, but they confirmed the source was not from the main power line nor from their transformers.
So approximately 5-years ago, I was forced to abandon the SWLing hobby. Early on, I’d turn on my radios every two months to see if my issue abated. After a while, I checked quarterly. Then semi-annually. In the last year or two, I’ve turned on my radios every winter to check and every time, I still had the horrendous and almost incomprehensible EMI/RFI issue rendering my SW radios as paperweights.
Fast forward to recent history.
In late June 2026, my house suffered a direct lightning strike. The bolt struck the metal chimney cap. My wife & I were sitting in the room with the fireplace and the entire room glowed! There was no fire, but I had a hole in the siding. One of my six security cameras was blown off the side of the house. Flames literally shot out of one electrical outlet on the opposite side of my house. In total, I suffered over $13,900 in damage (thank you, Allstate Insurance).
The pool suffered two damaged items: an outdoor ground fault outlet and the pool light were both fried (the light and the connected transformer for the light both connect to the ground fault circuit outlet).
One of the SWLing Nation friends that I made five years ago is Ken English. Every so often he’ll send me a text message, and we’ll have a friendly chat. Last Saturday Night, he reached out and we text chatted. During the chat I mentioned the lightning strike. He replied, ‘Did it [the lightning strike] change your interference problem?’
Hmm, great question. Did it? How could it? But wait, maybe somehow it did!
I turned on my radios and guess what? The interference is gone! And I now know the source of this five-year problem that knocked me off the shortwaves. The pool light!
The pool light is underwater. The power cord to the light runs underground for 80-feet where it connects to the transformer, which is on the ‘outdoor power panel’ that runs the pool electronics and equipment. I had a professional replace the light and transformer which required snaking 80’ of power cord out and replacing it with a new 80’ power line.
I’m not an electrician. I can’t explain the dynamics behind it. But a direct lightning strike that caused over $13,900 of damage has me back on the shortwaves!
Thank you, lightning. And thank you, Ken, because without your Saturday Night text, I would not have discovered that my 5-year problem was mitigated until – probably – some cold, cloudy December night.
Hi Gary,
I am glad the strike fixed your RFI problem.
However, it can come back.
For the fellows that experience terrible impulse noise there is only one electronic solution. The NR-1 antenna noise blanker by sv3ora.
The URL is at http://qrp.gr/nr1 and the youtube playlist for the product at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KwxiKZqJ1TzQpscf3voh5CR1c30WLD_
You would have solved your problem 100% if you knew about the NR-1 noise blanker.
73
Kostas sv3ora
Hi, Troy.
One standard way to find the source of interference is to turn off circuit breakers one at a time to see if the interference goes away. If it does, the source of the interference is on that circuit.
That would have been a good thing to try back when the interference started.
Steve W4OGM
Steve,
That was done about 25-50x – trust me. It was still present when everything was off.
Troy, thank you for the information. I have a 75 year-old house with a swimming pool of the same age. When we first bought the house 16 years ago, I could feel a tingling in the water with the pool lights on and immediately kept everyone out of the pool, thinking it was so old it might be on AC power instead of DC. It was DC, but an electrician grounded the system better and it did prevent the tingling. I never noticed much RFI. However, a couple of years ago I did have to replace the pump and it is on a variable speed pump, and I have significant RFI when I am anywhere near the pump. I assumed that variable speed pumps were just prone to more RFI, but I wonder if additional grounding just of the new pump somehow would improve the RFI problem. I don’t know whether there be a chance for additional grounding, or how to do it, but wondered if your experience might shed some light, based on how they fixed yours.
Hi Gary,
Well, I’m not sure if you had time to go back to my 2021 & 2022 post links. I was very sure, back during that time period, my problem was the pool grounding (I call it ‘grounding’, but technically I think the proper term is ‘bonding’ around the pool and that bonding is then ‘grounded’). Don’t hold me to the terminology but that’s my understanding. I tend to call everything ‘grounding’.
I cannot testify to know how it was done with your older pool, but with my newer pool it is hundred & hundreds of feet of bare copper wire. My wife has pictures somewhere, but I seem to recall something that looked to me like a chicken coup fence wrapped around the exterior of the pool (several feet from the edge) with copper wire every x-number of feet that connected that structure to the pool shell. This apparatus was anchored by multiple rebar stakes.
I thought this giant radio antenna-like structure was the source of my EMI/RFI. A large antenna that captured everything. And because the pool electrical connected to my main breaker box, I assumed the noise was traveling from the bonding/grounding structure and into my house. My belief was reinforced because when the power was turned off to both the pool and even the entire house , the noise was still present. Something was still transmitting the noise with all power off. And the radio noise was present in the house and outside of the house. If I walked to the end of my driveway to the street, the noise abated. But it’s kind of hard to sit by or in the street to SWL!
If you go back and look at the public replies to my posts (I received more detailed replies to my personal email), I recall a couple of people suggested my noise problem originated from the pool pump. Note: my pump is single speed.
My independent electrician inspected the pool contractor’s work (incidentally, I had to hire another third-party electrician during the final phase of the pool construction because the pool contractor’s electrician quit before the point where the pool junction box was to be installed and then connected to the house). My independent electrician verified that my pump was properly grounded. Obviously, it was impossible to inspect the maze of bare copper wire around the pool because that is buried by the concrete deck around the pool. But my electrician did inspect the end grounding point above ground, and he stated that was properly done.
I’m sorry for the long reply … but … based on feedback that I received from more than one-person while I was investigating my issue, a variable speed pool pump/filter has caused problems for others. One reader who emailed me said his RFI started once his neighbor’s pool was completed and he said RFI was present from approximately 8A until 7P each day which was when the pump/filter was running. He also stated in the winter when the pool was closed, he didn’t have the noise issue.
I do not have personal experience mitigating noise from a variable speed pump. In fact, I was never able to mitigate anything. The direct lightning strike was the beginning of the mitigation process – that and finding a pool professional who actually knew what he was doing.
I’d encourage consultation with a licensed electrician. I think I paid $200/hour for mine (though he cut me a bit of a break because he felt bad as the hours & his rate accumulated). You could probably have an inspection completed for an hour’s wage.
I cannot explain why I had a problem. Since my problem was the pool light, one would think when all power was turned-off, the noise would have ceased. Somehow, even with power off, noise was still transmitted through that line (maybe from the bonding structure because it is basically an underground antenna).
Good luck!
Thank you for the update and a great ending to the saga.
Thanks JD!
Troy,
One must remember that a LED light is a light emitting diode. Diodes only conduct in one direction unless their was a pair of them mounted in parallel and one was in the opposite direction to the other.
I am pleased you can now get back to a great hobby.
Mangoesman
Thank you Mangoesman … who am I to question or even understand the ‘why’, I’m just happy with the ending.
Cheers!
I think that the LED lighting problem is the worse for DXing. The bulbs themselves are ubiquitous, cheap and have a progressive low-quality. Bulb drivers with faulty insulation and dreadful parts (specially transformers) are everywhere, from the light poles to our homes – because worse is cheaper and RFI is something that regular people don’t care at all.
Where I live it seems that some DXers have already begun calling for some regulation of cheap bulbs and trying to educate other hobbyists. But buying the right ones isn’t always enough because your neighbour will still be buying crap.
Anyway, grumpy words aside, congrats on your old new hobby!
Regards,
Thanks Mendel.
Want to know what’s worse than LED bulbs for DXing? ASTRONOMY! As an amateur astronomer, LEDs are the worst.
Cheers!
Sounds like the new pool light had a switching power supply installed in the service box. These are typically a 120VAC to 12VAC transformer analogue unit. Mine is and it is totallhy RF quiet. You can easily detect noisy switchers with your portable AM radio using it as a sniffer tuned to an unused AM frequency in your area. Sounds like the lightning strike took your pool light and the transformer. Glad your RFI headache is now gone. Be sure to use an analogue transformer for your new pool light installation!
Good DX! W4DL Mike in EL96wf
Mike,
Yes, the LED pool light and its transformer box were fried & replaced. The replacement is the same manufacturer (PAL) as the old one, however it’s the current/new model (LED, too)..
I attribute the issue that I had for 5-years was due to a bad installation and/or faulty part. I’m leaning that it was a bad install because of the legal issues this contractor had (and still has). My wife reminded me that the pool contractor’s electrician told her he was color blind (he said that when he showed her how to operate the lights & how to change colors). I’d think being color aware would be critical to an electrician to identify hot, neutral ,ground wires, et al.
Thanks mate!
First, congrats on finally finding the source of your years-long RFI problem!
But what I don’t understand, in looking through your original post which outlined the things you looked at and tried… is that flipping the main panel switch and killing all power to the house should have instantly removed the RFI you were seeing, and alerted you that the problem was within the domain of your home’s electrical system. And yet, at the time, it sounds like you did that?
Anyway, what’s the old saying… “all’s well that ends well!”
73, Jeff K4EI
Jeff,
I 100% agree – and I also 100% do not understand. I spent 5-months (Sep ’21 – Jan ’22) and hundreds of dollars hiring an independent electrician to find & mitigate the issue (ant one point, the electrician said ‘I feel guilty taking your money by continuing the RFI because I have no clue what is causing it’).
But like you wrote, “all’s well that ends well” so I’m not going to get too bent-out-of-shape trying to understand the ‘why’!
Cheers.
Just out of curiosity: Was it an LED light? I’ve heard of LED light horror stories like this before.
Yes, it’s LED.
And I should add, an LED replaced it (manufacturer: PAL – essentially the same model but between 2021 & now it’s an updated version).
Oh wow, Troy! I’m so happy for you! This is brilliant news–a silver lining out of a serious lightning strike.
Let me know if you need a radio or two! 🙂
Thomas
Thomas,
For the past two months, I thought about my dormant radio collection. I was very close to liquidating several radios if not the entire collection sans a Gen 1 YB400 (via J&R in NYC) – that was my first serious SWLing unit. The YB400 replaced a ‘Panda’ that I bought via the Heartland USA catalog that used to come in the mail in the early 1990s.
During my 5-year hiatus, I did purchase an LC90 that enabled me to listen via the Internet but nothing over the waves in 5-years until 48-hours ago.
Oh but the YB400 is such an amazing portable! 🙂 Good on you! The first portable I properly fell in love with. So many good characteristics. 🙂