Does power corrupt?
Before we can even begin to answer those questions, we need to look at the power coming into our homes. (I’m going to have to ask our international readers to bear with me, as I can only talk about our basic domestic juice here in the US. European and Asian varietals may have nothing in common with our problems or solutions.) Our AC grid has evolved from a technology originally developed to run trolley cars and light bulbs. It was designed primarily to be safe in fact, back when Tesla’s and Westinghouse’s AC system was battling Edison’s DC scheme, the public was primarily concerned with which was safer. AC is also more convenient, at least from the power company’s point of view, since transformers can step the voltage up for long-distance transmission through thin wires. But the alternating current power system wasn’t designed to be particularly quiet, mostly because it evolved long before equipment sensitive to electromagnetic interference (EMI) existed. The US standard uses a three-w
