/diy/ - Do It Yourself

[Anonymous No.2845935]

I want to turn a room in my apartment into a faraday cage. From checking online, seems like if I want to go cheap and effective, with no concern for the schizo aesthetic, I can cover the walls and ceiling with aluminum foil (maybe? I’m not even sure if this would actually work) but I would be open to more appealing or effective ideas.

The main problem is the floor, since foil will be quickly destroyed in normal use; and the doorway. I don’t know if a proper faraday cage can be made with mixed materials. If so, I can use a curtain of sorts of the doorway, but I’m still not sure about the fooor. I’m also unsure how the grounding process works.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

[Anonymous No.2845942]

>>2845935
Modern aluminum foil won't work, you'd need traditional tin foil (if you could find it). Use hardware cloth, size the gaps to the frequencies you want to block. Over he hardware cloth or caging on the ground lay some plywood down and cover with click lock flooring if you're feeling bougie in your schizocage.

[Anonymous No.2845943]

22 gauge aluminium sheet the entire room

[Anonymous No.2845944]

>>2845935
>>2845942

Oh yeah, and before you lay the hardware cloth or whatever on the ground you might want to put down some underlayment down first (cork recommended) so you don't scratch tf out of the floor. Your landchad will appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.2845954]

>>2845942
>hardware cloth
Very helpful. Does the material matter?
>sized to block desired frequencies
Unless there is a reason I don’t understand not to do this (or am unable to), I would like to block all frequencies.

Any ideas on the door?

[Anonymous No.2845957]

>>2845935
Use a roll of aluminum flashing. Basically its a sheet that's thin enough to bend easily but thick enough to not tear. You're going to spend a bit of money to cover the whole room in the stuff, but its not prohibitively expense. Maybe put some loose tile down over it if you're concerned about kicking it around.

As for grounding, make sure the whole system is electrically connected to a water pipe in your house, or to a ground wire in your wall. (They're already connected anyway.)

>>2845954
A solid conductor with no gaps will block anything in the RF or microwave spectrum. The only reason to have gaps is to save on material cost or to be able to see through the barrier.

And I have to ask: Just what is compelling your to do this?

[Anonymous No.2845963]

>>2845954
Material does matter, though honestly I don't know specifically. I think it may have to do with the coefficients for the gap sizing calculation. You can calculate the size you want for the gaps here: https://resources.system-analysis.cadence.com/blog/msa2021-the-size-of-apertures-and-the-emi-shield-wavelength

Though, if you want to block everything, it think >>2845943 has the right idea.


For the door, if you choose the solid metal box route, I think you'd need to make sure the gaps along the edge of the door are as small as possible, with the frame also made of the same metal. Maybe slather some dielectric grease along the contact points for a better connection?

[Anonymous No.2845967]

>>2845963
I think the best thing to do to cover the door is to use more aluminum sheet to create little pockets raising from the (also aluminum) walls round the door. Another sheet can be tucked into these pockets to complete the barrier. Whenever you need to enter or exit, just bend the sheet slightly and pull it out on the pockets, then put it back once you're through.

[Anonymous No.2846050]

>>2845935
i THOUGHT FARADAY cage was made out of layers of copper wire mesh. like a big fishing net made of copper wire

[Anonymous No.2846052]

>>2845935
faraday cages are made with either brass or copper mesh.

[Anonymous No.2846063]

>>2845935
Save your money. Take your meds.

[Anonymous No.2846067]

>>2845935
you won't do this
as soon as you drug fueled high ends, you'll forget about this idea and thread

[Anonymous No.2846075]

>>2845957
> Just what is compelling your to do this?

Meditation room. See if I notice a difference.

If I do, I’ll probably try a faraday tent over my bed as well.

[Anonymous No.2846076]

>>2846067
I’m sober and it’s something I thought about for a while on a smaller scale.

I’d just like to know if i can even tell a difference in my mediations, since I’ve seen people talk about it before

[Anonymous No.2846077]

>>2846076
lol, my captcha for this post was “hy pot” but I just did it quickly and sent before realizing.

[Anonymous No.2846101]

>>2846052
You say this with such certainty. It sounds like you don't even know how it works.

When a conductive material is exposed to an external electric field, the electrons inside of it will arrange themselves in a way that creates an opposing field that directly cancels out the external one at every point inside of the conductor. Being completely surrounded by a conductor is like being inside a large conductor, so the same effect applies.

It certainly does not have to be copper. Any metal is a good enough conductor to make it work well. Aluminum is almost as good a conductor as copper, and it is certainly more effective per unit cost. If cost is equalized, then you get a far thicker wall of aluminum than copper for the same price, so the aluminum would actually outperform. It does not have to be mesh either. Mesh is often used to save on material cost, since as long as the holes are much smaller than the wavelength of the incoming radiation, it will act like a solid barrier would. Basically, mesh and solid walls would have the same effect if you're looking to shield from RF and microwaves.

>>2846050
Same as above, but with less contempt because you weren't asserting that everyone else was wrong.

READ, PEOPLE, READ!
YOU'RE A FOOL IF YOU TRY TO HARNESS FORCES YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND.

>>2846075
I don't expect you'll feel any different, but why not, go ahead. Try your bed first, since that'll require much less material. If you do enjoy it, then you can move on to your room.

[Anonymous No.2846103]

>>2846076
I'm curious about this as well, but I suspect you won't notice anything.
I didn't notice anything besides a bit of claustrophobia-induced anxiety when I was inside an MRI machine which is about as electromagnetically noisy as it gets. My thoughts were no more active or disturbed than normal.

[Anonymous No.2846307]

>>2845935
Covering the walls and ceilings will get you most of the way there -- the only EM radiation leaking in will have to go through the ground to get there. Some radiation will still get in, but much less than through the walls and ceiling. You can absolutely mix materials for a Faraday cage, the only important part is electrical conductivity. That means your door should have something connecting to the wall around it in order to block high frequency light from leaking in. And grounding isn't important for a Faraday cage, the whole deal is that metal conducts electricity fast enough that the electrons move to cancel out the electric field component of light pretty much instantly.

[Anonymous No.2846308]

>>2846075
You should consider testing if this has any effect with some aluminum foil and a big enough cardboard box before spending enough money to cover a whole room in the stuff.

[Anonymous No.2846337]

>>2846308
This. Put your cellphone inside a box covered in your choice of shielding material, and see if you can call it from outside.

[Anonymous No.2846383]

>>2846075
yeah, you're not going to do this.

[Anonymous No.2846384]

>>2846076
>I’d just like to know if i can even tell a difference in my mediations
you cannot tell a difference, no one can.

[Anonymous No.2846385]

>>2846101
as someone who has actually been inside a faraday cage and talked to the people who built it. according to them only brass or copper works.

[Anonymous No.2846386]

>>2846103
This. I have had several MRI's and one cat scan. you can't feel anything.

[Anonymous No.2846454]

>>2846386
I felt very nauseous and had a metallic taste in my mouth during my cat scan. But that's because I had IV contrast.

[Anonymous No.2846461]

>>2846385
No, that's simply not true. Copper and aluminum have almost identical effectiveness for electromagnetic shielding. I don't think those people you spoke to understood the working principle of a faraday cage very well.

[Anonymous No.2846467]

>>2845935
Just use aluminum window/door screen 'fabric'.
Be certain to bond all edges to adjacent edges.
Double-lap seams work. Any gaps will lessen it's effectiveness.
Multiple ground rods help.
Any opening to access the room must seal with full contact on all edges or it's all for naught.

[Anonymous No.2846522]

>>2846101
The better an electrical conductor the metal is, the better it will block electric fields. The better a magnetic conductor the metal is, the better it will block magnetic fields. Consider having a layer of mild steel as well as a layer of aluminium. Though in practice a well-conducting metal will block magnetic fields via eddy current cancellation if they're high enough frequencies. And alternating magnetic or electric fields by themselves attenuate much quicker than EM radiation. Still, if you want to schizo-max, I wouldn't ignore the steel sheet.

>>2846308
It would be better to use an SDR, that way you can actively watch the spectrum to see how well it blocks certain frequencies, and record a much greater range of magnitudes.

[Anonymous No.2846573]

>>2846075
Just get a set of those grounded sheets.
https://earthingharmony.com/products/sheet

[Anonymous No.2846595]

>>2846385
>as someone who has actually been inside a faraday cage
Did you find phd on electromagnetism in it or something

[Anonymous No.2846818]

>>2846522
No need to do steel AND another conductor, just steel alone will do fine and you're better off doing two layers of steel than steel+copper.

Conductivity is the only thing that matters if you're blocking static electric fields, but the goal here is to block EM waves, which have both electric and magnetic components. Attenuating one part of the wave will attenuate the other. Steel's ferromagnetism in conjunction with its still very good conductivity makes it far more effective than copper or aluminum with their somewhat superior conductivity for a given thickness. See the chart in my last post >>2846461


Steel will underperform for static fields, but static fields are not an issue.

>>2846573
No, that's a scam. You don't need fancy fabric at a ridiculous price. Aluminum or steel flashing is his best bet.

Also, in case you were suggesting that the grounding wire be taken advantage of, I want to reiterate that it is NOT necessary to ground the enclosure. Even if the metal wall does pick up an electric charge, the net field inside the room will be zero.

[Anonymous No.2847221]

>>2846818
>Attenuating one part of the wave will attenuate the other
I may be wrong, but I believe this attenuation only happens after a distance significantly larger than the wavelength of the EM wave. That's why people use magloops and other inductive antennas as indoor radio antennas instead of capacitive antennas. Though if I recall, Maxwell's Equations imply that the strength of each field should be proportional to one another, so I'm not sure on this at all.

Though you're probably right that steel alone is fine. Per dollar, certainly.

[Anonymous No.2847224]

>>2847221
What I believe you are thinking of is how big of a gap in the barrier the wave will "see". Remember, the fields are directed perpendicular to the direction of the wave's propagation, so thickness in the direction it travels has nothing to do with fitting the wavelength.

Look at the mesh on the window of your microwave. It's certainly not thicker than the several cm wavelength it emits, yet you don't get fried.

[Anonymous No.2847232]

>>2846522
What is the best gravitational conductor?

[Anonymous No.2847249]

>>2847232
why, my peanus weanus of course

[Anonymous No.2847258]

>>2845954
Preferably you would use brass or copper.

[Anonymous No.2847318]

>>2847221
Well, the electric field creates the magnetic field, so attenuating the E field will lower the B field as well. And while the magnetic field also creates the electric field, that extra field strength is also attenuated, so the EM wave as a whole loses energy exponentially quickly (used here literally, as the power decreases proportional to e^x as depth increases).

[Anonymous No.2847321]

>>2845935

I have helped build a large faraday cage for industry before there are some technical details you need to know about.

Grounding, this may be counter intuitive but you need to make sure your room is insulated, no extra paths to ground. A faraday cage only works properly with one single path to ground. Otherwise currents will circulate between the various paths to ground and allow for inductive paths for signals to get in and out.

Multiple materials are OK. Meshes are OK but the best faraday cages avoid them. The larger the opening the lower of frequency RF can get through. Generally openings should be smaller than 1/10th the wavelength of highest frequency RF you wish to block. But keep in mind, any conductive material sticking through the mesh will fuck your shit right up.

.
If I were doing it, it would be in a cement room with no wiring and I would zinc arc spray the shit out of everything.

But if I were a meth head doing it, I would just use scrap aluminum siding.

[Anonymous No.2847368]

>>2847224
>>2847318
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_shielding
>(above description of conventional copper shielding)
>Equipment sometimes requires isolation from external magnetic fields.
>For static or slowly varying magnetic fields (below about 100 kHz) the Faraday shielding described above is ineffective.
>In these cases shields made of high magnetic permeability metal alloys can be used, such as sheets of permalloy and mu-metal[9][10] or with nanocrystalline grain structure ferromagnetic metal coatings.

The implication of AC magnetic fields passing through electric shielding is that an AC magnetic field can propagate in the absence of an AC electric field, i.e. not just as an EM wave.

My assumption from this is: a solenoid with an AC current through it (e.g. 10kHz) produces an alternating magnetic field in its vicinity, with no significant net electric field component. As the field propagates outwards and attenuates by the inverse cube law, due to the geometry of the magnetic field it couples with the electric field, forming a proper EM wave. Inversely, if you block just the electric field component of a low frequency EM wave, the magnetic field component will still travel through for some distance, attenuating quickly. The distance at which it attenuates, the reason for the 100kHz value stated, will naturally be a function of the wavelength of the field, all else is scale invariant.

[Anonymous No.2847845]

>>2845935
maybe you can make a platform to walk on over the floor? like wood pallets