EMP and Lightening Protection
As a quick disclaimer, I am not an electrician, however I am a software engineer and have been tinkering with things my entire life. So I am reasonably well versed in figuring out how things work.
With various political tensions around the world, and the ever present threat of another Carrington event, I have been interested in some way to protect myself from the effects of various sizes of EMP events. To that end I have been doing a good bit of research into what an EMP is, how it affects various things, and how to best protect against it.
The challenge is that not all EMPs are created equal, so we have to start with what it is, and what it does. An electromagnetic wave is essentially just a radio signal, a very powerful one. As such the frequency of the wave determines how it will affect things. The length of the antenna also plays a large role in picking up such a wave and generating electrical current from it.
EMP Components
A nuclear EMP is made up of 3 major categories: the E1, E2, and E3 events. They are characterized by wavelength and period after detonation that they occur. The E1 event is a very high frequency event, my guess from the chart here and from an EMP Shield interview is that it will be in the gamma spectrum, despite the paper the chart is embedded in indicating it will only be a few hundred megahertz. The E2 event appears to be a lower frequency event, yet still in the gamma spectrum according to the same chart. The E3 Event is a low frequency, below 1 Hz, starting at about the 1 second mark and can last for several minutes.
A geomagnetic storm only has the E3 component, and while it is generally estimated that it will not be as strong as the E3 event from a nuclear weapon, it will cover and affect a vastly larger geographic region.
Like all electromagnetic waves, including radio waves, an EMP is limited to line of site, or any objects the waves are able to penetrate.
So what does frequency and wavelength mean to us. Let's start with a simple electromagnetic spectrum chart someone was nice enough to upload to quora. You can see on the left hand side (long wave side) we have radio waves, then microwaves and light, and gamma rays on the far right (short wave side). The longer the wavelength the longer than antenna required to generate a meaningful amount of current from the wave.
Most of us are familiar with car radios, truckers CBs, and walkie talkies. Those all have relatively long antennas and fall on the far left of this chart. Cell phones have much shorter antennas built into the body of the phones these days, they use the microwave spectrum. So you can imagine that super high frequency waves up in the gamma region are going to bind to every tiny little antenna they can find, which pretty much means every circuit on a circuit board.
The caveat to this is that now we enter the realm of speculation. Just how much current could a small wire generate before it got big enough to fry anything? And just how much would such a wave have to be reduced to in order to protect against that? There are examples on the Internet of people building small EMP devices that are capable of disrupting small electronics, but not frying them; and this is an important distinction when you're talking about the level of damage done. Clearly unexpected current introduced into a modern electronic device is going to cause it to miss behave, usually a reboot fixes the problem. What is not clear is how much current it would take to actually burn out a circuit, or if the wires on circuit boards are even capable of generating enough current to do that.
Once we get down to the E3 event or a geomagnetic storm we can see that the frequency of 1 Hz is super low. To get an idea of just how low look at this chart of standard Ham Radio frequencies. The Meter values next to the frequencies are the length of one full wave, and how long an optimal receive antenna would be to generate maximum voltage. Most of those frequencies are measured in Megahertz, and the conversion by a factor of 1000 goes Hertz, Kilohertz, Megahertz.
So we're talking an extremely long wavelength. What this means is it is unlikely to bind to anything smaller than an electrical line; which would in turn generate a massive surge into your house and fry everything plugged in.
EMP Protection
Most of us have heard of EMP hardening by putting things into a solid metal box. Or some sort of wire mesh faraday cage. It's important to note that such devices do not inherently block the EMP waves, they simply reduce them, if they get reduced to zero then they are effectively blocked. The thicker the metal box the more reduction happens.
Living inside a metal box is not only not practical for most people, it also does not fully solve the problem as the metal box can become charged and transfer the charge to things inside of it. So it is important for larger boxes to be grounded to allow that charge to flow to the ground.
And this is where logic starts to play a role. There is very little evidence we can pull from as to what an EMP would really do. The Carrington event is one of the most recent solar events we can look at. And there was some nuclear testing that generated EMPs we can draw data from to speculate on. It is also similar in effect to a lightening strike, so we can draw some data from lightening events as well.
Looking at all these data sources, it would seem that the highest risk items are long metal objects such as power lines that will provide great antennas to collect the energy and transform it into a power surge. Obviously the closer you are to the event the smaller the antennas that will be affected. And the easiest solution is if you could ground everything to get rid of the energy fast.
There are two problems with the grounding idea. Not all devices can be practically grounded, and most surge protectors do not react fast enough to stop such a surge. For reference a lightening strike lasts for around 1 second I believe, while the first part of an EMP surge, called an E1 event lasts for 1 nanosecond. The breakers in a standard breaker panel do not even react fast enough to fully protect against a lightening strike.
Whole Home Surge Protectors
In about 2021 electrical code change requiring something called a whole home surge protector. These are devices that react in about 2 nanoseconds shunting electrical surges and giving the breakers time to trip. These devices can not handle current for very long due to their tiny 10 guage wires, but it is long enough for the breaker to trip. While these devices can handle smaller surges, they sacrifice themselves if they end up protecting the house from a lightening strike.
There are multiple well known and trusted whole house surge protectors, a couple of them are:
Siemens FS140 it sounds like this is the highest rated one on the market.
Eaton SPD Type 2
These devices are great, which is why they are now code in all houses. However they still do not react fast enough to protect against a surge from an E1 event. It does sound as though you can use a modified ferrite bead to flatten the initial E1 event down to something one of these surge protectors can handle, but without digging into it, the details were not provided and that could just be snake oil.
Enter the EMP Shield
EMP shields are advertised as the first whole house surge protectors that react in less than 1 nanosecond and are therefore able to catch an E1 surge without any additional help. Their house unit claims to be able to handle 228 kA, however it sounds as though this is 114 kA per leg, which is probably fine as logically a large surge this device is supposed to handle would probably be split across both incoming power lines anyway.
The EMP shield is also claimed to be able to handle 90k volts. The amps and volts it can handle are the highest on the market that I have been able to find. However, it is a brand new company started in 2017, so the question is, it is a scam?
The Negatives
In digging into the EMP shield things start out looking pretty negative for the device. There is not a great deal of data about it being used in the real world, and I have been unable to verify most of their claims. In fact one of the biggest negatives to the EMP Shield is their sales reps.
In talking with their sales reps the reps come across as being pretty ignorant and only capable of repeating marketing data. They were unwilling or uncapable of sending me a picture of the inside of the device or even better of a third party opening it up and reviewing it. They were even unable to find me third party reviews of their device in action, something any company should have at their finger tips.
While I did end up finding a couple of decent third party reviews, I was unable to verify the claim that any big energy names or the military were actually purchasing their devices as they claim.
I did find one very bitter customer who posted on amazon and a couple of other sites claiming that the generator version of the EMP Shield had not protected their generator from a lightening strike despite being installed by a professional electrician. They also claimed the company would not honor the warranty guarantee to fix the damaged equipment.
I also found a review in which the customer had installed a solar panel version of the EMP Shield and the EMP Shield ended up draining the battery and damaging the battery and potentially the controller. Responses from others on the internet to this review called into question whether the person had installed the correct version of the EMP Shield. Not only are there multiple versions of the shield, there are even multiple versions for different kinds of solar arrays; this is because whole house surge protectors use different versions of metal oxide varistors to shunt energy to ground when it reaches a certain level, and you have to choose the correct one to ensure that the surge protector's resistance is high enough that it does not start shunting at normal usage levels. Based on the lack of customer response to these queries, it seems reasonably possible this was the issue.
I also asked their rep why their device does not compete better with the Siemens FS140. The rep responded with this:
Siemens has been around for a very long time, we have only been in business a few years. Also, we are in the EMP protection field, they are in the surge protector field. This is different fields so this is no competing.
Given that the EMP Shield is a whole home surge protector advertised to protect against lightening, they are in direct competition with the FS140. And the fact that they are claiming faster reaction times, plus the ability to handle larger loads, and a more diverse line of products, means that they should be beating the FS140 at every corner; except brand name recognition.
In a Siemens FS140 review the electrician recommends only installing whole home surge protectors with at least a 10 guage wire. He explained that this recommendation is due to larger guage wires being able to handle surges for longer periods before burning up and it is a mark of quality in the device. So I asked the Shield rep about their device, and they responded with:
All of our models have 10 gauge wires except the vehicle model it is 12 gauge wire.
And yet when I read through their installation PDF for the house version, I found this:
The EMP Shield (RL – Version) comes with a terminal block 12 AWG COPPER WIRE. tighten to Torque 25 in-lbs.
The EMPShield (W – version) comes with preconnected 12 AWG COPPER WIRE. Tighten to Torque 25 in-lbs.
Which makes me believe the wires are only 12 guage. I did notice that all their advertising pictures show unmarked wires, however in one video review the wires do have their specifications stamped on them. This could indicate lazy marketing, or a product that was upgraded at a later date.
Unfortunately after going back and forth with EMP Shield reps multiple times and getting answers that just weren't making sense I asked to speak with someone higher up. They claimed they would have their marketing director reach out to me; however after a month and a couple of follow up emails I have not heard from him at all.
The Big Questions
Did it ever save a house from a lightening strike, and was there third party verification not on their website to support that fact? After watching quite a few videos of people fawning over the device and not knowing anything about it, I finally found what I was looking for. In this video the guy shows how the device shorted the lightening strike and in the process self destructed and even got blown off the wall it was mounted on. Maybe in time we will see more videos like that, but at least we have one, so that is one point in EMP Shields favor.
Can it react in less than 1ns? To backup their claim, EMP Shield has posted testing results from having their device tested at the Keystone Compliance facility. Since I am not an electrician it took me quite some time to try and figure out what the results were saying. I have two concerns with this document: the first is that there are reaction times listed from .24ns all the way up to 2.08ns. And anything above 1ns would not protect against an E1 event and invalidates their marketing. The second issue is that all the voltages and graphs list the testing power in volts and amps, not in kilovolts and kiloamps. The caveat to this second issue is that the device does protect against lightening, so I must just not understand the graph labeling.
How would it function to protect a car when a car has no mechanism for grounding? This one has been really hard to figure out, and the area where the EMP shield draws the most criticism online from people using common sense and saying it just isn't possible. I watched this interview with the founder of EMP Shield, and he claimed that all they needed to do was draw the free electrons off the shell of the car itself; and he alludes to them accomplishing that by piping them into the battery. I can get on board with the premise that if you can ground the shell then that will protect what is inside (you'd have to ground the antenna too). But I have a harder time believing that you can just send all that energy straight into the battery and not have the battery blow up. However, by happy accident, I ran across a video that appears to be the emp shield saving a car from a lightening strike. The video felt authentic, and if it can accomplish this then that certainly makes the EMP claims much more believable.
Interesting Tidbits
no energy just "sits" in the wires It constantly shunts until all the over voltage is gone.
an E3 lasts for minutes to hours. It is continuous, and you are correct, without an EMP Shield is does cause problems for wires. that is why the E3 is what will destroy the grid. The E1 and E2 will not.
Constantly "shunting" is a fancy term for energy constantly flowing through the wires to ground, which sounds like the very definition of "sitting" in the wires. Especially if we are talking about high voltages over a several hour period. The rep claims that an EMP will not trip the breakers. So the rep admits that an hours long event would destroy the wiring in the grid, yet somehow the tiny wires in the Shield can handle it for an extended period because they are grounded; I am having trouble accepting this claim.
There is also the odd add on of the claim that the E1 and E2 events will not cause a problem for the grid. My guess is since these are shorter wave events and can more easily bind to smaller wires the Rep was insinuating that the E3 event would be the one more likely to bind to the long electrical wires. It felt poorly communicated to me.
When installing the EMP shield in a house, it is important that the 20 amp breaker(s) cover both rails, a double pole breaker does this naturally. It is also best to have the breaker be as close to the main wires coming into the house as possible to create the fastest path to ground for the extra energy.
Conclusion
After waiting a month with several follow-up emails for EMP Shield to answer these troubling discrepancies in their product, advertising, and commutation, I am left to assume that I will not be hearing back or get these questions answered.
Ultimately I do not feel solid in the idea that the EMP shield will do what it claims. However, with the two videos I found, and the conceptual research I have done I'd say there is a small possibility that the EMP Shield will function as advertised; or at least function as a basic whole home surge protector. Given how sketchy things are around this company I will not personally be purchasing one at this time.
EDIT ( 3/13/2024 )
We now finally have a YouTube video of an independent party who knows what they are doing actually testing the EMP Shield device. Despite all my misgivings prior, this video pushes it over the edge for me, and I now intend to get one as soon as finances allow.
In case the video does not exist by the time this post is being read, in summary a guy sets up a lab with the equivalent of a giant tesla coil type enclosed system on one end, a bunch of sensitive house hold electronics in the middle of the circuit, and the emp shield house device at the end of the circuit. The whole system is powered by 120VDC.
The guy was doing his best to break the emp shield because he did not believe their claims. He had an 8" spark gap setup to show the level of energy he was injecting into the system. The capacitors on the firing end would charge using the 120VDC then release creating a giant surge crossing that spark gap and hitting the entire system.
As part of the demonstration he showed all the devices working, and talked about how the test was affecting the rest of his house despite his house being disconnected from the testing room aside from the 120V source current.
After hitting the circuit over 100 times the emp shield device was still working and no devices appeared damaged in anyway. I believe he mentioned a couple of them might have rebooted, that was the extent of the damage.
He then showed a brief clip of him hitting the circuit with the emp shield device disconnected and every device on the circuit was badly destroyed. He also described how the destruction was so bad that the majority of his closeup video footage was lost because the camera filming it had been destroyed as well.
So not only does the emp shield protect the circuit it is on, it prevents a lot of residual radiation from entering the air around the circuit. This was a very well done test by a third party. The test was being discussed and reviewed by a panel of 4 guys with various expertise's in the field, and electrician, a bomb tech, and a prepper were among them.
