Vertical Clouds

[yogi]

Yes, the humming noise I heard sounded like 60 cycle hum but with something a little extra. The low frequency dominated. Now I'll tell you something that was stunning when I learned about it. The electrician came out today to check the attic fan. He spent a bit of time up there looking at every possible nook and cranny, but could not find a fan. Therefore, whatever I am hearing is not due to a faulty attic fan. The guy was very understanding and did a few things to try and locate the source of the hum. He flipped off all the breakers at which point I didn't hear any hum, nor did the hum appear after he flipped the breakers back on. He could not hear any humming, and my wife of many years could not hear any humming. By that time not even I could hear any humming, but I did to the point that I had to call somebody out to fix the problem. The problem, apparently, is not with the house.

I could just say I'm old and senile and am hearing things. But at least on two different occasions I went thought the house to locate the source. Never found it but I did feel it. Really. I did. Don't look at me that way. ...

Thank you for the short lesson in extrusion. I guess the idea there is not to remove any impurities from the plastic but to align the grain. It never dawned on me that plastic would have a grain to it, but what do I know? It makes sense that if there is a grain and it's all parallel to the walls of the tube then it will be as clear as it's ever going to be. I just didn't think plastic had grain, or a crystalline structure. I think it's pretty amazing that you figured out how to do it given that you don't have a chemistry or physics background. The infinite loop idea is brilliant, but I never would have guessed it would clarify plastic.

[Kellemora]

Do you have any fluorescent fixtures that use either a round or long fluorescent tube?
It is not uncommon for a fluorescent fixture to start humming as the magnetics in it cause a vibration with the metal housing.
Usually, sticking a toothpick under the transformer will stop the hum.

I'll bet if you use a stethescope with a hollow metal tube on the end of the rubber tubes, you just might find it.
And I hope the electrician didn't charge you too much for the visit.

The only other option I can think of is, Poltergeist Activity, but I think we can rule that one out for now, hi hi.

When I'm told something is impossible, I try to find a way, even if it takes me eight years of trying different ideas.
I seem to always find a way, it may not be the best way, but I find some way of doing it.
You would laugh if you knew some of the ways I tried to make a float meter with no moving parts to get clogged up by root fines. In hydroculture, you have to know when to water, and how much to water. And all the other companies used a float inside a tube, which wasn't entirely accurate, and their systems had several poor designs to them as well.
When you are raising thousands of plants, we make sure they cannot be overwatered by drilling a hole in the side of the pot at the high water level. Then we use a test in about 5 or 6 plants at various places on the bench, and when at least 4 of them say it is time to water, we water all of them at the same time with a nutrient mixture. For the individually potted plants that is.
For the small starter plants, we just set the growing chamber inside of a larger watering trough so to speak. The only problem with doing it that way is evaporation of the water leaves the nutrient level climbing higher than it should be. So, to keep that from happening, we would wait until it was time to water, them wash out the troughs with plain water by pulling the stopper at the drain end, and after washing it out, we would replace the stopper and fill it up with fresh nutrient.

Because of the high price of red line glass rods, one of my experiments used cheap hollow glass tubes, with a prism on one end, then the tube was filled with alcohol, and a flat cap placed at the other end. Although this worked a little, the tubes went bad really quick. I tried cheaper glass tubes and they just didn't work once you got longer than 2 inches.
I probably bought over 40 different types of plastic rods to experiment, and none of them worked, but one was better than all the rest for up to 3-1/2 inches. That was the polysulfone plastic. And the more I studied about that particular plastic, I learned it could be drawn. But could never figure a way to do that cheaply, nor get the results I wanted.
It was only by sheer accident that I found an extrusion machine could do what I wanted. And that came out in an odd way. A company was making extruded plastic rods with a camouflage pattern in them, and ones that didn't look quite right they tossed back into the machine, and instead of camouflage they were coming out with the pattern in nearly straight lines.
I asked the guy to take the ones with the wiggly lines and run them through again. He did so and the lines were straighter.
But you couldn't achieve exactly what I wanted by dumping them back into the melted plastic.
And that is when he told me they could put a drawing head on the extruder and that would make the lines straight arrow.
They also had a drawing head that turned, so they could make like candy cane lines on things, but that took two extruders linked together, one for the white and one for the red, into the spinning drawing head.
After that, it only took me a couple of months to convince him to run the polysulfone back on itself in a continuous loop as an experiment. And once he was all set up to do it that way, he would just let the machine run. The first time we did it, we only ran it for two hours, not good enough, then the next time for four hours, much better. Then if I wanted to pay more for tying up his machine he agreed to let it run for a full eight hours, and that produced exactly what I wanted.
FWIW: We were only talking about roughly 15 grand for the materials, electric, and labor to get that first final run done.
And once it was down pat, the cost dropped considerably to around 3 grand per run, which then made the product affordable to do for my purposes.
We were able to sell my hydroculture plants, in a growing chamber, in a decorative pot, with the light and nutrient meter, the growing media, and a plant for $12.95 wholesale, and were still doubling our money. So even at selling them at retail for $24.95, we were 2/3 cheaper than our closest competition. And with a 5 year guarantee on the plant and 10 years on the system itself. Not many places would give you a 5 year guarantee on a potted plant, hi hi.
This is one reason our biggest clients were plant rental companies. But they had to pay 2 bucks more or $14.95 for the plants because they would be in commercial settings. Even so, I think over the course of a couple of years, we only got like 2 or 3 plants back, and we could tell it was because they forgot to water them, even so, we replaced them.

As an aside: I gave my late wife Ruth's sister a plant right after we first opened. One of the more rare plants we sold. I believe it was a Black Aralea plant. She had it for 15 years, then when she became ill, her daughter took it. About 8 or 10 years after that, Amy called to tell me that her cousin still has the plant I gave her aunt, and it was still doing great, but was now a whole lot larger, and used a lot more nutrient too. Water once a week instead of once a month, hi hi.

[yogi]

You were doing a little more than flying by the seat of your pants in the hydorculture business. You knew some very specific details in advance and then took the challenge of how to implement your idea. They say a lot of great inventions came about by chance or from a field completely unrelated. Apparently that is how you discovered the process for making the plastic rods you needed. But, you knew in advance that you needed plastic rods of a specific quality. Finding out how to make those rods was just a minor detail. LOL

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We will be getting a bill from the electrician in the mail, but I doubt it will be more than $100. He was here the better part of an hour and while he found nothing, that alone was informative. I would not mind paying him for finding nothing in this case. The conclusion drawn, however, was that it was all in my head. I have tinnitus which is indeed all in my head, but what I was hearing originated well out of the range of high frequency tinnitus ringing. It is very disconcerting to learn that I'm the only one hearing these vibrations.

There are a few things that can be done along the line of troubleshooting. The obvious would be to put in ear plugs or sound protection gear to see if the sound remains. I have headphones that fit snugly around my ears but I could not come to any definite conclusion. Sometimes I thought the sound remained with the head set on, and other times it seemed to kill it. The electrician suggested that when I hear the sound I should go to the breaker panel and turn them off one at a time until the sound goes away. That is reasonable, but like wearing the headset the vibrating sounds are not dominant in the basement where the breakers are located. It may still be possible to test that theory when wife is feeling better and can negotiate the basement stairs. But then I had an idea.

My clever phone just happens to have an app that is a spl meter plus an audio spectrum analyzer. All I wanted to do at this point is to try and determine if I'm crazy or if there really is a background noise that only I can hear. I set up the spectrum analyzer and sat for about 18 seconds in my computer room listening to the humming noise and watching the meter. The above image clearly shows some low frequency noise in the 140 - 260 Hz range. It's fully 12 db above the ambient background noise. This proves (to me at least) that I am not crazy and hearing things nobody else can hear. Finding the source, now that's a different issue. If conditions are right I'll do some further experiments to see if I can isolate the source. I'm not sure how to proceed, but like you, I will find a way.

[Kellemora]

If you could see the hydroculture liner I invented, and let me explain the parts of it to you, you would see why it was far superior to anything on the market. But then, when you've been in the plant business your whole life, you know all the flaws of nearly any type of pot ever made, so learn ways to avoid those flaws from the git go.

I have really bad tinnitus also, but I can usually tell if the sound is in my headbone or if it is external to my headbone.

That 200 Hz high noise level has me baffled as to what could be causing it.
It's not 60, 120, 180, or 240 Hz so I think we can rule out transformer vibration or motors.
But what about stepper motors, or computer fans that run at oddball speeds?
Is one of your computers water cooled that uses a turbine type of pump?
Perhaps try your Schmarz-Fone program when in different rooms, to see which room it might be the loudest in, first.
If your meter is picking it up, then it's not likely in your headbone, hi hi.
What about a bad compact fluorescent or perhaps an LED lamp ready to go south?
I'm really stumped on this one Yogi, but you'll figure it out, I'm sure!

[yogi]

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That first image is slightly misleading, although it is an accurate depiction of what is going on.

The primary thing to keep in mind is that each bar in the graph is a 1/3rd octave range of frequencies. Thus the frequency shown in the red readout bubble is the center of that group of frequencies. The amplitude of the y-axis bar, therefore, is an average reading of all the frequencies in that band.

The second consideration is to note the method of measuring. The first graph shows SPL (Leq) readings, which is sound pressure measured in decibels. I'll quote it from Google because they say it much more eloquently than I can:

• Leq, LAeq, equivalent continuous sound levels
  Leq (equivalent continuous sound level) is the steady sound level which over a given period of time has the same total energy as the fluctuating noise.

This means the first graph, showing Sound Pressure Levels (Leq) as the average sound energy over a period of time.

As you could imagine all the audio frequencies bouncing around the room are not steady state. They are jumping up and down continuously, small amounts as it might be, So, over the 18 seconds that I was sampling the sound in that first graph, you can see where all the power of the room sounds is located. That be down on the low end of the frequency spectrum, and near 180 cycles, the third harmonic of 60 cycles. The important, and misleading, fact is that it's a running average. Not an instantaneous measurement.

It so happens the spectrum analyzer app that I was using allows for four different methods of weighting the measurements. I initially thought the SPL measurement would be most revealing, but it is not fine tuned. In order to get a more granular depiction I changed the weighting to SLOW, which is a measurement over 1 second of time. The graph from that kind of sampling is slightly different and more revealing. The peak amplitude is shown to be at 125 Hz which is the center of that 1/3rd octave band. Our old familiar 120 Hz falls right into that band. Three bars to the left shows another peak at 63 Hz, which would include the notorious 60 Hz hum we all know so well. I'm guessing that small hump to the right is around 180 Hz; a few more measurements would likely reveal a better peak.

The peaks are in the range of 3 db above the ambient noise in the room. At 3 db the sound energy is doubled. That might sound like a tremendous increase, but when you consider how low level the noise is to begin with, it loses its significance. The first graph shows clearly what I'm hearing. On average the low frequency energy is 12 db above the noise, which is about 15 times increase in intensity. My poor old ears, apparently, can pick that up. Why other people cannot detect it is the big question, second only to from where the heck is that hum originating.

Every one of your suggestions is valid. The dilemma is that I made these readings in every room of the house. The suspicious fact is that the hum is consistent throughout the house. The one exception is in the pantry which is sharing a wall with the garage (not insulated in other words). However, the increase in levels in the pantry is minuscule, something in the range of 1-2 db. That would be inside the margin of measurement error and does not really pinpoint the source. It appears that the entire house is humming equally in all its parts. That does not make sense. If a motor, or a transformer is the problem, the intensity would increase at the site of the noise. It would not be the same 30 feet away. The other observation is that the meter readings are essentially the same whether I can hear the hum or not. I need to find my sound protection gear to perform the ultimate test. Those ear muffs have a -80db sound attenuation built in and would be a good way to see if the hum is originating inside my cranium.

And, by the way, I also have a vibration sensing app on my clever phone. It measures vibrations in all three axes, x, y, and z. Everything in the house is shaking, as you might expect, but way, way, way down in the mud. I did discover that most of the walls are shaking in the z-axis more so than in the x or the y. That's actually a good thing. You don't want your walls vibrating side to side or up and down. LOL The vibration level, however, is only a small notch above and below 1 (one), measured in g-force.

I have a feeling that instead of an electrician or an HVAC guy, I should be talking to an audiologist.

[Kellemora]

I've figured it out Yogi!
YOUR HOUSE is ALIVE!
You are hearing its molecules as it lives and breathes, hi hi.

My old stereo system had dB meters mainly to keep the microphone volume set, and the speaker output set.
I was surprised once when my mike was picking up something that was around 45 dB and I couldn't hear it.
This was a new noise that never happened in my small recording area, so I was baffled by it for a while.
The things was, it only happened a couple of times.
I didn't do any recording when the frau was doing laundry, and considering she was not home or doing laundry, I couldn't figure out where the noise was coming from.
But I finally figured it out.
There was a door to my downstairs (basement) bathroom from the bedroom in the basement to the bathroom, and also from the bathroom to the laundry room area. There was a nice exhaust fan in the bathroom, with a switch at both doors. And I always wire 3-way switches so if both are down, the power is off to the light or fan or whatever those switches are powering.
My son would sometimes use that bathroom, like after working on his car and he came down to the laundry room to take his greasy clothes off. He usually never turned off lights either, hi hi.
I noticed the bar of soap on the sink was dirty, like oily dirty, and he's usually good about washing it off.
That was my cue to go into the bathroom, and when I did I heard the exhaust fan running.
Turned it off and my dB meter dropped back down as expected.
That fan must have been running for about two possibly three days.
No wonder my electric bill is so high when the kids are home, hi hi.

[yogi]

Your tale about the bathroom fan creeping into your recording studio is the kind of thing I suspect is happening here. That is exactly why I called an electrician to look at the attic fan. Since I don't have the capability to go up there, it's accessible via a trap door in the garage ceiling, I did not know if we even had any fans up there. I should have had a clue when I checked the circuit breakers. There is nothing labeled "attic fan" nor any switches to turn it off if I cared to. I just assumed there was some sort of thermal switch that has gone awry and that the entire unit would have to be replaced. The only good news there is that I didn't have to pay $700 to replace an attic fan, because we don't have one. The fan theory also made sense because it is entirely possible that any noise up there would propagate freely to the ceilings of all the rooms in the house. There are only trusses up there and no walls. However, there is at least 6 inches of insulation on the ceiling which should be enough to dampen any stray motor hums.

Last night the humming was particularly loud and irritating as I sat here in the computer room. I got out the ol' sound meter and cranked up the sensitivity so that I could see what is happening in real time. I also have a spectrum analyzer in another app which shows a picture more true to the environment because it doesn't use 1/3rd octave filters. All that meter showed was a preponderance of noise at the low end of the spectrum, which is something I already knew. It did not differentiate the frequencies as well as the sound meter, but it more or less collaborated as to what frequencies I am hearing. At any rate, I took the audio meter to all the rooms in the house given that wife was asleep and all was quiet except for that damned hum. All the rooms showed the same spectrum with the 60 cycles and it's three harmonics emphasized. The amplitude of the 60 cycles varied below and above the noise floor which is the only clue I have about the source of the problem. All other frequencies were pretty stable at the noise level.

The pantry was a higher level the last time I checked and that repeated again last night. It was only a few db higher in amplitude but often fell to the noise floor as did the other rooms. Across from the pantry, with the door to the garage in between, is the laundry room. I put the meter on top of the wash machine and the 60 cycles was slightly more emphasized than in the pantry. Then I put the meter on the laundry tub, next to the wash machine, and voila! 60 cycles rose up significantly, but ON THE WASH BASIN. The washer and dryer were not running and there are no other motor driven devices in that room. There are no transformers either. I can't believe the sink is generating the hum, but it might be amplifying it. The source could be up in the attic above the sink or down in the basement below the sink. Again, we are talking only a few db above the background noise, which isn't a lot. Most people could simply adjust to that hum and ignore it. I would too if I knew what was causing it.

I know you were trying to be humorous with your "living house" suggestion, but I'm not so sure you are that far off base. I have heard noises and seen shadows that I can't explain. For the time being I'm writing it all off to my sensory organs getting old and malfunctioning. This house has no history other than me living in it and being a display model before I got here. So, I can't imagine who or what might be haunting it. But, we have in fact talked about inorganic things having a consciousness and perhaps being alive. If this house is trying to communicate with me, I sure as heck am having a hard time understanding it. Plus, I think it is having cardiac issues. Like a heart murmur for example.

[Kellemora]

Just out of curiosity, if you have a basement, does your house have a RADON evacuation fan?
Those are tiny fans that run continuous, like a computer fan. Being mounted inside a pipe sometimes they start to hum as they age or if dust builds up on the blades.

I gave thought to what it might be, and that's the only thing I could think of that I haven't mentioned, that would run continuous.

Good luck in your search for the culprit!

[yogi]

I lived in my previous house for 25+ years with no radon mitigation installed. The village people in all their wisdom decided that whenever a home is sold a radon test and report must be generated. They don't say mitigation has to be implemented, but no buyer in their right mind would buy a house with known radon problems. Well, we did the test and failed. I had to have a radon mitigation system installed. I mention this in response to your suggestion, a very good one by the way, as evidence that I know what all that venting looks like. When we purchased this house I inquired about radon and they said the test is not required because it is virtually unknown in these parts. I can see why my particular house might be exempt because the basement is not fully surrounded by dirt. We live on the side of a small rise in the landscape and have a walk out basement door. Radon, if it does exist, isn't likely to accumulate.

There are two things I would do beyond using the sound meter to prove I'm not hearing things. One is to get a ladder tall enough to reach the trap door in the garage ceiling so that I can go up there and have a look for myself. If the hum originates up there, and at the location where it is the strongest, the electrician would have fallen over it as he walked away from the door. I'm reasonably sure the attic is clean, but I would like to check it our on my own. The other thing that might be worth the effort is to obtain that stethoscope you suggest using. I don't know that it would be any more helpful than the sound meter. The meter removes any bias from the measurement, but the stethoscope might help pinpoint the source.

Resorting to logic, the only likely source of the hum would be the refrigerator which is located outside the laundry room. I think the intensity of the hum increases in the wash basin simply due to resonance. I could try to calculate wave length and make some measurements of the tub itself, but that would only explain why it is louder in that room. The fridge does not sound loud when I stand next to it, and the meter placed directly on its door doesn't show an increase in the level of the sound. But, the pantry, where the hum does increase, is sharing a wall with the fridge. Plus the fridge is enclosed in the typical wooden box under the cabinets most kitchens have for such an appliance. Again, some kind of resonance could be going on inside that enclosure. The hum is not exactly random. It often gets noticeable around 9 PM and continues through most of the night. Well, it may shut off when I am sleeping, but it is usually going when I wake up. Usually, but not always. Also, my computer room and bedroom are both located at opposite ends of the house from the kitchen. I would expect the hum to be dampened considerably at this end of the house, but it's not.

Then, there is the question of what to do about it if it is proven to be the fridge. It is made by GE and we have already put several hundreds of dollars of repair into it because that is how GE makes appliances. Do people replace refrigerators because they hum too loudly? I would, but who is to say the next one will be quieter? I know how to make computers silent, but refrigerators? Not so much.

[Kellemora]

If you have a walk out basement, you are correct, no Radon can build up in there.
Because I could make a Radon removal system so cheap, I just went ahead and put them in every house with a full-basement I worked on. It was cheaper than having the test done and also saved from having to have the test made. A simple 4" box fan on 120 volts only cost like 8 bucks back then, bought one a couple of weeks ago for 12 bucks. The little 4" PVC box was like 2 bucks, maybe 3 bucks with the fittings already molded in. And PVC pipe was cheap. Took less than 15 to 20 minutes to install, so if I figure my labor and materials, it came out to under 30 bucks, while the Radon test was over 100 bucks. The test only to see if you need to install the evacuation system, and if already installed, no need to do a test, hi hi.

If you have a sound meter, perhaps instead of a stethoscope, you just need a small aluminum or plastic tube that fits over the pick-up mike on your device.
When I used to go on Ham Radio geo-caching where we had to find the hidden transmitter, at first I used a plastic tube wrapped with lead foil so the handy-talkie didn't pick up and side signals, only picked up from the end. Then the next year I used an aluminum tube I would ground to earth ground with a wire, and the antenna was wrapped in paper so as not to touch the aluminum tube. Then by the third year, I had built a small Yagi antenna that just connected to the antenna port. This turned out to be the best way to do it. Although I always found the Cache, I was never the first in all the years I did it.
Those who were winning were always a group of three or four guys using triangulation to spot it right away.

Well, if your refrigerator is the frost free type, and you get a suction when you close the door. There is a two-stage fan in there. When you first close the door of the fridge, the fan will run on high until a certain vacuum is reached, and then it will slow down to a low speed, I don't know if this fan ever shuts off. However, you said you flipped the breakers and the sound stayed.

I do have one unusual thing that does happen, I know because it happened at one of the houses I lived in.
Connected to the Chimney was a steel pipe, put up to hold a TV Antenna. They took the TV Antenna down, but left the pipe it was mounted on. When a certain type of commercial airliner flew overhead, or probably a few types, you could outside and look up at that tall pipe and would be vibrating in the middle, like a sound wave pattern. It too made a hum inside the house, even though it was connected to a solid brick chimney. But it only lasted while an airplane was flying over.
Something like that never happened with all the antennas I had up at my next house for ham radio work.

Sound waves are funny things. Like when a band played at TGIFridays and were not all that loud there, but down at my house, it was a good 20 dB louder. We complained about it enough times, the police department sent out someone to measure the sound at my front door. It was ten times louder after the wall at the bank fell down. The shape of the bank where the drive up windows were amplified the sound, and like a megaphone pointing in my direction.
It helped when they moved the outside band over to the other side of their building, and then finally the bank rebuilt the wall that fell down, and it quit rattling our windows half the night, hi hi.

[yogi]

The radon mitigation I had installed back home was very similar to what you described. The only addition to the system was a meter that registered what the ambient radon content was. It had a colored dial so that you can tell if too much was present. Our basement failed the test by the smallest of margins, one point over the maximum limit if I recall correctly. We had a sump pump in the basement and the guy doing the test said if that was sealed we probably would pass. I did have the pump sealed and the exhaust fan installed too. The vent had to be above the roof line and to me it looked ugly. The fan, as I was told, is only good for a few years too. So, all in all it would have been a pain the the drain if I had it installed all the years I lived there. The basement here has a sliding door that opens to the patio under the deck. It also has a few windows, those plastic ones that leak like a sieve. I don't think radon has a chance in this place.

We do have a frost free fridge. And it does create that sucking sound. The primary circulation fan is located on the back panel (closest to the pantry by the way) and I don't know if it runs continuously or not. I'm thinking it only runs when the compressor runs but I could be wrong. There is a network of ductwork in that back panel with the fan. We can control the temperature to a limited degree in four sections of the refrigerator, not to mention the freezer. The problem we had was one of the flappers inside the ductwork iced up and caused the veggies in the vegetable drawer to freeze. Because that flapper froze in place, frost also accumulated on the primary fan and eventually caused it to wobble and rattle. No, it was not a hum. LOL So, you might think replacing the fan and defrosting the flapper would fix it all. The fan cannot be replaced, but the entire back panel can, ductwork and all. So instead of buying a $30 fan replacement, we had to buy a whole panel for $400. Then there was the labor charge. Given that type of experience with GE products I would not be surprised if the compressor motor resonates with the box it is fitted into. That would radiate to the surroundings if it rattled enough.

Wee have a chimney and it looks like maybe a 4" pipe coming out of the roof. It could be more, but it goes straight down to the furnace. On top of that metal pipe is a whirling dome. It spins around in the wind, such as it is doing right now because it's windy outside. That pipe could resonate and be the source of the problem. But, as I said, it's spinning now and no hum can be heard. My so-called audio meter is actually part of my so-called smartphone. It's just software installed to create a virtual spectrum analyzer. I know the audio on phones is tuned for the human ear which is frequencies predominantly below 1000 Hz. I thought the meter could be off due to the microphone on the phone being tuned for voice, but the software developers seem to have figured that out. I can get a virtually flat line when there is silence in the house. Well, it's flat as background noise can be. Then when the hum starts in, I see the low end of the spectrum light up. Thus I am pretty confident the meter is giving me accurate readings, at least in a relative sense. It's not calibrated to any standard I know of, but does fall into the expected range of sound pressure.

And, speaking of audio, I took my wife to her ENT doctor this morning. She is seeing him for allergies but they are big on hearing aids too. One of the posters in the waiting room described that Lens hearing aid I told you about not too long ago. It's the one that attaches to the ear drum directly and has a much broader frequency response then the average hearing aide. That's due to the fact that the ear drum is the microphone in the case of the Lens device. So, if I ever get motivated to improve my hearing, I now know where to go to see an audiologist. Unfortunately, as you surely know, the smaller the device the higher the price. The best and smallest conventional hearing aides are between 7-10 K dollars. I can only imagine with this tiny lens must cost.

[Kellemora]

I've mentioned before the horrible problems we had with all the LG appliances we had installed in the kitchen.
I had to replace the refrigerator after only 2 or 3 years. I wasn't putting more money into something with the LG label on it.
The new fridge is not as fancy, no water/ice dispenser in the door, but does have an ice-maker in the freezer.

I think the furnace vent would be too big to get a hum set up in it, but now your fridge could be a likely suspect.
I'm wondering if perhaps you have aliens tunneling under your house?

I know next to nothing about hearing aids, other than I don't like them, and don't want one.
Especially not at the prices they get for them. If worse comes to worse I'll buy a pair of those $35.00 specials, hi hi.

I had super bad night last night. Heart Rate above 100 bpm, and O2 down below 90, so I knew my CO2 levels had to be high.
I sat up from around 6 am doing pursed lip breathing, and using O2 at the same time, which was already on, I sleep with O2 on all night. The PLB did help to get my HR down to around 88 bpm so I wasn't so panicky. Once I got it down to 80 I slowly walked to the kitchen, did a nebulizer treatment, loaded up on O2 to get up to 95, but by then my HR was back up in the 90s. So, that's what I spent two hours doing, just PLB up until around 9:30 am when I felt I could make it up to my office OK.
Usually, once I'm seated at my office desk, with O2 on the right way, I can do pursed lip breathing until I'm back down to a HR of around 75 or lower. And if the O2 holds at around 95 I turn off the O2, and I"m usually good until lunchtime when I do another nebulizer treatment.

I hope your frau is doing OK!

[yogi]

Your instincts are very good and likely correct in the case of my humming refrigerator - I guess it forgot the words so that all it can do now is hum. The noise was particularly loud this morning when I woke up and the house was very quiet. Thus the audio meter would be able to do all it can do in the ideal environment. While the floor in the computer room had a very slight vibration, the sound meter showed the air to be normal noise. A flat line frequency response in other words. I walked two rooms over to the kitchen and pointed the meter at the refrigerator, and BINGO! 60 Hz and it's two harmonics showed up very clearly. Just to double check, I stayed in that physical location and aimed the meter opposite the fridge. The hum and its harmonics dropped a couple db. That gave me the direction I've been trying to locate the past week or so. I moved around to a few other spots and did the same kind of test and got the same results. The fridge is the source of the hum and its vibrations.

You would think that a guy like myself with more than a few years of audio experience in a factory environment would know better, but apparently I was not doing the sound test properly. The meter weighting and sensitivity was good, but until this morning I've been pointing the meter toward the ceiling for all the tests. It's amazing that the hum can indeed be measured so well by doing that, but my error in performing the test pulled me in the wrong direction. Originally I had assumed it was all an attic fan problem so that pointing the microphone toward the ceiling made sense. What didn't make sense is the consistency in most of the rooms of the house. The ceiling sound level didn't vary much from room to room. Apparently the mic in the smartphone is way more directional than I thought. When I rotated the meter 90° to face the walls instead of the ceiling, finding the source became obviously simple.

So, it appears that the GE refrigerator is the noisy culprit after all. Now what? Well I can live with it now that I know what it is, but the sound still is irritating. It's particularly annoying when I'm trying to ignore it laying in bed before I fall asleep. I don't know if I changed or if the fridge changed during the six years we have been living together. Either way, my love for GE has diminished even more than usual.

While I don't have the same medical problems that you are experiencing, I do have a lot of empathy for you. I know how scary it can be when vital functions start to go haywire. It's nothing less than panic in my case. You certainly have the routine down pat, but I can't imagine you being very comfortable with it all. I don't suppose I can comfort you very much with my words, but I must tell you that in some ways you are an inspiration. A lot of folks I've met in the past and who have major health issues simply give up and let the illness take over. I think we both know where this is all leading, but I do not sense that you have given up in any way. In fact you are pretty much in control and using what resources you have left to your best advantage. It takes a certain mental attitude to accomplish that, and that is what is inspirational to me. I love a person who doubles down in the face of danger.

[Kellemora]

Well, Congratulations on finally finding the source of the Hum!
Now to correct the problem.
I don't know if your fridge is on wheels or not, but if so, roll it out far enough to get to the back service panel.
Take a couple of toothpicks with you also, or a bamboo skewer would be better.
Try to feel anything that is vibrating from the hum and wedge a stick in it, if possible.
Sometimes just tightening a screw or nut might alleviate the noise.
Just don't get your fingers in the open cooling fans under there, you are looking for the fan that creates the vacuum in the fridge, which might be enclosed in a plastic box, hanging down from the bottom of the fridge.
Speaking of not knowing the words is why it hums, hi hi.
Did you know they whistle the words to the song, Bridge over the River Kwai?
The reason being is because the words are dirty, hi hi.

GE makes good stuff, usually, perhaps that fan motor is going bad is why it is humming to let you know.
It also might not be that hard to replace the fan. I had to replace a blower fan on my dishwasher back home at least three times before I bought a new dishwasher. The way it was mounted, on a metal plate with a plastic housing over it, it was really loud. After I replaced the second fan, I put some insulation spray foam on the outside of the metal plate that held the motor. That alone made a big difference. Fortunately, the fan only runs for a short time when the dishwasher is done. But then that motor finally got to squealing big time, cheap knock of motor I bought had the bearings go bad in it. So my next replacement was an OEM motor, and three times more expensive, naturally.

I owe my soul to the company store, so I can't go yet, hi hi.
You would not believe how I've modified some of my medical equipment or add-on options to save money.
I think you are enough of an engineer to know if you can capture what would be waste and use it rather than waste it, you'll save a ton of money on drugs.
What I'm talking about here is my nebulizer meds, and the mouthpiece you use with it.
The doctors directions for using a mouthpiece is to breathe in an out through the mouthpiece.
An air pump is connected to the mouthpiece, and a tank hold your meds, the shape makes it work like a venturi, but also blasts the liquid against a plate causing the meds to become a vapor mist, like a fog.
That part works properly and as it should. But it is running continuously, so after you inhale and get the meds, when you exhale the meds are being blown out into the room.
So, the first thing I did was use my tongue to when I exhale to block the end of the mouthpiece.
But the air is still flowing blowing the meds out into the room.
So, I found a mouthpiece that uses a 5 inch long tube, this saves some of the meds, but not enough.
In my infinite wisdom, I added three more of these tubes end to end, so the tubing is now three feet long.
I still lose a very tiny bit of meds into the room, but unfortunately adding a fifth tube raises the back-pressure a bit to high making it harder to inhale. Now if I switch from those corrugated tubes to a smooth tube, I might be able to get up to 4 feet and not lose any meds. I just haven't gotten that far yet.
What I've done is I timed how long it took to use up a dose of meds with each of the three different mouthpieces I've used.
They averaged between 4-1/2 minutes, to 5-1/2 minutes. So I know 5 minutes is close to the desired dosage.
So then, after adding the three extra tubes, making it four tubes long, and using the device for 5 minutes, I'm getting close to the proper dosage. The BIG DIFFERENCE here is, on the Albuterol, 99 bucks a box, I get three uses where I used to get only one usage. And on the Budesonide, 122 bucks a box, my cost after insurance, which is a smaller starting amount, I get two usages with a tad left over. So, over the course of 5 tubes, I now get 12 usages.
Albuterol comes in 3 ml tubes, and Budesonide in 2 ml tubes. You can't really overdose on either of these drugs, but I don't like wasting stuff that is expensive. And I told my doctor what I was doing, which is why it looks like I'm not buying enough. He thought that was a novel idea, but also said he cannot recommend altering how a device works.

I think I mentioned that my oxygen concentrator machine, the scobies charge my insurance 556 bucks a month rental.
I bought an identical machine with only 5,000 hours on it for 245 bucks. It puts out better than my rental with over 36,000 hours on it. And they have not refurbished it at 25,000 hours like they are supposed to.
Considering it only gets used about 180 to 200 hours per month, and they charge 550 bucks a month rental. And they buy them new for like 3 grand each. They are making roughly 70,000 dollars back on a 3,000 dollar investment.
And I know I told you they charged me 55 bucks a month rental on my nebulizer for a full year.
I could buy a brand new one, same make and model from Walgreens for $29.95, which I'm thinking of doing, so I have one up in my office to use, like I did with the oxygen concentrator I bought, it's in my office too.

We were in the wrong businesses, hi hi.

[yogi]

Thank you kindly for explaining why they whistle to the Bridge Over River Kwai. I had no idea.

The fridge must be on wheels because the repair guy who came out to fix it had no problem moving it out of its niche. The panels with the fans and cooling ducts were inside the cooler box and not very easy to service. I don't know if the fan he replaced (along with the rest of the panel) was that vacuum fan. I think all it did was direct the cold air from the cooling coils, but I could be wrong. I'm also thinking that the vibration isn't from a small muffin fan that can easily be replaced. The vibration is strong enough to be felt over the entire length of the house. My wife would argue with that because she neither hears the hum nor feels the vibration. Regardless, I'm guessing the compressor motor is the culprit. I have some of those bamboo skewers so that it would not be a problem to do what you suggest. I'm just thinking it's a lot worse than that.

Your doctor is legally bound to give you good advice and telling you to modify your nebulizer feed would not be a good practice. I recall mom using that short version mouthpiece and the cloud of smoke around her so that I have some idea of what you are doing. I don't doubt that the nebulizer could be engineered to be lossless, but that's only in theory. More often than not engineers are limited by costs, especially where consumer products are concerned. No doubt the nebulizer was approved by some egg headed people at the FDA and they had their design input as well. While Big Pharma is '"big" for a reason, I don't think they go around designing things to deliberately be inefficient. It may seem that way but their main priority is to deliver the proper dose of medication under all possible circumstances. Not everyone is mechanically inclined as you are. The end result, unfortunately, includes wasted medication. You found a way around that, but not many people are as clever as you are.

[ocelotl]

I know very little about optics (where is Juan when we need him) and find it slightly amazing that plastic lenses don't do you any good. All I ever read on the subject had to do with cameras. There was a review about Nikon cameras many years ago that claimed they were the last of the consumer type cameras to still use glass lenses; something serious photographers preferred. Based on that review I bought a Nikon camera. Looking back on the decision the logic I used was flawed. Glass might be superior to plastic, but the light sensor was digital. You could not get any better resolution than that which the sensor was capable of providing, and it did not come anywhere near to being as good as film. That was then. Today the sensors are a lot better and might even exceed what film can do.

Just passed by and read this... At first I thought about Galilean eyeglasses, yet when I read the post with more care, I thought about what was the idea behind the original glasses. First, glass optics have been improving from the 1600s, so by the middle of last century, most of the developments and clearness and transitivity have been already done. Each piece of glass in those glasses had an specific function, be it to correct astigmatism, to help correct either nearsightedness or farsightedness, or to help twist the image to focus where the ophthalmologist thinks it has to. As improvements in automatic figuring devices have been introduced and improvements in glass mixtures have been introduced in the last 50 years, maybe designs could be done to make any piece of glass to do more than one correction. Even the anti reflective finish is a correction by itself.

Down I link to a Galilean glasses vendor and include an image of a pair of Galilean eyeglasses from the Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica shop. If each of the pair of telescopes are assembled with two achromatic lens arrangements, those things have eight pieces of glass in total.

https://www.eschenbach.com/products/tel ... 1634-4.asp



Last year we had to replace our fridge, since it started failing to freeze as it used to. We diagnosed it to have an issue with the compressor, but as the cost and risk of change was not trivial, we decided to get a new one. We got a Whirlpool one made in Monterrey by Acros, a local appliance manufacturing company that not only has survived NAFTA, but also the influx of Asian manufacturers, and that exports appliances to the USA. since it is a traditional back radiator unit, it lacks a fan cooling the Freon gas pipes. In that aspect it is a bit noisier when the compressor is working, but since it doesn't have a Freon cooling fan, when it is silent, it is really silent. Due to his height, I haven't put wheels under it yet.

Glad both of you are still kicking around.

[yogi]

Yes, Juan, we are still here. The Devil doesn't want either of us just yet.

I've seen those Galilean eyeglasses before but never knew the name. I bet they would be just the right thing for going down the Dragon's Tail over by Gary's place.

[Kellemora]

I have astigmatism, and I wear Tri-Focals, made of GLASS, so they cost me a whole lot more.
I've tried plastic a couple of times, and for me, not only could I not see right out of them, they didn't last very long either.
My glass glasses are what is called Photo-Gray so they become darker in the sun, but not really dark like Photo-Sun.
Making glasses is mostly all done by computerized machines now, whether they are glass or plastic.
The company that makes my glasses was really peeved at me one year, because in the ball drop test, they broke like 7 lenses before got a lens that passed the test.
In my mind I'm thinking, OK, make a pair and don't drop the ball on it, because that has got to stress the glass, and/or make a pit in the glass. Ever shoot a BB gun at a large sheet of glass. It pops a cone shaped piece of glass from the other side.
But apparently, glasses don't break that way, more like tempered glass I assume.
I also tell them NOT to polish the sides of the lenses, because when they do, they pick up side reflections that drive me nuts.
On the bright side, at least they can make glasses that get my vision exactly how I want it on all three inner lenses.
Albeit the grinding company don't like the weird figures my eye-doctor sends to them, hi hi.

Once my son got me a GPS unit, I went out driving all over the place, because I knew the GPS would get me back home again, hi hi. Saw a lot of interesting things when I was out doing all that driving around. I've driven over covered bridges, through long tunnels, and of course, the Tail of the Dragon many times.

[yogi]

My wife got herself a pair of Photo-Grays and regretted it every day the sun was out. They did what they were designed to do in the sun, but she didn't like the fact that they stayed grayed out as long as they did indoors. I have glasses too and wear sunglasses over the normal set of lenses. It was a little odd wearing two pairs of glasses at first, but now I am accustomed to it and prefer it this way. When I had my eyes examined and was looking through all the options, the least expensive glasses with no options other than plastic lenses were nearly $300. All I got for them was anti-glare coating and so far that's all I need. I cam imagine what it would cost for glass tri-focals. Expensive as they are, the cost is well worth it if you can see all you need to see.

And, why are they dropping balls on your glasses?

Had to do some might driving recently when wife was hospitalized. My GPS was the reason I was able to find the hospital and get back home after the sun had set. LOL Like yourself I find the map app most helpful when coming home from a strange place. I've been disoriented a time or two in unfamiliar territory and the compass in the car wasn't very helpful. My GPS talks to me which is the best part of it all. I think it was the Garmin GPS I had several years ago that seemed to scold me when I didn't follow its directions. The app in the clever phone is much more forgiving and always has a kind word to get me going in the right direction.

[Kellemora]

Interesting, my Photo-Grays change states really fast. The older they get, the faster they change too.
My last pair of glasses were around 850 bucks, so next time I expect them to be close to double, it's been 3 years.

That's how they test glass glasses, and it is required they do that test on them.

My now very old GPS is a Garmin, but it was the top of the line when my son got it for me.
Big screen, yes with voice, and memory sticks. But the touch screen is getting mighty iffy.
Says I hit the wrong passcode, and after three tries it shuts down until I'm back home again.
I'm trying to figure out how to turn off that security feature, because I normally only plug it in when I'm not at home and need to find my way back, hi hi.