Chapter 10

Buying for Your Home

If you’re buying new furnishings or appliances for your home, you have the perfect opportunity to choose ones that will help create the level of wellbeing for your family that you desire.

Here are some things to think about before you buy.

Is it wireless or not?

You might think that most people would know whether the products they were purchasing were wireless or not, but that’s not the case. So many of today’s products unexpectedly have wireless function, it’s easy to introduce wireless products to your home unintentionally. I’ve visited homes where people have been surprised to learn that their phone or their printer, which they’d connected with wires, was nevertheless emitting wireless radiation.

The words ‘wi-fi’, ‘Bluetooth’, ‘smart’, ‘MHz’, or ‘GHz’ on the packaging are indicators that a product uses wireless radiation.

Check your options

Just because the electronics store has shelves of cordless phones, it doesn’t mean there are not perfectly good corded options available. You may be surprised at the options available.

If you do decide to buy a wireless router, choose one that can be turned off when it’s not being used and not one that will automatically turn itself back on.

Choose connections

If you use a wired modem, choose devices that will connect with it easily. For example, a laptop can be connected to the wired modem easily so that the user can access the internet without any wireless exposure (providing the wireless function on the laptop is also turned off). On the other hand, a tablet can’t be easily wired to the modem, leaving the internet user exposed to wireless radiation from both the tablet and the router.

Choosing beds

You might wonder what choosing bedding has to do with wireless radiation.

Many mattresses and bases contain metal spring coils. Because metal is a conductor of radiation, some scientists have expressed concerns about the effects of lying on them for long periods of time daily. These researchers measured electric fields from FM radiofrequency signals above beds with and without metal-coil mattresses. They found that, above metal-coil beds, fields were low close to the mattress surface, but they increased with a small distance above it. (This was not the case for beds without metal-coil mattresses.) They even postulated a connection between these fields and breast cancer. Even though the study measured FM radio, which operates at lower frequencies than wireless radiation, it illustrates the conductive nature of wires.

Although the risks of metal-coil mattresses are far from proven, it’s probably a good idea to keep metals away from the bed during sleep as much as possible.

If you’re in the market for a new mattress, latex, memory-foam, and futon mattresses don’t contain spring coils.