FMS Articles

Running Interference
If computer ‘jitter’ is bugging you, the culprit may be magnetic fields.

Working on a computer sometimes can be like watching “The Outer Limits” - some unforeseen force seems to be in control of the screen. As a not-so-happy consequence of the technology boom, building owners and tenants are increasingly likely to have their computers and other sensitive equipment go haywire because of electric and magnetic fields, or EMFs.

More landlords are becoming aware of this issue, says Michael L. Hiles, president and CEO of Field Management Services Corp. of Los Angeles. It’s a problem they can’t afford to ignore. “The consequences of an elevated magnetic field inside of a commercial office building has a financial impact directly on the value of the building itself,” warns Hiles, whose company specializes in the measurement and assessment of EMFs, design and implementation of field mitigation plans, and new facilities design consultation. The company has performed hundreds of field mitigation projects around the world, including a project FMS did last month at the Water Garden office complex in Santa Monica.

According to Hiles, all buildings have areas inside of them with high magnetic fields from the power delivery system. “It’s not arguable that at a certain level, the fields are going to cause interference in your building.”

Magnetic field problems normally occur in areas adjacent to high current-carrying conductors. In a commercial office building, the usual suspects include electrical closets and switchgear, transformer vaults, conduit and bus bars - even the power transmission and distribution lines outside the building. Fluorescent lighting and other monitors in close proximity can also have deleterious effects.

The most common effect is a distortion of the computer monitor. The term for this is “jitter,” a sort of left-to-right shifting of the image on the screen. Depending on the strength of the interference, jitter can range from a couple of barely perceptible pixels to severe enough to render the screen unusable, says Jon W. Munderloh, senior technology consultant at FMS. “It becomes so distorted that you can’t read anything or work on a monitor.”

In addition, there are other sorts of perturbations such as desktop computers randomly turning themselves on and off, and Hiles says a general contracting company recently reported similar behavior involving a laptop. Indeed, he says, a field can wreak more havoc than monitor mischief. “It’s capable of causing a computer system to malfunction,” Hiles says. “The tenants of the owner now find themselves in a contretemps over whether the space that they have rented is adequate and appropriate to the use that their company intends to put it.”

While owners generally like to keep mum about it, Hiles says it’s difficult to keep field problems secret because word tends to leak out. “After the problem has been discovered, the lawyers [become] involved and the tenants and the landlords are all at each others’ throats.”

In any case, an increasing number of landlords and tenants, especially technology-based companies, have become more attuned to this topic. One issue that has become important to tenants over the last two or three years is proximity to facilities that use high electromagnetic frequencies, says Henry Bullock, managing principal of Menlo Equities. “There are more and more of these high-technology companies that are checking the specific location for airwave interference because of the trend toward wireless communication,” says Bullock.

The Palo Alto-based company specializes in the acquisition and development of buildings for high-tech users. Says Bullock, “We’ve had a couple of tenants that have looked at buildings and specifically rejected them because of wireless interference.”

On a project FMS worked on in Carlsbad, a group of engineers working for a Japanese-based company was expanding down into a building’s first floor. “This was a high-end, gold-plated tenant and the owner of the building was pleased to be able to keep them there,” Hiles says. “They redesigned and developed the area, put in all their fancy computers, high-speed Internet access, digital communications systems, fancy furniture and partitions. [Then] they fired up the computers and found these higher-performing computers wouldn’t boot up.”

When the engineers took one of the computers upstairs, it worked just fine. But back downstairs, it was lifeless. The tenants - savvy engineers conducting sophisticated research on things like global positioning satellite systems - were flummoxed. Finally they hooked up an extension cord and began testing the computer every few feet, eventually reaching a point there the field strength was below 3 milliGauss (mG, a unit of measure for magnetic fields). Hiles says, “They concluded the magnetic fields from the source, which in this case was the switchgear for the building, was causing the computer to malfunction.”

Of course, there are still some tenants who don’t quite get it. Case in point: Seeking relief from computer problems, a New York law firm relocated within a Manhattan skyscraper from one floor, which happened to be located near the transformers, only to find the problem apparently followed them to the new space 20 floors away. It turns out that in this particular building, transformers were located every 20 floors.

The EMF issue is picking up steam for a number of reasons. The use of technology is booming, forcing building owners to ramp up the amps. More current is flowing through the building, and the stronger the current, the stronger the magnetic fields that are emitted. Improvements in computer monitors - color, higher resolution, larger size - makes them more sensitive to external background fields.

(While a building’s power supply will cause electric fields to be elevated too, they’re typically shielded by the floor. Magnetic fields, on the other hand, not only are capable of going through most building materials, they are the force that will cause interference.)

The problem commonly manifests itself following a building upgrade or remodel. The first floor of a commercial office building was customarily given over to something other than office space - a restaurant or retail plaza, elevators or other common area, or maybe the reception area for a bank - i.e., uses that don’t involve lots of drones in cubicles with sensitive computers. In what Hiles calls a “classic scenario,” an owner will weigh the value of that piece of real estate as a storage room vs. its value densely packed with workers, and decide to turn it into office space. Result: “All of a sudden you find the first floor is bathed in magnetic fields.”

Besides equipment interference, there is another issue often raised in connection with EMFs - potential health risks stemming from elevated fields. On this point the matter is far from settled, Hiles observes. “Any discussion about health and magnetic fields is a war of opinion. Like any good argument, there are well-meaning folks on both sides.” There is no hard proof that elevated fields pose any significant health risks, he notes, but at the same time there is no known level that is guaranteed to be safe. Hiles points to a project he recently worked on in which a building in Los Angeles was being converted to an Internet hotel, and was upgrading its power system.

Due to an insufficiency of space in the basement, a 2,500-square-foot street-level space was tapped to house a new utility transformer and distribution equipment - right below a law firm that wasn’t a bit pleased by this. Furthermore, they included environmental lawyers who did in fact voice health concerns.

According to Munderloh, there are three main strategies to deal with field interference. The first and least expensive is simply to create distance. Magnetic fields decay or diminish the farther away you get from a source such as a transformer or electrical equipment. The rate of decay is usually the square of the distance, explains Munderloh, so if you double the distance the field will fall by one-fourth. Often the space next to an electrical room will be used for storage, but that’s not always a feasible option for landlords.

The second strategy is to reduce the source strength. With very large power systems it’s sometimes possible to reduce magnetic fields - for example, by replacing open bus ducts with compacted cables.

Shielding, the third strategy, is usually the least desirable due to cost. Munderloh says there are three approaches: Shielding whatever piece of equipment is being affected, such as a computer monitor. Often however, there are too many monitors, or concerns about other equipment, to make this practicable. Another option is to shield the source, for example, going into the electrical room and shielding the transformers. Again, that’s not always possible due to inadequate access or space. The third approach, the one that was used for a new building in phase two of the Water Garden, is to shield the area that’s being affected.

In this particular case, a tenant space is located next to a large transformer vault and the main electrical distribution equipment for the building, Munderloh says. “The tenant is a well-known dot-com company and they’re sensitive to these issues,” he observes.

The electrical system has been activated but it’s very lightly loaded, so the magnetic fields are not very high at this point. However, Munderloh says, when the building is fully occupied those levels are anticipated to increase “by as much as four times in magnitude. Based on that projection, we were able to forecast that the magnetic fields will be sufficiently elevated in this tenant area to cause concerns for sensitive equipment interference.” Using computer simulation, the company designed a shield for installation during the tenant improvement buildout, which will reduce the fields to an acceptable level.

The Water Garden project was a little unusual in that the city of Santa Monica strictly limits such work on Saturdays and Sundays, noted FMS senior consultant Kenneth L. Griffing, who did the initial survey and assessment for developer J.H. Snyder Co. “Oftentimes our work can be a bit messy, so it’s advantageous to have us come in and do our work on the weekends.” But he adds, “From a shielding standpoint, the project is pretty typical of the things we get involved with.”

As for the shields themselves, they are composed of highly specialized, primarily aluminum alloys and range form one-eighth to a quarter-inch thick, although multiple layers can bring the total thickness to several inches.

Says Griffing, “We spent over three years working in a laboratory testing different materials and developing different techniques that are used in putting together our shields.” Their effectiveness is due to a combination of the type of material plus the way they’re installed, he adds.