Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

I had something along these lines happen to me years ago. It was sound-related, but didn't turn out to be electronic.

I was renting in a century-old house that had been converted into apartments. Every night, around midnight, this very high-pitched hum would start, and continue until almost dawn. None of the other residents ever heard it when they were around. While the exact timing varied, the time during which it happened overlapped with my sleep schedule (I was working a late tech support shift at the time) and it kept me awake. Earplugs didn't really seem to help.

There didn't seem to be any obvious source. I did exhaustive work to try and track it down - even got the permission of the owner and my fellow tenants to try shutting off the power at the breaker box in the middle of the night to see if that helped. (It didn't.)

It wasn't always constant, but it was around enough and preventing me from sleeping enough that I was going slowly insane. I had my ears checked for tinnitus - nope, I had and still have darn good hearing. I started reading about the Taos hum, looking into resonant frequencies, and finally stumbled across the answer.

The noise started a little while after everyone in the building went to bed. It stopped shortly after they got up in the morning. It was the sound of the century-old plumbing system at full pressure. If I just left a tap open a trickle, and the noise went away along with my sleep-deprivation.

Reddit is literally leaking

On a related note it’s interesting how electric shavers (which could easily suffer from the same issue) are allowed on aircraft, but mobile devices need to be in flight mode. Are the frequencies of RF noise from an electric motor in a different range, so they don’t cause issues with aircraft?

Something like this happened when I was a kid and it scared the heck out of me. Suddenly there was this loud garbled voice booming from the stereo speakers. I thought it was the devil or something. Turned out to be the radio enthusiast who lived next door. There was a big antenna in their backyard, so they were probably broadcasting with some power. Plus my dad had the whole Hi-Fi rigged up with lamp cords.

I knew someone who lived two blocks from a radio station, and they would get interference everywhere, there would be staticky top 40 music coming from the phones, from clock radios, from the stereo. It would come and go. They would complain, the radio station would fix something, but in a few months it would be back.

I had to debug my home this summer and I think it makes a good story. I have been renting this appartment on the ground floor for one year, and for environmental and economical reasons, I decided to try to reduce my electricity bill, which was quite large for the size of the appartment. An obvious culprit was the Canadian winter in a poorly isolated place, but I was also wondering about why in summer I had around 22-23 kWH of electricity consumption every day. I have no A/C, so I figured it was either my electronics or the appliances or a combination of both.

I bought an electricity usage monitor plug and started to measure every electricity consuming stuff, but couldn't account for more than 3 or 4 daily kWH. Then I went in vacation for one week, turning off almost everything in the house, and the electricity consumption, that I can check every day, had barely moved. Something was consuming at least 20kWH every day in my home and I didn't know what it was.

At the same time in prevision of the winter, I bought a thermal IR camera to spot isolation problems. I started to play around with it, and discovered a fairly large hot spot in the bathroom, on the bottom of the bathtub. Touching it with the hand, it sure felt warmer than you would expect from a baththub. Maybe it was some hot water? But the water heater was on gas and my gas bill was fairly normal. The hotspot would also not go away after hours. Then I remember a visiting friend remarking weeks ago that my bathroom was warmer than the rest of the appartment.

To test my suspicions, I tried to play with the electricity meter of the appartment. After some experiments, I found out a switch that would turn off the mysterious heat source. The baththub started to cool down and the power usage displayed went down to 0. My theory was validated! Something under my bathroom was drawing around 800W constantly every hour of the day and every day of the week and that was making my appartment so hot in summer and my bill so large.

At this point, the only thing I could do was contacting my landlord and detailing my findings. It turned out he had installed a dehumidifer in the basement the year before to dry out the air and fight a moisture problem, but he had configured it to a very low setting, like 30% humidity and that was making it work constantly. The dehumidifer was installed just below my bathtub and its operation was heating it at the same time. Since it was an old home he had bought out a few years before, he didn't know where the basement was drawing its electricity from. Well now he does.

He reimbursed me the electricity and changed the settings of the machine and then my electricity consumption went to almost nothing... until november came and the cold of the last weeks of fall started to hit Montreal, but that's another story.