Gold Coast Doulas Logo
Gold Coast Doulas Logo

electromagnetic field

Bebcare Baby Monitors - DSR Digital Safe Radio - Ultra-low Radiation

5 Tips to Build a Low EMF Emissions Home for Your Baby

Parenting, Postpartum, Sleep / / , ,

Guest blog post by Andrew from Bebcare Low Emissions Baby Monitor

Parents are deeply concerned about the safety of their baby. Why wouldn’t they be? Your baby is your bundle of joy and the most precious. With the abundance of wireless devices these days, EMF radiation is a hot topic amongst parents. In this blog post, we will walk you through what is an EMF and 5 tips to create a low EMF emissions environment for your baby.

What is EMF?
EMF stands for Electromagnetic Field. That sounds complicated! Well, it is kind of, but it’s actually elementary college physics. Electromagnetic field is present throughout the universe and is an essential part of our everyday life. There are many forms of EMFs, some are good EMF, while some are bad EMF, just like cholesterol in your body. Visible light, WiFi signal, microwave, and cellular signals are all different forms of EMFs. Your ability to see things is due to electromagnetic waves interacting with the retina in your eyes and turning that into an electric pulse in your brain. That said, an example of bad EMFs would be high power waves coming from high power electrical cables or even what scientists call “ionizing radiation” from powerful sources. To put it simply, exposure to these bad EMFs causes significant health problems because the EMF waves ionize your cells and may cause cancer. X-ray is a common example of ionizing radiation, which is why you do not want to be doing X-ray scans often.

Why is EMF important to your baby’s safety?
Parents should exercise the highest level of caution when it comes to baby safety. Depending on where you look, there are scientific studies that have linked exposure to EMF with the development of cancer, including the W.H.O. classification of EMF as possibly carcinogenic to humans in 2011. Furthermore, there are scientific studies that indicate correlation between exposure to EMF and learning disabilities such as ADHD. Nevertheless, it is a controversial subject with stakeholders making arguments on both sides.

5 Tips to build a low EMF emissions home

Place WiFi Routers Far Away from Your Baby
The further away the source of wireless emissions, the lower its EMF power. WiFi routers are one of the most common sources of wireless emissions at home or office with health side effects. You should consider placing the router away from children or yourself. Power is often measured in Volts per meter (V/m) or milliWatt (mW), meaning you want to purchase a router with a lower power rating.

Put Your Phones Away from Your Nightstand
One of the most common mistakes is putting your smartphone on the nightstand next to your bed. This exposes you and your family to several hours of constant exposure to wireless radiation as you sleep. Try placing the phone at least 15 feet away, or even putting it into Airplane mode.

Install EMF Shielding at Strategic Places
EMF shielding can be an effective way to create an EMF safe zone within your home. Metal panels have the ability to block out Electromagnetic waves from entering into this safe zone.

Pick a Home that’s Far Away from Power Plants and Wireless Towers
Cell phone and communication towers emit the highest doses of wireless radiation. The long term effects of constant exposure to such high doses of EMF radiation are not well understood by the scientific community. It is wise to choose a home that is far away from these sources of high energy wireless signals.

Use a Low Wireless Emissions Baby Monitor
Your baby monitor acts as the communication bridge between your baby and you. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance that the baby monitor operates in a safe, ultra-low emissions manner. Bebcare baby monitors utilize DSR Digital Safe Radio technology, which emits less than 10% of wireless radiation compared to other products.

Get the lowest EMF emissions baby monitors at bebcare.com with 10% DISCOUNT using discount code: goldcoastdoulas

Check out our BECOMING A Mother course! It’s a self-paced, online series to help reduce fear and gain confidence in pregnancy, birth, and early parenting. With recorded video lessons, monthly live chats, and a supportive FaceBook community – it’s everything we wish we would have known before we had our babies! We’d love to see you there!

Kristin & Alyssa

 

5 Tips to Build a Low EMF Emissions Home for Your Baby Read More »

Bebcare: DSR Digital Safe Radio Ultra-low Radiation image and logo

Bebcare – A safe monitor for your baby’s nursery

Sleep / / , , ,

A while ago I recorded three videos about electromagnetic emissions and creating a sleep sanctuary for your child. You can find all three on our YouTube channel. I spoke with Lisa Tiedt, a Building Biologist at Well Abode. She used science to physically demonstrate to us how baby monitors, sound machines, and wifi modems emit frequencies that are unhealthy for our bodies, but especially for our children who are at critical stages of growth and development.

I was recently introduced to Bebcare. Their baby monitors are the lowest emitting monitors on the market. Most wireless monitors emit pretty strong doses of radiation, the same as a microwave, all day long even when the monitor isn’t in use. You can probably find the health hazards in very fine print at the bottom of the manuals from other brands.

What Bebcare has done is create a monitor with 91% less emissions when in use, and when it’s idle there are zero emissions. Zero! It only turns on when your baby cries.

They have a few different monitor options: Bebcare iQ, Bebcare Motion, and Bebcare Hear.

Bebcare iQ is their most sophisticated model with infrared night vision, 360 degree pan and tilt capabilities, lullabies, room temp, breathing sensor (mat sold separately), and white noise silencer. It also has a two-way talking capability so you can reassure your child from afar and minimize unnecessary trips back and forth to the nursery. All this is tracked on an app you check from your phone.

Bebcare Motion is their traditional baby monitor with camera and wireless monitor that works over 900 feet away. It still has a lot of the great features the iQ does including two-way talk, night vision, lullabies, zoom, pan and tilt.

Bebcare Hear is (you guessed it!) an audio monitor. With no video, this monitor keeps it simple and focuses on crystal clear audio over 2,000 feet away. That means you can safely listen to your baby while you’re on the other end of the house. There is a night light, lullabies, and two-way talk on this model as well.

Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast with Lisa from Well Abode and someone from Bebcare. We will actually be testing one of their monitors and talking about our results, asking questions to the Bebcare team, and talking about practical uses for the different monitors. Let’s find out how Bebcare stands up to the competition!

If you’d like to purchase one of Bebcare’s monitors, use discount code goldcoastdoulas at check out or just follow this link to receive 10% off!

 

Bebcare – A safe monitor for your baby’s nursery Read More »

A wooden desk with a pad of paper, cell phone, two cups of coffee, and a wifi router

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Routers

Parenting, Sleep / / , , , , , , , , ,

Alyssa Veneklase talks with Lisa Tiedt, Building Biologist and owner of Well Abode, about creating health sanctuaries in our homes.  You can watch this video on YouTube.

 

Alyssa:  Hi.  It’s Alyssa and Lisa here again.  This is Part 3 of our series on how to create a low EMF sleep space, and we’ve kind of narrowed it down to three main culprits, which are sound machines, monitors, and then routers?

Lisa:  Yeah.  The router that you have in your house.

Alyssa:  Even though routers aren’t usually in bedrooms, we’re still going to talk about them today.  We put one across the hall, so it might be very close to a bedroom, and we can kind of see how that affects the sleep space.  So do you want to tell everyone again just briefly what a Building Biologist is in case they didn’t watch the other two videos?

Lisa:  Yes.  A Building Biologist is a person that assesses any built environment.  It could be a home or an office or a school for anything that directly impacts the health of the people that work, sleep, or live within those spaces.  And we look at air quality — that’s a very broad topic, but air quality, creating a low EMF environment, as well as water quality, too.  Of all the homes that I have assessed, the three top culprits are just the ones that we’ve talked about today: the sound machines, the baby monitors, and the routers that are typically in a room that shares a wall or is in close proximity to a sleep space.

Alyssa:  So do we want to measure this room with no router and then kind of see how things change as we get close to the router?

Lisa:  Yes.  So we’re in Alyssa’s daughter’s room.

Alyssa:  This is my daughter’s room, and there’s no router in here and we actually don’t have one in this part of the house, but we plugged one in across the hall just for this video.  But a lot of people will have an office maybe across the hall or maybe the bedroom is near the living room where it’s plugged in.

Lisa:  Or it could the bedroom’s on the second floor, and the router could be in the basement right underneath.

Alyssa:  So it could be going up and down this way?

Lisa:  Yep.  The three materials that actually stop radiofrequency radiation are metal, steel, and brick.  But it passes directly through building materials such as windows, drywall, plywood, wood, things of that nature.  So even having a router in close proximity spills over into all those other spaces.  And, again, the sleep space is the most important, and we’re here today to create a sleep sanctuary.

Alyssa:  All right.  Should we look at the numbers?

Lisa:  Again, we’re looking at radiofrequency radiation.  We are looking primarily at the middle number here, and it says 3,680 microwatts per meter squared.

Alyssa:  What’s our ideal?

Lisa:  An ideal for RF is 10µw.m², so you want to be in the double digits.  So we’re at 3,810µw.m², and we want to get to 10.  So we’re going to go across the hall where the router is on.  You can see that the numbers, as we get closer to the router, are beginning to increase.  And so obviously, distance to source matters, but as we get close to —

Alyssa:  Oh, so now we’re up to 188,000µw.m²?

Lisa:  So we’re now up to 188,000µw.m².  We get closer and closer.  We’re at —

Alyssa:  Over a million µw.m²!

Lisa:  Over a million!  And if you look at the router here, there are two numbers.  There’s 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) and then there’s 5 gigahertz (GHz).  So both of these frequencies are active in a router that you get, just any router.  It’s automatically turned on by the manufacturer.

Alyssa:  And that’s the 5G that is faster?

Lisa:  Yep.  And so now, you know, we’re up to 1.5 millionµw.m² of radiation.  So one thing that you can do — obviously, distance from source matters, so in your daughter’s bedroom, we started at 3,600µw.m².  We’re now at 1.5 millionµw.m².  So it’s really good that your daughter doesn’t have any router in her bedroom.  There are different shielding options.  This happens to be a fabric one.  You can get a metal one like we showed you with the baby monitors that’s just in the shape of a rectangle instead of a cylinder.  And so you can see now that this has taken it down to around 10,000µw.m² — A router shield will reduce EMF’s from WiFi by ~85% to 90% 24/7.

Or upgrade to the JRS Eco Wireless routers reduce radiation pulses by 90%. The JRS Eco 100 models even take it one step further and automatically switch to a completely radiation-free Full Eco stand-by mode when no wifi devices are connected and automatically detect only your paired devices. 

Alyssa:  So it went from 1.5 million µw.m², almost, to about 10,000 µw.m².

Lisa:  So that’s exponential reduction.  We still — again, we want to be in single digits.  We want to get to 10 so even this is kind of too high for a safe sleep space.  And so one of the really cool things that you can do is get this particular router which has a manual on/off button bur turning off at night.

Alyssa:  So most routers don’t have an on/off button?  You would have to completely unplug it?

Lisa:  Most routers, you’d have to pull the cord out of the wall.  The other kind of ingenious thing that you get is — this company actually sells remote outlet switches.  They come in sets of one, three, and five.  And what this allows you to do is plug this switch into a wall and then you plug the router into the switch, and with the remote outlet switch at your bedside table — and you can see here.  You can actually turn the router off and on.  So now — and this is kind of still shutting down, but now it went from 1.4 million µw.m² to around 10,000 to 1 million µw.m².  Now, this is still picking up — I think probably your smart watch, but essentially, it’s going down and down.  And then the other thing even better that you can get so that you don’t have radiation coming from your router all the time is to actually hardwire. The best option is to manually turn off WiFi and Bluetooth on every device and use hardwired grounded & shielded Ethernet cables to get Internet connectivity. This eliminates EMF’s from WiFi with your devices.  

Alyssa:  Okay.  So keep your router as far away from your bedroom as possible?

Lisa:  Yes, and turn it off when you sleep.

Alyssa:  And turn it off when you’re not using it, especially during sleep.

Lisa:  Yep.

Alyssa:  All right.  Thanks!

Lisa:  Thank you!

Research 
To learn more about the health impacts of man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs), check out the BioInitiative Report. It has a 19 page Summary for the Public & Charts which is the preeminent summary. The full 1,500-page report authored by an international panel of M.D. and Ph. D. scientists and physicians, analyzes +3,800 scientific, peer reviewed studies showing adverse health hazards of electromagnetic radiation, especially with children. Diseases and disorders include cancer, neurological diseases, respiratory diseases, behavioral disorders i.e. ADD and autism, immune dysfunction, Blood-Brain Barrier permeability, reproductive failure & birth defects, chronic fatigue, insomnia, depression, headaches, muscle/joint pain, chronic inflammation and many more.

 

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Routers Read More »

Alyssa of Gold Coast Doulas sits with a woman on a bed in a child's room

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Sound Machines

Pregnancy, Sleep / / , , , , , , , , ,

Alyssa Veneklase talks with Lisa Tiedt, Building Biologist and owner of Well Abode, about creating health sanctuaries in our homes.  You can view this video on YouTube.

 

Alyssa:  All right.  Today, I’m here talking to Lisa Tiedt.  She’s a Building Biologist, and, as you know, I’m a sleep consultant, so we’ve partnered a few times to talk about how to best create a sleep space, not just for a newborn but for toddlers, as well.  So tell us what a Building Biologist is.

Lisa:  A Building Biologist is a person that comes into any built environment, which could be a home, an office, a school, and it assesses it for anything that directly impacts the health of the people who live or work within those spaces.  So the type of things that we look at are air quality, reducing manmade electromagnetic fields (EMFs), as well as water quality.

Alyssa:  Okay.  So what do want to talk about today?

Lisa:  So for today, what we really want to do is create a sleep sanctuary for you and your family.  We have taken a look at three things that are typically in a child’s sleep space that really increases the EMFs in that space.  We want to get those as low as possible because those are challenging to the central nervous system, the immune system, the brain, the heart, and all the inner cellular communication because all of those require or rely on frequencies, as well, electrical pulses within the body.

Alyssa:  And as we’ve talked about before, sleep is the time when your body kind of regenerates.  So if you don’t have a safe space for your body to actually rest and regenerate and rejuvenate, then that’s when all of those disruptions happen because they’re being bombarded by all the things we put in the rooms, right?

Lisa:  Yep, that we don’t think about.  Sleep is the absolute most critical time for your body to be in homeostasis.  So you just want your child’s body to be able to naturally do whatever it’s trying to do in terms of rejuvenation and development.

Alyssa:  So a sound machine is one thing that I recommend to every single sleep client.

Lisa:  Yes.

Alyssa:  So we’re going to talk about different sound machines today, and then she actually has her little handy — what do you call that?

Lisa:  It’s a gaussmeter, and it measures AC magnetic fields.  And for a sleep space, you want to be anything less than 0.2 milligauss (mG).

Alyssa:  Okay.  So do you want to get right into it and tell us about —

Lisa:  Let’s get right into it.

Alyssa:  Okay.  I’m going to move this a little bit.

Lisa:  So I have an example of a sound machine here that is particularly high in EMFs and specifically AC magnetic fields.  So first I’m going to turn on the gaussmeter, and it’s at 0.3mG, which is a really good measurement for a sleep space.  Now, this is the Dohm sound machine —

Alyssa:  But didn’t you say we want to 0.2 or lower?

Lisa:  Yes.  So this is kind of coming down here.  We’re at about 0.25mG.  And there’s other things that are happening within the building that’s affecting the sleep space, too, but we’re just going to focus on the sound machine today.

Alyssa:  Okay.

Lisa:  So when we turn this on, you will see that the —

Alyssa:  Whoa.

Lisa:  These Dohm sound machines are particularly high in EMFs.  So this one is measuring at about 900, 920.  920 milligauss!  And we want to be at 0.2.  So the Dohm machines, if you want to create a sleep sanctuary for your child, is not one that I recommend.  If you have one of these, I would actually exchange them for a different model.  I have two examples here that are really low in EMFs.  The first one here is the HoMedics.

Alyssa:  Which is, by the one, the one I recommend to everybody.

Lisa:  Which is — okay.  Great!

Alyssa:  Even before speaking with you!

Lisa:  Oh, excellent!  Excellent.  So we’re totally on the same page.  I’m going to turn this on.  So the milligauss here is 0.15.   So this is just a pristine environment for your daughter, and when I turn the HoMedics sound machine off, it does not increase the field at all.  So this is one that I recommend, and obviously, there is, you know, different sounds that you can do here.  The other one that I recommend is called the LectroFan, and both of these you can get on Amazon.  This one has the same effect as the HoMedics brand, which is essentially nothing, in terms of increasing the AC magnetic field.  The other thing that I like about this one is you can charge it and — it’s portable.  You can take it with you in the stroller or whatever.  So these are just a little bit of a different kind of use case.  But this is just one example of — with a little bit of information, what you can do to help lower the EMFs within your child’s sleep space and help them help their body develop and rejuvenate as it wants to.

Alyssa:  Thank you!

Lisa:  Thank you.

Research 
To learn more about the health impacts of man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs) check out the BioInitiative Report. It has a 19 page Summary for the Public & Charts which is the preeminent summary. The full 1,500-page report authored by an international panel of M.D. and Ph. D. scientists and physicians, analyzes +3,800 scientific, peer reviewed studies showing adverse health hazards of electromagnetic radiation, especially with children. Diseases and disorders include cancer, neurological diseases, respiratory diseases, behavioral disorders i.e. ADD and autism, immune dysfunction, Blood-Brain Barrier permeability, reproductive failure & birth defects, chronic fatigue, insomnia, depression, headaches, muscle/joint pain, chronic inflammation and many more.

 

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Sound Machines Read More »