EMFBase
Sources & emitters

Solar PV inverter and optimisers

String inverters and panel-level optimisers switch at kilohertz to tens of kilohertz and are wired into the building's supply, so they can raise both magnetic fields near the DC and AC runs and conducted harmonics throughout the house.

dirty electricityhomeworkplace

Provisional record — listed for completeness, excluded from the search index and sitemap until every value carries a primary citation. Last verified 12 August 2026.

Also searched as: string inverter, microinverter, solar EMF

Category
dirty electricity
Emission bands
Power frequency; Switching harmonics
Environments
home, workplace
Duty cycle
Daylight hours, proportional to generation; some units also have a night-time standby carrier.

Field strength by distance

Mitigations, most effective first

Site the inverter on a garage or exterior wall, away from bedrooms, and keep DC and AC runs out of occupied wall cavities.
Addresses the dominant magnetic-field contribution at the design stage, when it is nearly free.
Specify optimisers or microinverters that do not use power-line communication, or that can have it disabled.
Power-line communication deliberately injects a carrier onto house wiring.
Measure conducted harmonics before and after commissioning to attribute changes correctly.
Provides a baseline; without one, every later reading is unattributable.

Why no value is published at 1 m

Depends on inverter topology, cable routing and whether panel-level electronics use power-line communication. Measure at the inverter, along the DC and AC runs, and on circuits inside the house.

Measure with

  • ELF gaussmeter (power-frequency magnetic field)
  • Dirty-electricity (line harmonics) meter

Related records

  • Dimmer switch and phase-cutting controls

    Phase-cutting dimmers chop the mains waveform and inject harmonics from a few kilohertz up to about 1 MHz onto the building wiring — the classic source of what practitioners call dirty electricity.

    Sources & emitters

  • ELF magnetic field survey

    A source-finding walkthrough plus a 24-hour log, because power-frequency magnetic fields track electrical load and a spot reading answers almost nothing.

    Measurement protocols

Sources

  1. sbm-2024 Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines for Sleeping Areas (SBM-2024) — Institut für Baubiologie + Nachhaltigkeit (IBN), 2024. ngo, link checked 2026-08-12.
  2. icnirp-2010 Guidelines for Limiting Exposure to Time-Varying Electric and Magnetic Fields (1 Hz to 100 kHz) — International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, 2010. guideline, link checked 2026-08-12.

Same record, other formats