Date: 23 Dec 2009 Comments: 0

When you think about people being able to control electricity, a couple of things come to mind. The first would be science fiction and the second would be Magneto from X-Men and his metal helmet. However, science fiction stuff like this is beginning to appear in the real world. Debbie Wolf lives near Brighton on the south coast of England and she is one of the ever growing ‘SLIders’. An SLIder is a person who believes that they can interact with household appliances, anything from cookers to panel heaters.

The ability that has made Debbie famous all over the world is called Street Light Interference syndrome (SLI). In Japan Debbie has been compared to comic book heroines and characters from the BBC show ‘Heroes’. For a person who believes they have SLI, the profession Debbie has gone for is a little risky. She works in the Royal Sussex County Hospital, fortunately, nothing electrical has malfunctioned so far.

Although it’s always fun to believe that someone can yield that sort of power, it needs to be questioned. Does SLI exist or is it simply coincidences that lead people to believe they have a power. As with the majority of things, there is a possible explanation.

One aspect of maintaining a suitable room climate is the levels of moisture within the air. The majority of homes these days have central heating and double glazed windows. This combination alongside heaters and oil filled radiators often leads to the room’s air getting very dry. Having dry air in your home can cause alot of health problems, however, dry air can also increase the levels of static electricity within your home.

A home could be compared to that of a computer data centre. At large data centres a huge amount of heat is created, this causes the air to get very dry which causes a large amount of static electrcity. This static can cause terrible damage to the computers. To try and reduce the amount of static electricity, humidifiers are used to increase the moisture within the air. This can be the same in your home, a normal level of humidity would reduce the amount of staticelectricity. So basically what Debbie really needs is a humidifier, it may also improve her health. The reason why she doesn’t damage any hospital equipment is most likely because they are already using a series of humidifiers to protect equipment like industrial heaters aren’t caused any damage.