The mystery of the humming house in Chesapeake

CHESAPEAKE

It was around November, Charlie Buchanan said, when his house started humming.

The sound is incessant, low-pitched and obnoxious, he said. The kind of hum that gets in the ears and under the skin. It's driving him crazy, but even after 40 years as an electrician, Buchanan, 64, just cannot find the source.

"I can fix almost anything," he said at his house in Great Bridge. "But I can't fix this hum."

The mystery has confounded a wide range of people in the last few months. Buchanan can hear it, but his wife can't. Dominion Power has been out six times, but a spokeswoman said none of the workers can hear it, either. On a recent visit, a Pilot reporter and photographer both heard it – faint but steady, emanating from near a rear window in the corner of Buchanan's bedroom.

"You can hear it?" he said. "Whew!"

Buchanan lives in Homestead Acres, a neighborhood just off Benefit Road a few miles west of the Chesapeake Expressway and Edinburgh Shopping Center. When the noise first started, he thought it might be from inflatable Christmas decorations across the street. But when he checked, they weren't running. The holidays came and went, but the sound remained.

He asked on Facebook if anyone had any ideas on why his house might be humming. One reader wrote: "Because it doesn't know the tune."

He determined that the noise is not generated from the cable or propane gas running into his house, and it's not from a busted pipe. Few appliances run 24 hours a day – for example, the pump in his well water system kicks on and off – but he hears the hum all the time.

A neighbor's hot tub was one of the first potential sources for the noise, but Buchanan eliminated it by asking them to turn theirs off.

He Googled theories like "magnetostriction" and "the harmonics of sound waves," and put a hand and an ear to nearby telephone poles to feel for vibrations. He wonders if the issue is a transformer somewhere.

"I’ve hugged 10 of them," he said of the poles, and found four that were definitely humming. He said he's pretty sure there's no alien spaceship under the house, but admits he has exhausted his troubleshooting skills.

In January, Buchanan said, a crew of five Dominion Power trucks came out to try to locate the problem. They cut power to his and about seven other houses, he said, but the noise persisted.

It doesn't seem to plague his neighbors, he said. An electrician friend told Buchanan it's in his head. He does have tinnitus, a type of ringing in the ears, but the hum is louder and lower than his tinnitus’ higher frequency, he said.

Thanks to an online tone generator, Buchanan has determined that the droning noise is humming at 60 hertz, about the sound frequency generated by electricity.

Bonita Harris, a spokeswoman for Dominion Power, said that after half a dozen visits since October, crews are frustrated. One time they even used equipment that detects and measures radio frequencies, but didn't pick anything up, Harris said. A supervisor with more than 30 years of experience has been out three times.

"He’d like to be able to hear it, fix it and be done with it," Harris said. The company will continue to work with Buchanan as best it can; a crew will be out again next week, she said.

"I feel for the guy," said Jeff Winters, a power quality specialist at Dominion and one of the many people with whom Buchanan has talked about the issue.

In this modern age, Winters said, there are any number of things electronically that could contribute to house noise. A wireless phone could be a culprit, for example, he said.

It's a matter of determining what the sound is and where it's coming from, he said, "If we can."

Buchanan said he just wants it gone. He feels like the noise is driving him out of his house, but he's trying to maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing. He said he almost wore tinfoil on his head to answer the door for a reporter.

"May the hum not be with you," he said.

Victoria Bourne, 757-222-5563, [email protected]

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