Stealing Electricity ?

In this video i build a coil that's effectively a huge loopstick antenna with tuning capacitors to resonate at 60 Hz, which is mains frequency in North America. The coil can generate over 5 volts near running appliances or power cables, and charge a capacitor or light up some LEDs. It works by collecting the small magnetic flux leakage that every AC device produces.

The power generated is less than 100 μW in most cases, so it can't do anything very exciting, but it's really interesting to stand under a power line and see a capacitor charge from its leak. The biggest limiting factor seems to be that transmission lines which have opposite phases very close to each other result in a near-zero magnetic field at a distance from canceling out most of each others magnetic flux.

Some figures:

Coil Wire Gauge: 28 AWG
Number of turns: ~12,000
Coil Inductance: 28.1 H
Capacitor Value: 250 nF