Power saver?

nicholas bonham-carter

Or snake oil?
I wonder if it has a UL listing.

https://theviralbest.com/products/energy-saving-device

Grallert

sounds like snake oil but...

Jamie Hall

I'd say snake oil...

pecmsg

KC_Jones

I am going with snake oil....sort of. I know it's possible to add some system on your side of the meter that can "trick" the meter into not actually reading the power you are using, actually it's even possible to make it go backwards. That being said, I've never seen anything even close to that small that could accomplish the task.

I am far from an electrical engineer, just learned about this when I worked for the power company and they actually demonstrated it for us.

sunlight33

http://electronicsbeliever.com/electricity-saving-box-scam-revealed/

Solid_Fuel_Man

Snake oil 100%. First off the little write up isn't that well written. Second off in bold it says "only used 1500 watts of electricity" well my friends electricity is sold by the KWh. 1500 watts isn't anything without a time attached to it. If he meant 1500KWh, that is an astronomical amount, so he wouldn't have questioned the low usage, rather the opposite.

As a licenced Master electrician myself, those terms are written by someone who is trying to sound like they know and appeal to the masses. I smell BS for sure!

Leonard

Sounds like one born every minute and two to take him.
Poorly written and absence of sound technical details is a red flag.

There are soft start units that reduce motor starting amps, (very useful if have electricity outage and your powering a motor ( A/C) from a small generator that can't make many amps).
But the overall power savings is negliable , as I think they only act during motor starting, ~ 1/2 second. Then likely do nothing.

sunlight33

Well, there is no such a thing as a perfect writer, he/she should have used Grammarly.

Leonard

It can't add the correct technical details to make it not stink of BS to us.

One of the articles even had a good technical explanation of power factor, real and apparent power..... but then just stopped and didn't explain technically why that was relevant to their "power saver device"

Jellis

An electrical engineer gave a demonstration to our class regarding this.
It was a long time ago but his basic point was for a factory that uses many many times the amount of electricity of a home. it was a good idea to optimize the motors to run more efficiently because of the amount of motors they were running. However the savings to a residence was pennies/year. not worth the investment.

Jamie Hall

Some industrial facilities run -- or at least used to run (I'm getting old) -- some of their processes with three phase synchronous motors, which have the interesting properly of being able -- with proper adjustment -- to counteract the poor power factor of big induction motors, leaving the power factor of the overall supply pretty close to 1.

And if you look at power lines, you will sometimes see racks of truly large (like feet tall) capacitors on the lines -- same idea.

Leonard

But that's just correcting the power factor (PF) to ~ 1.0 not changing the real power (watts) which is what residential customers get charged for.

I'm ignoring as insignificant the small additional IR losses in house wiring that come from higher total amps ( from low PF loads) flowing in lines.

Jamie Hall

Leonard said:

But that's just correcting the power factor (PF) to ~ 1.0 not changing the real power (watts) which is what residential customers get charged for.

I'm ignoring as insignificant the small additional IR losses in house wiring that come from higher total amps ( from low PF loads) flowing in lines.

Quite true on not changing the real power -- but for industrial users, it changes the billing, as power factor is included in industrial billing. And the correction capacitors on the lines are helpful. Reason being that although one is charged only for real power in smaller and residential applications, the power company is very interested in working as close to 1 as they can, because that sharply reduces the transmission line losses -- which they can't charge for but which take up capacity in the grid.

Solid_Fuel_Man

Our POCO wants to see PF be above .85 or capacitors are used. But even with horrible PF a facility only gets billed for KWh, lousy PF doesn't turn the meter and faster/slower. It just overheats transformers and lines. Pretty much all VFD have PF caps built in as well as line conditioners so excessive noise isn't put back on the line.

A home has essentially no PF correction as there really are no motors. Maybe a water pump of fractional HP which runs maybe 1% of the time or less. Residential electric systems are extremely under loaded unless your charging your electric car or something.

I just dont see how "plug this widget into the closest outlet" can do much of anything. It isn't tuned to anything, only picks up half of a 240V service, and and and.

ChrisJ

Someone needs to buy one and crack it open to have a peek.

I have no doubt that it's a lie.
I'm just curious how much of a lie I.E. is it literally an empty box with some LEDs and resistors?

sunlight33

Because people's electric bills vary from month to month, so chances are some people will see a lower bill after using it even though that's not the real reason

Solid_Fuel_Man

@ChrisJ I motion you to be the Guinea pig!