Everything Else

April 1 must of come early for these guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TDVi_aLF1I

There's so much snake oil going on here. I wonder if it's profitable to buy one simply to be part of the payout from an upcoming lawsuit.

I think you are too late - there must be many before you in the lawsuit queue already.

Uh, weird: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_S-6_KDju8

Welll.... an unloaded motor is almost purely inductive... but the electricity company sells power in watts and not VAs. So it's up to them to take care of the PFC and a cheesy $3 plug-in capacitor isn't going to save you anything.

They don't show a power meter anywhere because that thing isn't going to save any power. Only voltage and current...

I've been working on power electronics my whole career and I have no idea what these guys are doing. So it's like a filter capacitor in a power supply? When an electric motor demands a whole bunch of current, like from a clothes washing machine or an air conditioner, the capacitor dumps it's stored energy in thus relieving "The Grid" of that responsibility, thus saving you money, despite the fact that you've already paid for the energy that's stored in the capacitor? Geek warning: The energy stored in a capacitor is one half times the capacitance times the voltage across the capacitor terminals squared, and no, I didn't have to look that up...

From what I read up it's just two or three caps a switch and the voltage regulator to drive the LED.
Really all you are getting is a plug-in starting capacitor.

Power companies don't charge residential customers for reactive power consumption; only industrial customers. Which is why you see big capacitor yards behind companies that present large inductive loads to the grid. So I don't get why they're targeting this device to home users, who aren't charged for that load. Or, at least they're not here in the US....

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=snake+oil


At least buy into something that claims to improve something interesting: http://www.quantummansite.com/catalog/tigertail.php

Who knows, the placebo effect might be enough

Variants of this scam have been around a while - I think the idea is that you throw the reactive load up enough to where you can show all these "free" KVAs, but because the phases are off you aren't getting any real power. Similar to how they test generators by throwing a reactive load on them to drive up the KVA while staying at a very low wattage (hence the prime mover isn't highly loaded).