You folks purport to be experts. You state categorically that devices like the Power-save and KVAR Power Reducers are scams.
so, please be so kind as to educate us ignorant folk
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Apparently the US Department of Energy and Alcoa Aluminum are party to the scam. Please provide your analysis of the above referenced document and explain how they are deceiving us. Explain how their results are scientifically impossible and therefore part of a conspiracy to scam the unsuspecting.
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Please provide analysis showing that this report completely contradicts the science of electricity.
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Peter Sauer of the University of Illinois is apparently a scammer, in your estimation. Please analyze his paper and tell us poor unwashed how he is deceiving us.
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Being that Wikipedia is nothing but lies, please verify that the article referenced is nothing but a lie and how it contributes to the scamming of America
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Detail the lies in this article from allaboutcircuits dot com
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Please provide detail about the lies that are being promulgated in the above presentation. We the great unwashed rely on your expertise to keep us from being the victims of scams
To Mr CS, who started the thread about the Power-Save 1200, and who later gleefully piled on me, please be advised that the folks here who have been so adamant that power-Save and KVAR are scams, you should be aware that these folks have demonstrated no knowledge of the research and the science of the last 25 years in the subject of reactive power and power factor optimization. They may know something about some things, but that does not mean they know everything about everything. Their refusal to do any research, their refusal to read the reports and the papers and the RESULT of real time installation, their failure to make a few calls, shows them for what they are - pompous asses who bray and kick and call names. But they do not research. They are unwilling to educate themselves.After all, if they were to do so, they might learn something. They might realize they are wrong about something. they might have to admit that they don't know everything.
There IS science behind this. Do your research and check references and see for your self. But stop pretending you know everything. Stop pretending that you are the be all and end all of science. You're woefully lacking.
Why don't you stop posting links that are irrelevent to your application of the product. A cap at a motor helps. A cap at the meter when the motors are in the facility does not reduce your consumption. Easy as that. Let me explain it in terms you might understand. A bullet proof vest, properly worn, will stop small arms fire to the torso. However, if you put it in the closet, drive to the local quicky mart, and get shot, it won't help. It is all in the location of the product.
So please stop posting that anyone on here says caps don't help. They do IF you put them in the appropriate place. Any power systems analysis program can be used to prove what we are saying. Very very simple lab demos can prove it also.
For someone billed on kW (like a residence) the following may reduce the bill:
Utility....Meter....wire....CAP.Motor
The following will not:
Utility....Meter.Cap...wire....motor
Notice the importance of location. It is not uncommon for scammers to play on the ignorance of consumers to sell such things. They pull out reports that say caps are great and save all kinds of energy and then try to convince the consumer that their magic box will save money the same way. The problem is that the magic box has to be at the load, not the meter.
I challenge you to get a first year power systems analysis book and perform a few calculations and see if you get different answers depending on where you place the cap relative to the wiring and the load.
As you said for someone billed on kWh. I think part of the scam is that pf correction helps if your billing has a penalty for reactive power 'consumed'. Doesn't help residential, but scammers don't know or forget to mention that.
Also where used, the correction has to be matched to the reactive load at the time. Does your box, Incorrect, change the pf correction with the load? Or does it always apply the same correction - increasing the current when there is not enough reactive load?
And some of the scammers say the current is decreased and intentionally or stupidly confuse that billing is for Wh, not VAh.
Incorrect (what an appropriate name), people here are well aware of what pf correction is about. Everyone responding says your box is a scam. No one supports you. Why do you suppose? Or is this an invention from Area 51?
--------------------- Yes, capacitors for power factor correction do work- this has been known for something in the order of 100 years. Big deal. However they supply capacitive reactive to balance the inductive reactive of motors and some ballasts. Properly sized to the application, they do save money. Improperly sized- they don't. They do not reduce the real power taken by the motor nor losses in the motor ("downstream" from the capacitor. They do reduce power losses upstream because the current is lower.
If you have residential service there are three factors that exist:
a) loads are generally resistive or nearly so- compensation is either useless or provides negligable gains (cost benefits ratio stinks) . b) Losses in equipment "downstream of the capacitors" are not reduced and motors will not run cooler or have lower losses. c)Residential metering is of KWh and measures only real power so putting the capacitors at the entrance will not reduce power bills as the losses beyond the capacitor are unchanged.
I have read the references and there is nothing in them to contradict what Salmon Egg, Charles Perry, etc have been saying. However, there is definitely nothing in them to support some of your claims and hyperbole. You don't seem to understand the references that you presented (even the watered down ones) - they are fine but some of your claims are not. That is the problem- Power factor correction with capacitors is fine but don't claim benefits that don't exist. Those claims are the scam. By the way, I know Pete Sauer as a colleague in the same line of business and same academic background (just that I am older and retired for several years). --
Don Kelly snipped-for-privacy@shawcross.ca remove the X to answer
found another refernece for you experts to look at
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my own research continues to show a whole science of power factor correction, along with a whole industry. Study after study, business after business, all point to the same conclusion - placing capacitors into the electrrical system, WORKS
well, I'm tired of dealing with people who think they know everything when the fact is they have done no research whatsover. the only scammers on this newsgroup are those who proclaim their expertise, even though they have done no research and and dont know what they are talking about.
I have been reading your posting since they started and agree that for household use power factor correction will NOT reduce costs. In industry you have a totally different situation, in the UK most factories running large inductive loads have automatic power correction systems fitted. With these, the system switches capacitors in and out of circuit to give the best power factory possible, as in industry power fact does effect the costs. So, yes power factor correction does work if applied where it will make a difference to running costs, i.e. in industry. In the home do not waste your money on it as the electricity supply will not measure the difference.
In a past job I used to design mains frequency inductive heating systems and always recommend my customers to use power factor correction in their factories.
With the UK government's determination to force everyone to use "energy saving" light bulbs and ban filament bulbs we'll soon need to apply PFC the other way. Whilst they may use less watts, the PF is poor and although it may not affect the householders bills it's going to reflect back to the generators in a detrimental fashion.
You spend so much time trying to prove your point, you don't even read (or understand) the references you come up with.
In the case of the first one (DOE and Alcoa), if you *READ* it, you'll see that correcting the power factor saved Alcoa from the 'severe power factor penalties' they were paying. Tell me, do you know of any residential service where the resident pays 'severe power factor penalties'?? No, because there is no such penalties in residential service tariffs.
So installing capacitors on a residential system will *not* save them from 'severe power factor penalties' simply because the homeowner isn't paying any such penalty in the first place.
As its been pointed out innumerable times, the residential kwh meter is
*not* affected by low pf current. The meter always registers just the
*real* power component of the current. Reducing current while raising the power factor does *not* change the rate the disk rotates.
In this latest reference of yours above, the discussion is about a poor power factor increasing the losses *in the supply system*. Tell us, how many residential customers pay for the losses their loads cause *in the supply system* (i.e. the power companies equipment, not the homeowners)?
But you fail to notice (or chose to ignore) this reference's example of a poor power factor and the increase of losses by 78% doesn't tell you how many real watts of power are saved.
If an entire home runs with a pf of 0.75 (such as the motor in this particular reference), and it uses about 15 kwh of energy per day, then the
*losses* of such a system are on the order of only 0.75 kwh of energy per day or less. If we are *very* generous and assume that half of those losses are in the motor itself and the other half are in house wiring (the real split is much more in the motor and very little in the house wiring), then the house wiring losses are 0.375 kwh of energy per day. Using this reference's numbers for pf correction to 0.95, we could reduce the *house wiring* losses down to about 0.211 kwh of energy per day. A savings of
0.184 kwh/day. That's less than two cents a day. After an entire year, less than $8.
On the other hand, if we put the power factor correction equipment at the service panel just downstream of the meter, then the only 'losses' that are going to be affected are those in that very short length of wire between the meter and the power factor correction equipment. With that setup, the losses in the motor and all the wiring and equipment from the motor back to the point where the power factor correction equipment attaches to the system are still there. So a 'whole house' power factor correction will not change the electric bill in any perceivable amount.
Large industrial users can benefit from pf correction because 1) they may be subject to penalty fees if they don't correct their pf, so avoiding those fees is worthwhile and 2) with in-factory distribution and transformers and the large loads they have, the losses in the 'in-factory' distribution can be large enough to make it worth while.
Another application that benefits from pf correction is when the *supply* capabilities are limited. Off-grid folks that use inverters can see a benefit. Not because pf correction reduces *energy* consumption very much, but because it reduces the current load on the inverter. Inverters are limited in how much *current* they can produce regardless of the power factor of that current. So to maximize the real power available out of an inverter, it is wise to make sure the load is as close to unity power factor as possible. But if you don't understand the difference between the current rating of an inverter and the power rating, that's a whole other problem.
Bottom line is *scammer*, that although power factor correction can reduce the losses of any inductive system, the savings are so small for a residential customer that they will probably *never* recover the cost of installing such correction.
Promising to cut *electrical losses* by 50% without telling the homeowner just how much those losses are is very misleading and bogus. It misleads the consumer into thinking they're going to see a huge drop in their electric bill. As if your *scam* is going to reduce their total energy consumption by 50%. If instead you tell the homeowner you're going to save them about 0.2 kwh /day, then you wouldn't be *scamming* people with this nonsense.
And trotting out references about industrial customers that save huge sums (by avoiding 'severe pf penalties') as 'proof' of your claims is just further fraud.
Here in the states, a lot of CFL have power factor correction built right into the electronic ballast. So they 'look' like something very close to a resistor to the supply.
It is certainly possible and I am sure that better quality ones will have but there is nothing on the packs to say yay or nay and keeping costs down, shaving fractions of a penny off the price, particularly in the face of cheap eastern imports, is the name of the game here.
There was recently a lot of complaints about them in the IET journal from people who probably know more than I. Some of them clearly from a power generation background.
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