Power Save 1200

"Reduces electrical bills up to 25% per month" - thats true, as worded. "Reduce Your Electrical Bill on Average of 10 to 25% Per Month" - fat chance.

The Federal Trade Commission might be interested, but I wouldn't bet on it these days. I think Miss Cleo finally wound up in trouble.

On another newsgroup someone posted the patent this scam is based on. From what I read, the amount of correction is manually set with switches. As soon as the inductive load changes the correction is wrong.

Is there anywhere in the US where 1 or 2 family home utility metering includes power factor penalty?

Can you get away with scams in the UK?

bud--

I work in the western states, I am unaware of any utility that charges PF for residential metering. I know of a couple that have tried to get the rate approved and were rejected by the commissions that heard the case.

This one has been around for at least 10 years, just time to recycle it.

I know an electrician that saved on his power bill by jumping around the meter with a couple of No. 12 wires. He got by for about 10 years. Then the power company started monitoring meters and caught him. He had to sell his house to pay the power bill.

The printing plant I work for bought the house next door for future expansion. During the demolition, it was discovered that the previous owner had hacked into one of the junction boxes in the back lot of the plant, and buried the wires (modified auto jumper cables) so well that they went under the wall that seperated the lots, and we never knew he was there (He apparently did this when the plant was closed for Christmas holidays some years back).

We called the local utility company, and they sent a crew to take photos and read our records to estimate how much he was sponging off of us. The last I heard the previous owner was being criminally charged with Theft of Services and was liable for back payment to the utility...with interest! It may cost him more than our company paid for his property.

Some friends of mine when I was in Junior high school family moved into what had been the offices and maintenance buildings so their dad could expand his motor rewinding business. He let us have one small room for our own workshop, and there was a lot of chopped off wiring where machine tools had been removed, so we shut off the power to the building and started ripping it out. We noticed the man next door watching us out his window, till we turned the main breaker back on. Then we realized the meter was running with nothing in the building turned on. We checked all the circuits, till we found a pair marked, "Gasoline pumps". There was a concrete pad where the two pumps had been removed, and he had buried wires to his house. We unhooked the wires from the breakers and pulled the wires out of the conduit while he was screaming at us. My friends dad showed up about then, and after the police were called we found that the guy had worked for the construction company for a couple years, and had run most of his house on the two 20 amp circuits, after the pumps were removed.