This is one of the most B.S. product I’ve ever dug into. From the marketing to the science to the real-world testing, the “Electricity Saving Box” is totally a scam. Here’s why…

Stanford University researchers have made a solar panel that works at nighttime!
It will reduce or eliminate the need for battery storage! TAKE THAT Big Oil!
You can probably guess how it works… Let’s BUST this impractical boondoggle wide open.

The research paper: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10….

Forum: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/ee…

00:00 – Pulitzer prize winning twitter Blue Checkmark time
00:35 – If Stanford University did the research, it has to be true!
02:35 – Take that Big Oil!
03:35 – The Thermoelectric Generator AGAIN…
04:10 – It generates HOW MUCH power at night time?
06:02 – Let’s run the numbers on Dave’s LG panel system
08:04 – It’s not much better than ONE 18650 cell. LOL
09:37 – Tech journalists should be able to multiply and divide.
10:09 – Reading the paper
11:50 – Photos of the prototype

Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of power-saving scams. They often claim to save vast amounts off your electricity bills.

The problem is, they all rely on a grain of truth in their marketing spiel. So these devices often sound technically plausible.

They can seem legitimate on the surface, even though they are not.

On the plus side, scammers are generally quite lazy. So the vast majority of energy-saving scams currently on the market look much the same as they did ten years ago.

Some are little devices that plug-in to a power socket and magically reduce your electricity bill. These devices use bogus techno-jargon like ‘dirty power’ to sound smart and get your money. If you buy one, you’ll get a cheap plastic box with a plug on it that won’t reduce your electricity usage. They include devices like the Eco-Watt, EcoPlug, MiracleWatt, Voltex, Voltbox and others. There will always be a new name: Voltex (getvoltex.com) was uncovered so fast they just made a new website for the similarly named Volt Box (getvoltbox.com). By the time you read this, they’ll probably have another new name.

Others get wired or plugged in at your meter board to supposedly perform power factor correction on your electricity usage. Examples include the Earthwise Power Saver, the Power Saver Pioneer, Energy Saver 1200, and others. These devices often say that they ‘reduce amps’ or ‘correct power factor’. As I’ll explain below, power factor correction is a real thing, but it won’t help residential electricity users.

Yet others are junk concepts conveyed via an over-priced e-book. Recent examples include the Easy Power Plan or Power Efficiency Guide eBooks. The fun thing about these two is that they’re both written by a “geography teacher from Memphis, Tennessee” with two different names and ages, who would have thought!

You can buy these fake gadgets on Wish, AliExpress, and Alibaba direct from China – no real surprises there. Somewhat more disappointingly they turn up frequently on Google Shopping, Amazon and eBay as well.

Scams of the free energy variety are somewhat common on start-up sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter.

In summary, most organisations cannot be trusted to shield you from these scams. They’ve tricked a lot of people. But some quick research reveals the dubious nature of the claims made.

Reality: Power Factor Correction Is Real, BUT…
Residential electricity customers, and most small businesses, do not pay for poor power factor. So, even IF these devices correct power factor, they will not change your electricity bill.

Power factor correction will reduce your apparent power consumption. It does not affect real power (what you are billed for).

Power Scam Type 2: Secret Info / Free Energy Machine
The second type of scam I have seen are informational. Such the sale of an eBook which will show you how to build a free energy machine. Or the funding of a new business venture to build such a device.

Of course, they’re always from some novice. If this garbage was real, they would not be selling you an ebook about it for $27. They’d be manufacturing the thing and selling it to you for a lot more.

Enersonic Power Saver.

They had all the usual claims:

“by using the Power Saver, domestic consumers could save up to 24% on their electrical power consumption… [they] would thereby save money.”

But, the reality was more like this:

“the Power Saver was not capable of reducing the amount of electrical power consumed by domestic consumers as measured by retail electricity suppliers, and therefore domestic consumers could not save up to 24% on their electrical power consumption by using the Power Saver… [they] could not save money by using the Power Saver.”

Summary: How to Avoid Being Scammed & Start Saving Energy
First of all, if the device looks or sounds like one of the products mentioned above, it could be a scam.

A healthy dose of scepticism, plus some online research, should set you straight.

Now, this does not mean that anything that plugs-in and claims to save energy is some kind of trick. For example, standby power eliminators and power meters are plug-in devices that actually do help you save power!

Next, you should re-double your efforts on proven strategies to save energy. They’re easier, cheaper, and obviously far more rewarding.

You know, all those ‘boring’ things like:

Checking your power usage with a power meter or energy monitor.
Changing all your lights to LED.
Switching to low-power heating & cooling systems.

The Forbes Investigation: How Bloom Energy Blew Through Billions Promising Cheap, Green Tech That Falls Short
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/02/13/the-forbes-investigation-how-bloom-energy-blew-through-billions-promising-cheap-green-tech-that-falls-short/?utm_source=FBPAGE&utm_medium=social&utm_content=3119213361&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainFB#4fc9b0093e5f

His company, publicly traded Bloom Energy, sells fuel cells—steel boxes that generate electricity using natural gas. The boxes, which it calls energy servers, emit a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, but they are supposed to make much less of it than traditional power plants and do so without generating lots of smog ingredients like nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides.

Even better, Bloom’s units get their fuel via underground pipelines unaffected by the Diablo winds that threatened California’s high-voltage wires and led to the power outages that Sridhar considers intolerable in any modern society, let alone in Silicon Valley.

“Every time there is a disaster your power price is going to go up, because somebody has to pay for the damage,” Sridhar says. “That is the catalyst fþor change.”

protect against grid failure with Bloom-powered “microgrids,”

Bloom has never generated a profit, despite at least $1.7 billion of invested capital, some of which was raised on the back of false statements.

Over its 19 years in business, Bloom has installed several thousand of its 15-ton boxes worldwide for big tech companies including Apple, AT&T and Paypal, which are willing to pay up to guarantee 24/7 power for data centers where the cost of downtime is nearly $9,000 per minute. A lot of its customers are in states with the highest power prices and big clean-energy subsidies

This should be Bloom’s time to shine. “The natural gas, thanks to fracking, is already there,” Sridhar says. And yet, despite big promises, Sridhar’s boxes are highly unlikely to transform the grid in California, or anywhere else. The reasons are manifold, but boil down to this: Bloom’s technology is too dirty and too costly.

Truly renewable power is now much cheaper than Bloom’s. Without subsidies, solar and onshore wind both cost 4 cents per kwh, according to asset management firm Lazard.

Power Saver devices are sold everywhere. But do they actually save power?! DON’T BE SHEEP!

Comments:

These dodgy crowd funder defense responses are always the same. “It’s not a scam because doofawinkle technology is real and is used in industry”.

Comments:

I await the inevitable Morus official response, then the backer backlash at this vid, then the production delays, the excuses, then the calls from backers for refunds, then…well you get the point

“My name is Bond, Hydrogen Bond and I will thwart your evil plans of vacuum drying!”

Red Dot – The participation trophy of design awards?
“At least you tried”
What’s funnier is that they didn’t even win the reward, they got mentioned.

just checked on the Kickstarter page, they replied to a comment that mentioned your video