mivey
Senior Member
For a brief moment in time.:grin:Does that work in a microwave?
That is the prototype. :grin:
" UTILIGUARD " Saves 20% on energy bills ??????????
- Thread starter Davebones
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hurk27
Senior Member
- Location
- Portage, Indiana NEC: 2008
only if your oven is gas or wood burning
I had one of those, found it at a yard sale (go figure) I thought it was for displaying photos:roll:
Well until a older friend told me what it was for. (camping)
Open Neutral
Senior Member
- Location
- Inside the Beltway
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- Engineer
Does it ease eyestrain and improve reception, too?
{Decades ago, there was an audio spoof about the Pink and Plastic Religious Icon Company of Del Rio Texas.
One of the lines was about putting one on your TV to ease eyestrain and improve reception.}
ps: is there a 3-phase model? And does it soften the water?
{Decades ago, there was an audio spoof about the Pink and Plastic Religious Icon Company of Del Rio Texas.
One of the lines was about putting one on your TV to ease eyestrain and improve reception.}
ps: is there a 3-phase model? And does it soften the water?
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USMC1302
Senior Member
- Location
- NW Indiana
All these "power saver" threads remind me of a couple similar wonders that have made the rounds. Let's see....the magnets or stainless billets placed around or in fuel lines(natural gas, gasoline, whichever) that "align" the molecules so the fuel burns more efficiently....And I often wonder how we ever have come up with some of the folk remedies some swear by. Stop a coolant leak in your engine by putting pepper in the radiator??
readydave8
re member
- Location
- Clarkesville, Georgia
- Occupation
- electrician
folk remedies
folk remedies
clothes pins on fuel line in car to solve vapor lock problem--I used to see this often.
folk remedies
clothes pins on fuel line in car to solve vapor lock problem--I used to see this often.
USMC1302
Senior Member
- Location
- NW Indiana
I don't feel that old, but who remembers the pyramid craze? Put you razor blades inside your pyramid and they'll resharpen themselves....etc. Maybe a pyramid over my meter will equal stealth technology and my electrons can flow undetected
Speedskater
Senior Member
- Location
- Cleveland, Ohio
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- retired broadcast, audio and industrial R&D engineering
The last time that I heard that story was 1968.
From a radio DJ, Dick "Wilde Child" Kemp. (A Texas boy)
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- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
- Occupation
- Electrical Engineer
Desperate people trying desperate measures. A lot of the car myths like that started in the Great Depression when people had no money at all to fix their cars. Pepper in the radiator actually sort of worked, my Dad did it once when we got a leak in the radiator of our Jeep while out in the deep woods. It stemmed the flow of the leak to the point where we could keep up with it by adding water from our canteens (which also meant stopping at every stream). The radiator was toast afterward though, it's not like it really "fixed" it. It was that or try to walk out...
A lot of these energy saver scams originated in the 70's right after Frank Nola released the patent for a Power Factor Controller that NASA was going to use on space stations for small AC motors. It sort of worked, but people went way overboard with the claims. That first wave of scams died out though because it was too expensive to market a scam that relied on first time buyers as it's entire customer base, because once you bought one, you NEVER bought another. But that all changed again with the advent of the internet, which makes it really cheap to find suckers on a mass scale. You also no longer need brick-and-mortar for your "business" because you can run it from your bedroom and have the crap made for you in China for next to nothing. If you get caught, you fold up the laptop and start a new web page. The environment couldn't be better for scammers now.
weressl
Esteemed Member
Yeah, they installed the Nola circuits in soft starters to be selectable via a switch and then they just disappeared form subsequent model w/o an explanation.
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
- Occupation
- Electrical Engineer
When I worked for a soft starter mfr, we were shipping ours with the Nola PFC control feature turned on and instructions on how to turn it off. After about 5 years and a lot of troubleshooting calls from the field, we changed to shipping them with it turned off and instructions to turn it on. 5 more years and we decided to save the $10.85 worth of extra components it took to keep it there and just dropped it on a redesign. Nobody noticed or complained. In 12 years at that company I had exactly one user (GM) who took advantage of it. I had been involved in the initial development of another brand (Vectrol) in the late 70's and already knew it was iffy at best, so I investigated out of curiosity. I found they had erroneously calculated their savings, but for political reasons the GM EE I worked with decided it was in his personal interest not to admit it, because he had availed himself of a hefty bonus for "saving energy".
weressl
Esteemed Member
Well as you can see I noticed it.:roll: I had it switched on and it seemed to soften the notching is what I can observe from the fleeting curiousity I had on the subject. The subsequent spread of the bypass VF contactor use as a standard feature probably saves more energy than the Nola ever did. Again, I never expected much of it, just to minimize the SCR losses so it did not merit of spending my time on it. It would not have been a good return on investment.
weressl
Esteemed Member
Evidently AutomationDirect still sells soft starters that use the power saver mode. the SR44 starters do not have an integral bypass contactor. The power use reduction is accomplished via reducing the voltage output at reduced loads. The maximum savings claimed is 10% of rated load IF the motor is runnig at 30% of it's nameplate load. That reduction is reduced by the efficiency of the thyristors by 0.5-1.0%. the greatest savings are accomplished at the smallest sizes, eg. 7.5HP and diminish as the motor size increases to 1.5% - or virtually no savings whatsoever above 150HP. All these statements are of course Manufacturer's caim without independent 3rd. party evaluation.
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
- Occupation
- Electrical Engineer
That Automation Destruct soft starter is actually the Fairford QFE Series brand labeled out of the UK, also sold as the Baldor MD Series and a couple of other small time "energy savers" here in the US.
Fairford used to market that thing as "saving 40% of your power use!" A friend of mine was threatened by Fairford when he declared on his website that the Emperor had no clothes, but they never followed through with their threats after he presented them with his evidence. Their marketing people had thoroughly partaken of the Koolaid , but their own engineers knew better. When he challenged their assertions, the engineers prevailed and Fairford actually backed off on their marketing approach, shifting to focus more on the normal tangible benefits of soft starters and lowering their claims of energy savings. But they did not rein in their partners, some of whom still make some pretty wild claims.
Fairford used to market that thing as "saving 40% of your power use!" A friend of mine was threatened by Fairford when he declared on his website that the Emperor had no clothes, but they never followed through with their threats after he presented them with his evidence. Their marketing people had thoroughly partaken of the Koolaid , but their own engineers knew better. When he challenged their assertions, the engineers prevailed and Fairford actually backed off on their marketing approach, shifting to focus more on the normal tangible benefits of soft starters and lowering their claims of energy savings. But they did not rein in their partners, some of whom still make some pretty wild claims.
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