Can I save 85% of my electric bill with a $50 gadget?

Do any of those power saving energy cleaners actually work, and can they lower my electric bill?

Dear Mike,
I keep seeing advertisements for these “clean power” products. Do you promote them? Have you ever used anything like this? And the most important question is “do they work”? —Sanford R.

Dear Sanford,
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? And yes, it certainly is that. I’m going to put this type of product into the same category with magnets on your car’s gas lines. Those supposedly “polarize” the hydrocarbons in the fuel and improve MPG. We would all like there to be a simple and affordable way to improve our miles per gallon, or cut our home electricity bills. However, there’s simply no way that any of these products work at all. It’s just wishful thinking on your part, and a big scam on their part.

What do they claim that’s not true?

The premise is that somehow “dirty energy” (or low Power Factor) is causing the power company to overcharge you, so if you clean it up with this little gadget on the wall, your electric bill could drop by up to 90%. That’s right, the claim is that your $100 per month electric bill would suddenly drop to $10, which is absolutely not true. It’s just a scam to separate you from your hard-earned money.

How do I know this is too good to be true?

Well, I’ve actually done Power Factor Correction on an industrial level where we’ve had to install huge capacitor banks to get the PF in a manufacturing plant closer to 100%. The reason why this is done at industrial plants is that they operate a lot of 3-phase motor loads which have large inductances, as well as VFD (Variable Frequency Drives), which generate huge Triplin Currents in the neutral conductors. [Inductance: The property of an electric conductor or circuit that causes an electromotive force to be generated by a change in the current flowing. —Oxford Languages]

That extra inductance wastes a lot of energy in the power lines and transformers that doesn’t show up on the meter. And complex loads can create Triplen Harmonics in 3-phase systems, which create huge odd-order harmonic currents that can cause overheating of the neutral conductors. But don’t worry about Triplen Currents in your residential power since they can’t occur in single-phase 120/240-volt power systems.

It’s all about the beer!

Power Factor is often visualized in electrical engineering classes by showing a glass of beer with foam on top. The liquid beer is the actual energy doing work, while the foam is the extra wasted energy that forces the power companies to install larger transformers and conductors than static energy calculations would suggest.

But you’re not paying for the foam!

You’re not paying for the foam as a residential power user. But industrial users typically have poor PF (Power Factor) which costs the power companies extra to deliver. And that’s why power companies will charge industrial customers extra if their power factor gets too low.

These huge capacitor banks are used to get the power factor closer to 100%, which helps the power company not have to install larger transformers and conductors for the wasted power that doesn’t perform any useful work.

That little gadget you plug in a wall outlet WILL NOT correct low Power Factor or reduce Harmonics (Clean up dirty power)!

However, residential customers are not assessed extra charges by the power company for running too many inductive loads (like big industrial motors). So there’s nothing to be gained by correcting your power factor, even if you could afford a few thousand dollars worth of capacitors and switch gear.

That $50 gadget you plug into a wall outlet at the home will do nothing to correct any power factor issues in your home. And remember that the power company doesn’t charge residential customers extra even if you did have a low power factor. So these sort of gadgets do nothing useful at all, except to make the “inventor” rich.

In the final analysis, there’s no such thing as “free” energy…

Just like running your car on water, or the free-energy Tesla generators you see on YouTube videos are supposed to produce, all of these gadgets are simply scams, including gadgets that claim to save money on home electricity bills. So don’t fall for them, even if they show up on Facebook or Amazon.

OK, everyone. Remember that electricity is a useful and powerful force, so we all need to pay attention to safety precautions while using it.

Let’s play (and shop) safe out there…. - Mike

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