Jul 22, 2009 07:06 PM
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Crescent power saver and other power savers sold on Indian shopping websites are a scam.
The PowerSaver device is alleged to save you money not by turning things off, but by correcting the power factor of electrical equipment in your house.
A single small plug-in device like the PowerSaver cannot actually effectively correct the power factor of other stuff plugged into the same circuit. Apart from the fact that the PowerSaver is not nearly big enough to contain the hefty high-power componentry it’d need, power-factor correctors have to be matched to the load.
Too little correction - which is what you should expect, if your power factor is bad enough to need correcting in the first place and the corrector you purchase is one of these wall-wart-sized “power savers” - and they won’t entirely compensate for poor power factor. Too much correction - which is actually possible, even with a cheap plug-in corrector like this, since the overall power factor of a modern household can actually be very good - and they can make a bad power factor worse.
But, and here’s the punchline, it doesn’t actually matter whether these devices correct power factor at all, because nobody but certain large commercial electricity users is billed by power factor. Normal domestic electricity meters can’t even measure it.
The PowerSaver Product Testing where they proudly show a bank of fluorescent lights drawing 1.306 amps with no “power saver”, and then only 0.642 amps when the “power saver” is connected in parallel. That’s the sort of reading you might perhaps get if you plugged a large enough capacitive power factor corrector in parallel with a highly inductive load, but your electricity meter will notice no difference at all.
The Energy Star program run by the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy would like you to know that these things are scams.
