[ExI] gadget- pie in the sky?

[Jordan]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 07:20:11PM -0600, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:
> OK techies, what's with this thing?  Invented by Tesla, they say.  Fraud?
> bill w
> 
> https://electric-saver.com/v3/?sub1=102fa4337589c90800b4946592a2da

It is a fraud as you surmised, but more specifically, although they
don't directly claim so, based on the ad's voltage/current waveform
graphs this appears to be a variant of the "power factor correction"
(PFC) scam that's been going around for a while.  Details here:

 http://www.nlcpr.com/Deceptions1.php

Power Factor Correction can be genuinely useful in a few specific
situations, such as when operating off-grid from a generator or a
solar/wind/battery inverter system.  I recently upgraded such a
system to get about 20% more battery-charging power out of a small
Honda generator, by raising power-factor from 0.65 to 0.98.

But even there, PFC circuitry needs to either be built into the
load being powered, or have sophisticated sensing and control
circuitry, like what the power utilities themselves use for this
purpose on long power lines, at substations, and at or near large
industrial facilities.

Even in a rare case where PFC correction would be of benefit, the
scam device is far too small to have more than a negligible effect. 
I'd guess they wired some simple arrangement of capacitors and
maybe inductors directly across the line, without any sensing or
control, just enough to show some minute effect on an oscilloscope
or meter (but no real power savings, for reasons mentioned in the
link above) to give the scammers a small amount of plausible
deniability.  Or, it may not even be that, doing nothing more than
powering its status LED.

-- 
Jordan.