Power saver plugs just got a bit darker

by popular request i'm revisiting the power saver plugs again these are plugs that you're supposed to just plug into a socket you plug it in the little green indicator lights and instantly it cuts your power bill by a huge amount and you're going to save so much money lots of adverts saying oh yes i bought this and plugged indiscreet but one of the reasons i'm visiting this and i'll open this up now is to talk about a new twist that advertisers have that is rather sinister you see they've started uh taking video or pictures of say a little african inventor girl who's made some invention it shows her in a workshop or it will show video of some kid in i think the one i saw recently was it was a german video and they'll put their own text over the top their own story about how he's mit's top student and how he's built this amazing device to save you millions of pounds and the oil companies have tried buying them out but he said no i want the people to have it so they can save money and these adverts they're putting the text over the top that the text has nothing to do with what's going on the video in the background it's just you know they've stolen video and they've just superimposed it but you look in the comments down below and it's full of like particularly on facebook where they publish these a lot and the comments are like omg what a wonderful young kid you know doing this for us i was in tears i bought five i'm giving them to all my family and it's all a scam it's just this is all fabricated but anyway let's take a look at what's inside one of them hopefully this is discharged it should be a big capacitor fundamentally that's what's in these and a circuit board and the circuit board has the pure function of a adding a fuse inline and powering an led because i mean obviously you need an led to actually show it's working so i'm going to reverse engineer this and then i'm going to tell you how you can really save power because the sort of people who'd be considering buying these or maybe have bought these uh will probably have had a really high power bill recently and they're wondering ways to to cut that down i'll tell you how to do that but first of all i'm going to take this circuit board i'm going to take some pictures of it and we can explore and reverse engineer it and then we shall talk about that how to save power for real one moment please okay let's start with the circuit board quite odd scruffy looking resistors but they are actually supposedly fairly high tolerance resistors i think they've just used whatever they could get because let's face it the people making these are not usually technically adept it's just achieving what they need within a number of components which is why this little capacitor here is missing we've got a fuse this is good uh what is the rating of this fuse i should have checked that i shall check that if i can it's a 5 amp fuse so i shall note that down 5 amp 5 amp quick flow it's got an f that surprised me i thought they'd use a slow blow because that turns out the capacitor is quite high value-ish in relative terms so get the fuse we've got a resistor to discharge capacitor the capacitor is tucked in the back we've got an led which is out of focus here because it's just jacked right up off the circuit board on the end of a stem and then we've got a very simple capacitive dropper circuit with 100 nano farad capacitor and then four discrete diodes for a full bridge rectifier and then a couple of resistors i'm not sure why this one's here this one isn't really 100 needed don't tell them that they'll remove that one as well uh i'm just going to check something here is it a 400 volt yes it is 100 nano 400 volt okay so let's take a look at the if you want to have a go reverse engineering this here is the front of the circuit board and here is the back so you can take a wee snapshot and you have it can have a we go at reverse engineering that everything is flipped on the back of the circuit board so that this capacitor is here and the diodes are here and i've drawn them on just to make it easier for you let's take a look at the schematic it's not that complex the mystical bit here is this big capacitor this big black pasta here is almost amusing that they've chamfered off the edges of this case just so the domed cupboard fit on it is roughly a three mega fire capacitor and the type of capacitor is is commonly sold in ebay for what i think a printed offer listing let me just grab a listing here we go this one was a 2.66 3.59 and it's described as electric machine capacitor cb6 cbb 61 which is a common type three micro farad for a volt motor ceiling fan but it's commonly called an appliance motor capacitor and uh it's used a lot in fans you'll find it in air conditioners and series of one at one of the windings to get phase shift in the motor so get that big capacitor i i tell you what i'm going to put a big red circle around it because that's the most that's the bit that does this really does anything in here it's a big capacitor and we'll put that around the fuse that's important and this discharge resistor they're all important the rest of this stuff you know it doesn't match if it lights up or not it's going to do what it does so we've got this 270k resistor which is designed to discharge the capacitor if you unplugged it and that wasn't there there's a chance that you'd get a quite a strong shock off the pins and sometimes with 40 ones of these i've had one the past that the resistor was not connected properly you can get a shock off the pins another thing worth noting here is these pins are shorter than the standard they're supposed to be for a uk plug but they still make connection then we've got the so that's the main circuit right we've got the fuse we've got the big capacitor and the 270k discharge resistor for safety then we've got a 100 nanofarad capacitor the bridge rectifier and then the currents going through the led to make it light and it's interesting to note that they do have positions for three leds in this circuit board now i notice that some units do actually have a multiple of leds but they've just got them in parallel and they could have actually wired them in series for extra efficiency but it's just different models maybe more leds equal more power i'm not sure that seems to be how these people work it works better if it's got more lights they should flash as well that would be quite good just blink every so often to show it's saving money but there's this 5.1 k resistor here which if they'd had the original electrolytic capacitor in there which is actually there's a place for it on the circuit board right here underneath that red capacitor actually let's let me show you the bigger picture let me show you the bigger picture hvac over time comes to mind here hvacr videos that capacitor there would actually provide a bit of smoothing but to be honest it's not really needed the led is technically speaking just dipping out 100 or 120 times a second but it's not really visible but if they'd put that capacitor in this resistor would have made sure the light went out decisively instead of just fading away as they sometimes do intelligent energy saver yes indeed so what will this do it will not save you power it will not cut down your electricity bill what it will do is that if your mains waveform you see this at exaggerated drawings or site it shows spikes and glitches all over the waveform it's not quite as bad as that usually but having a big capacitor across the main supplies like a filter and it will actually have some effect there but that's about all it will do and usually your some home appliances have capacitors in them for that filtering the downside of this is that it will also pass if you were to plug this in and your electricity meter was programmed to measure apparent power this thing would potentially let me can i measure this can i measure how much current this is going to draw i'm going to have to plug this in with the case open oh that's dangerous and we'll plug it in and uh we'll see what the apparent current is 253 milliamps so the apparent power of this thing right now that's quite high times 240 is the equivalent of 60 watts ooh that's quite a high apparent power that's ridiculous uh that means that if you if you're a modern tariff if you've got a smart meter um and you uh did i catch that on video let me just do that again because sometimes i go off video for that let's plug this back in and show you so you can see the real thing i'll show you what i did there capacitors pass current but they don't heat up they actually cause a phase shift but it causes an apparent current so if i plug this into this unit and i tilt this back so you can see at this time instead of just doing it offshore and i step through it says there's no no real power being drawn 246 volts is a supply voltage but it's passing 253 milliamps 253 milliamps that's point two five three times the 246 volts again at the moment is 62 watts that's the what it a meter measuring apparent power would actually measure that it would bill you for that it would cost you 60 pounds a year to have that plugged in wow that's pretty grim um but in reality most meters at this point in time just measure real power so it's not actually going to bill you for that so how can you save power well the biggest loads in your house are heating and if you've suddenly had a massive increase in your electricity bill really like massively huge increase and you don't know what it is then look for things in your house it could be that you know something simple turning this thermostat up just a few degrees will cause the heating to run a lot longer people leaving doors open the heat will get out and the heating equipment will come on and or vice versa cooling equipment and hot climates it will run longer and that has a huge impact on your bill it may be that you stuck a heater in a garage or left a heater on somewhere just because you thought that would be a good idea or maybe one of your outside the old fashioned 500 watt halogen flood lights they used to jam on and they will cost effectively they would add over 100 pounds each to your bill every quarter if you the 500 watt halogen flood light jammed on another thing to look for your hot water tank if it's got an immersion heater is it boiling is the water absolutely coming out scalding hot the thermostats in those film if you look at the tanks in the uk we've got big domed tanks like that and there's a junction box in the side and it's got a heating element that goes into it um and also thermostat if the thermostat fails it will keep heating it up because these are often vented outside above the roof through a sort of pipe above the water level of the tank it will be blowing boiling water outside it will literally be blowing boiling water down the drain that will cost you three kilowatts running all the time 24 7 would cost you 3 000 pounds a year so that's something to look for other things to do if you've nothing really suspicious like this could somebody if you live in a block of flats could someone else be connected onto your supply the way to find that out is to turn off all the loads in your house and watch your altruistic material if it's rotating or blinking to be light to show power consumption there could be somebody that the wiring has got mixed up somewhere or somebody's tapped into your power other things to do if all these draw blank is to say are you living in a very hot house if you are or if you're in a cold climate and you've turned the heating way up because you cold easily wear worm clothing and turn the heating down if you turn it down from say 20 degrees celsius 60 or more degrees fahrenheit down to something like 50 degrees fahrenheit or maybe 15 16 17 degrees celsius that will make an absolutely massive difference to your electricity bill because the hotter your house is the faster the heat's going to escape the same applies in hot climates to air condition equipment um other than that really look for new equipment you've added that might actually be drawing a lot of power some computers draw a lot of power some dehumidifiers actually draw a lot of power particularly if they end up running all the time now 40 appliances that just run all the time is a significant issue but this won't fix them however if you want to buy one of these for the novelty and they do have that effect of at least having a filtering effect on your power then don't go via these big online sellers because they're probably drop shipping them from chinese sellers chinese sellers like these who this is if i searched on ebay for power saver that's all i searched for available make sure you get the correct plug type but they typically cost in the uk four pounds twenty six four pounds eighty you know they're less than five pounds in america they should be less than eight dollars or something like that so you can buy one i mean it's nice enough case apart from the short pins it'd be a good project case to build something into like like an ionizer perhaps it's cheaper ultimately to get the case and the capacitor if you wanted one of these as a as a high power filter but other than that they don't save power but what i've told you can so if you are concerned about power usage don't waste your money one of these just ignore the adverts they're all lies uh just look around and see if you can save power in other ways because that's absolutely the best way to do it

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 550,096

Rating: 4.9415331 out of 5

Keywords: power, saver, saving, plug, scam, filter, capacitor, indicator, schematic, circuit, how, works

Id: iy1P08aj73k

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/nemom]

From the description:

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These power saving plugs have been around for a while. They possibly started life as a genuine filter plug for softening significant mains transients, but then found a new scam market being sold as power savers, often sold using fraudulent claims of reducing your home electricity bill by a significant amount. (They don't.)

Things have taken a slightly darker twist recently, with adverts involving pictures and video of young kids, with fabricated stories of how they invented this miracle power-saving device, but refused to be bought out by "big-oil" so that everyone could benefit from their technology. When these adverts have appeared on platforms like Facebook they have inevitably resulted in a flurry of gushing comments from people who have become emotionally involved with the story of youth heroism and have bought several units to support them.

In reality these units are probably being drop shipped from Chinese warehouses, which will also happily supply their long established product to you if you search on eBay for "power saver". The going rate on eBay is around £5 shipped (about $7). If you buy from the rogue marketers they will mark that up significantly if you even get the products. (Facebook has a terrible history of marketing scams where people have been duped out of their hard earned money.)

As mentioned in the video, you can bring down your home energy bill dramatically by understanding that the most significant energy costs are heat sources, air conditioning and equipment that runs continuously. By adjusting the house temperature down slightly and wearing warmer clothes you can save a significant percentage of your heating bill. Tracking down draughts will reduce the amount you spend on heating or cooling the outside air, and even basic attic insulation has the same effect as wearing a hat. It keeps the heat in or out.

The very best REAL energy saving plug you can buy is a power monitor plug that shows you how much power appliances are actually using.

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