Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Power savers and other urban legends

There has been a sudden plethora of purported electrical power saving devices that have flooded the market here in Malaysia. Possibly due to the fact that there is a slowdown in the economies of the world and any and all means to cut costs and save is proving more attractive by the day. The record needs to be set straight however as unfortunately these devices do not save you money and instead just divest you of your hard earned cash.

There is no technical or physical way that plugging in or connecting any device to your household mains is to going to reduce your power consumption. All these devices do (if they at all work) is bring the power factor of your home up to unity. Unfortunately I have to resort to the use of technical jargon here but in essence bringing the power factor of your home up to unity presents a more efficient load to the utility company. It reduces the current traveling through the cables and hence transmission costs for the utility but has no bearing on power consumed by the consumer. One such device which I saw on display and hooked up at a major DIY centre here in KL literally shows the current consumption drop as you switch the power saving device in and out of circuit. Unfortunately all this does as stated above is reduce the current traveling through the cable. The consumer doesn’t pay for the amount of current consumed, he pays for the power. And this device has no bearing on the amount of power consumed.

So, save your money and just turn down the lights.

3 comments:

zzdoc said...

Thanks for that info, cuzz..
We have one of those devices in our house and were planning to install the same in the new house so you just saved us a few bucks.

And you're right, our TNB bills have always been rising, device or no device.

Alex said...

Thanks for the info. Never got around to fixing one as I could not understand how they worked.

Now I know they don't...

thegume said...

well said maestro