Are these advertised products frauds?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Are these frauds? Or are they genuine and I’m missing something? I’ve seen all of these products advertised on YouTube videos. Some are available on Amazon, eBay, and Lowe’s. Why hasn’t the FTC sued these companies for fraud.

The first product is a mini “air conditioner” about the size of a toaster. It advertises to cool a room in minutes. You can save $$$ with this device. BS: It’s not an air conditioner; it’s a small humidifier. How it works: It has a 660ml reservoir for you to put tap water that lasts for “hours”. It blows air over the water. The water evaporates, thereby absorbing heat of vaporization. It “humidifies as it cools”, which is exactly the opposite of what you want in an air conditioner. By my calculations, evaporation of 650ml of water absorbs a paltry 1400 BTU over a two hour period. The added humidity negates a lot of that. Is it false advertising if it lowers the room temperature by one half degree? I can’t believe Amazon and Lowe’s have the audacity to sell this. Note: I saw this product in a Lowe’s store in late June. It was on their web site in mid-July, but it has since been removed from their web site.

The second fraud product is StopWatt, an electrical device that you simply plug into a wall socket and save electricity. The narrator says that she lowered her electric bill by 40% and she knows of one fellow who lowered his monthly electric bill from $206 to $16. It allegedly does this by “stabilizing” your household current. It sells anywhere from $10 to $90 on Amazon and eBay. If it were that simple, one would think that Congress would be giving these devices away.

The third fraud is a device that plugs into the computer port of your automobile, using the same computer port that mechanics use to diagnose problems. It will increase your miles-per-gallon by 30%, thereby cutting your fuel bill in half. Arithmetically, that’s not possible. A 30% increase in MPG will lower your fuel costs 23%. They advertise that oil companies have managed to keep this device out of retail stores so that you can only buy it directly from the manufacturer. Again, if were that simple, don’t ya think car manufacturers would build this into the computers already in your car?

The fourth is a weight-loss product that has been on ABC, NBC and FOX (I guess CBS refused). The narrator’s aunt used this and lost 70 pounds (32 kg) over a three month period. What you see in the video is someone sprinkling a powder over ice cubes in a glass. The narrator tells us to “hurry before the weight-loss industry has this video removed.” Perhaps YouTube removes the video when someone reports it to them.

Honorable mention: I receive frequent spam phone calls and emails about putting solar panels on my house. The profit margin on this must be fabulous. They advertised “no cost” or “zero out-of-picket”, but what they fail to mention is that you must enter into an installment contract and they’ll put a lien on your house until you’ve paid for the “installation”. Imagine the headache if you need to move while there is a second lien on your house. Any mortgage that the new owner gets will be subordinate to the lien by the solar company. No bank will allow that so that the solar panels must be paid for if you want to sell your house.

2

The AC is just a small swamp cooler style cooler that might make things slightly more comfortable at your desk but has no chance at cooling a room as it claims. The wall electric device and car service are essentially plastic housing with an LED to flash and make you think it’s doing things – complete garbage. There’s teardowns of these devices on YouTube.

If Ford could make a car that got 500 MPG, they’d do it and make a gazillion dollars but the marketing on these scam devices rellies on a vague “Big Business” that keeps them down. The oil companies pay off Ford or utilities pay off the government, etc. Don’t ask why some nation with nationalized utilities wouldn’t want to reduce everyone’s consumption 98%.

I’m not familiar with the powder but common sense prevails. Solar panels aren’t a scam (assuming they’re manufactured and advertised correctly) just the financing on those particular panels.

3

Our air conditioning doesn’t work well upstairs, where our office is. A couple of years ago, my wife heard about the mini-AC from a client, and asked if we should get them. I absently said sure, so she ordered one for each of us. When they arrived, and I saw “As Seen On TV!” on the boxes, I thought “well fuck, we just pissed that money away.”

During the summer, I have it set up next to my desk, so that it’s aimed directly at my face, about 18 inches away. When it gets above 80 degrees upstairs (which only happens on really hot days, 90+, which isn’t too often), I turn it on. It actually works ok for that purpose - blowing somewhat cool air directly onto my face feels like a personal AC. Does it cool down the entire room? Of course not. As soon as I move out of the way of the air, the hot feeling is immediately back.

So, I dunno… I guess I’d say the product isn’t a complete fraud. Just mostly a fraud.

4

Swamp coolers work, when you use them in an environment where they can work. We ran ours until July. It can drop the house temperature by 25 degrees, with a corresponding increase in humidity. But when you’re starting from near-0% humidity, that’s not a problem.

You need low humidity. Like Arizona, or a room that has already been air conditioned (dehumidified). You run a swamp cooler in a room that has been air conditioned, the AC just has to take that humidity back out again, thereby using more energy.

I wonder both why these ads are allowed to keep existing, and why people keep falling for them. My dad taught me about scams 50 years ago. Why haven’t other people learned, too? Why are there generations of suckers since, still standing in line to be fleeced?(segue into the Idiocracy thread.)

5

This. My understanding is that they only really work when you’re in an environment, like Arizona, where high heat is accompanied by low humidity.

If you live in the Midwest, or the Southeast, and temperatures in the 80s or 90s are nearly always accompanied by high humidity (dew points in the 60s or 70s), they won’t do much, if anything.

6

We still have people who believe in Bigfoot, and you’re asking them to figure out the thermodynamics of cooling their house. That’s an uphill battle at best.

7

I just want them to realize “hey, if a company says “this device will save you money/regrow hair/make you lose weight/make your dick bigger”, why isn’t is available everywhere? Why isn’t it on every TV, website, tiktok, building wall? Maybe it…doesn’t work?”

We can help them with Bigfoot later.

8

It’s a psychological question. I don’t know why some people prefer their illusions, but just take a survey of any religious congregation and that’ll give you a start. Or I’ll bet you could find YouTube videos on the subject! :stuck_out_tongue:

9

And here’s Bigfoot. Again.

There are more sightings of Bigfoot on the Dope than out in the woods.
:blush:

10

I once pissed off a girlfriend who was blathering on about the 300mpg engine that the oil companies had bought the rights to and were suppressing. I said “That’s ridiculous. Do the thermodynamics.” She looked at me and said “What?” I told her that there were was a certain amount of energy in a gallon of gas, current engines extract around 30% of it, to get 30mpg or so, and no magic was going to make that figure 10x what it is now.

11

I saw a note about personal AC devices in fine print saying they are Air Coolers, not Air Conditioners. All their claims are relative to other Air Cooler devices. And then still not true.

12

In my view all the cited products are frauds. From what some have said, it may be that in very limited circumstances in very dry desert environments a “swamp cooler” may have some limited benefits, but in the vast, vast majority of circumstances it’s making the discomfort of heat much worse by raising the humidity without providing much cooling. Or at least, dumping vast amounts of water into the air for every tiny drop in temperature, making the overall problem worse. There’s a reason that air conditioners use a lot of energy – they have a big job to do, and that job isn’t going to get done by a fan blowing on a wet cloth. And an important part of that job, in most environments, is lowering the humidity. If you have a central air system, down in the basement there’s usually a pretty substantial trickle of water running through the drain hose.

So at the very least, the advertising for the cooler is fraudulently misleading. The rest of the stuff is just abject nonsense.

13

“Look, I only really expected to sell these to people in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, but if some Florida Man stereotype wants to buy one, it would be infringing his rights as an American to not sell him one. Caveat Emperor!”

14

Yeah, the primary fraud is in the claims and associated cost. No one would pay $199 NOW $69.99 for something that does the job of a $7 desk fan in the right circumstances. But it does, technically, do a thing.

The wall power thingie and car MPG thingie can’t even claim any minor function. Unless you consider blinking an LED to be a function.

15

Others have covered the “mini AC”: It works, but only if you’re in an arid environment, and only aimed directly at your face,and not great even then.

For the second one: It is possible, in principle, in some circumstances, to have a device that just plugs into the wall and decreases the usage recorded on your bill. This is because of something called impedence matching: Real-world loads can be what’s called resistive, inductive, or capacitative (or more commonly, a combination of these). There’s not much you can do about the resistive part of the load, but capacitative and inductive loads cancel each other out. Most real-world loads are partly inductive, because motors are inductive, and so you can make things more efficient by also plugging in a capacitative load. The problem is that the electric companies already know this, and they know how inductive household loads are on average, and so they already have capacitors as part of their infrastructure to take care of that. So unless you’re using a lot more motors than the average household, there’s no more benefit to be realized, and plugging in a capacitor would actually result in wastage the other way. Industrial customers do sometimes (depending on the industry) have much more inductive loads, but those companies already buy very large capacitors to balance their loads.

For the third one, there are a number of parameters that can be tweaked in how you run an engine, and which are controlled by your car’s engine computer. Different values of those parameters will have tradeoffs in the amount of emissions you produce, and in the mileage you get, and in your car’s power, and the like. The factory default settings for the computer try to balance all of those tradeoffs, but if you really care only about mileage and not at all about emissions, power, and so on, you can adjust the parameters some to get a little more mileage out of the car. But it won’t be much, and it’ll come at a cost in the other things.

For the fourth, what precisely are they claiming? I can believe that there’s someone out there who used it, and while they were using it, they lost a lot of weight. Was the weight loss because of this product? Can you expect that anyone else will get similar, or even any, results? They don’t say anything about that.

To sum up, most of these probably do “work”, in the sense that they’ll give some results, in some circumstances, for some users, but most likely none of them is actually worth it.

16

Maybe in some wildly theoretical universe, yes. But in my (limited) experience there is very little, if anything, that you can actually “tweak” through the OBD-II port. It’s essentially a read-only interface whose only “write” function that I’ve ever seen is to reset error codes. And even if some fancy vehicle did have some tweakable settings, there is no way that a single generic device would work this miracle on ALL vehicles. So although a theoretical discussion may be of some academic interest, this gadget is clearly an outright fraud.

17

More accurately, they COULD work in some minor way, in theory. But the devices being sold won’t work because they don’t have anything in them to work. Crack one open and you’ll get a mostly empty housing with a small board, resister, LED and a basic chip to control the LED blinking. They’re basically like buying a stereo box full of bricks. The OBD2 MPG one has the 16 pins to plug into your car but only three actually connect to the board: two for ground and one to power the LED.

They talked about the car thing on a Youtube channel (Donut) and admitted that you could tweak your car’s computer for slightly better mileage, however each make/model is different and there’s no indication or way this thing has every make/model’s ECU calibrations in it (obviously the advertising says works on every/any car). It’s just not plausible on the surface.

18

Our prior thread on the mini-swamp coolers as a scam:

19

As I recall, the cost for one fan was in the neighborhood of $20. Probably “Only $19.95!”. If they’d cost $70 a piece, I don’t think I would have absently said “sure” when my wife asked if I wanted one. :slight_smile:

20

That’s at least a little saner. They get sold online as “Mini-AC Unit!” with wild claims about cooling a room in minutes and sold for ridiculously high prices.