I just deleted a piece of spam from something called Killerwatzz, that claims your electrify is dirty, and for a fee, they will clean it for you.
I swear to OG God of Cavemen, this takes the cake for goofy spam!
Yes, I’ve been a baaaaaad boy; I deserve punishment.
The real-world quality of electricity in many areas is less than great. But most of the purported harms of that are wildly exaggerated and most of the purported fixes for that are pure snake oil.
So THAT’S where all the dust comes from around my place. Here I was blaming cat litter. (chortle)
Open the thing and then they want pix of your electricity and they’ll send you some of theirs 
.
For a small fee, of course.
Or gifts cards. They likes the gift cards.
I always wash my electricity before I use it.
Gourmet electricity: we pull out all your copper wiring and replace it with silver. And we have our staff calligrapher re-do the legend on your breaker panel. It’s not for the lady from Dubuque; more the lady from Dubai, but the ground fault circuit interrupter always comes free of charge.
Anybody else think this thread was going to be about whether the electricity was produced using coal, or other polluting power sources?
That was what I thought when I first saw the subject line.
Yep, exactly.
Is your refrigerator running?
The bad thing about this scam is that dirty power is actually a thing.
Even worse, if you google it, you get some actual information about what it is, but you also get a LOT of woo sites and scammers trying to sell you things you don’t need.
Dirty power basically means that your AC sine wave isn’t a pure sine wave. It could have noise spikes, harmonics, or significant amounts of induced electrical noise on it.
In industrial use, if a plant’s control system is having issues, one of the first things we look for is whether the control system is fed from “clean” power or “dirty” power. Clean power is conditioned through a UPS and power filters and the like. Dirty power is basically unfiltered plant power. The grounding won’t be as good, and it will have all kinds of noise from the inductive kick of large electromagnetic things (relays, motors, etc) all kicking on and off. The worst I have ever personally measured was 600 volts of noise on a 24 volt control line. Needless to say, that control line wasn’t working very well.
For residential power, “dirty power” is rarely a thing. But you can have it if you live close to a bar with a neon sign. Or maybe you live close to a 50,000 watt commercial radio station. If your power is fed from a nearby substation that is pretty old, you could get significant noise spikes as things are switched on and off of the line. So it is rare, but it does happen.
Two BIG red flags if someone starts talking about dirty power to you.
- They start talking about reactive power. Again, reactive power is a thing. It’s basically the power that gets wasted charging up temporary energy storage devices, like capacitors (metal plates) and inductors (a coil of wire). Real power is measured in watts. Most people are familiar with watts because that is what the electric company charges you for. Reactive power is measured in vars, and most people aren’t familiar with that. But commercial and industrial customers do care very much about these, because if they have too many vars, the electric utility charges them out the wazoo for it. Inductors and capacitors kinda work opposite of each other in that when capacitors are charging during the AC sine wave cycle, inductors are discharging, and vice-versa. So if you have a big inductive load (i.e. you have a bunch of large motors) you can balance it out with capacitors so that the vars cancel each other out.
Some scam companies will offer to do the same thing for your home. But the reason this is a scam is that the power company doesn’t charge residential customers for vars. They only charge for watts, which is why you probably never heard of vars before. Residential power tends to be a bit inductive (from motors in washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, etc) so the power company balances out residential lines with capacitor banks that are switched on and off of the line as necessary.
These “power factor correction capacitors” look like this.
Since the power company takes care of the vars for you, and they don’t charge you for them anyway, adding capacitors to your home service is a complete waste of money.
- The second guarantee that it’s a scam is if they start talking about power lines causing cancer or any other kind of ill effects. Power line health effects were a big topic in the 1980s, and at that time there hadn’t been a whole lot of research done on them. After 40+ years and a few bizillions of dollars thrown at it, no one has yet been able to prove any connection between power lines and anything bad. But there have been plenty of studies that have shown something bad. The problem is that none of those studies has yet held up to peer review and further testing. But the scammers will happily point to these studies to prove to you that power lines are bad for you and you need their device to keep you safe.
Curiously, there is actually a statistical link between living close to high voltage transmission lines and having a shorter average lifespan. One of my college professors was actually one of the early researchers into this. He said it could just be that people who choose healthy lifestyles simply choose not to live close to power lines, or similarly, people who are poor and can’t afford to live as healthy also are more likely to live in a home that is less expensive because it happens to be close to power lines.
That was very educational, thanks for the learning!
Our Vax Workstation had a special power conditioner. It was a beast with a 5lb transformer inside and filter caps. It output standard 120 AC.
That’s typically not needed at home. A good quality surge protector is enough protection.
I have my vintage Fender tube amp plugged into a line conditioner. That’s because tubes are expensive and my amp is a collectable.
I know people doing electrochemistry work that is extremely sensitive and requires lots of shielding and conditioning, with mixed results.
Is my electricity dirty. Yes. Yes it is.
Thanks, @engineer_comp_geek! Most of that I had no clue about.
Outstanding post. Thanks
Yes, I was going to brag about Entergy’s Nuclear 1 and 2 reactors.
I’ve heard of using a motor to a flywheel then to a generator to get stable (clean) power and to protect against voltage spikes.
What gets me is some of these power companies (especially “green energy” ones) claiming that “all” of your power will come from them. For one thing, they probably don’t even own the power source or the lines to your house. Even then, power companies send directly to the grid. Unless your house is connected directly to the power source, it’s impossible to know. Now, if you are off the grid, that may be another story. I spent over thirty years working for gas and electric companies. If things have changed, I’m not aware of it (I’m always willing to learn).