A person in my company has been approached by the Power-Save about installing some of their devices at our car dealerships. Here is the info page for the commercial device. When I head about it, I expressed some doubt, so the above web pages were forwarded to me.
In a nutshell here is what they are promising:
–> Lowers electric bills up to 25%!
–> Reduces electricity required by inductive loads (motors)!
–> Enhances capacity of existing electrical system!
–> Eliminates harmful power surges!
–> Protects appliances and sensitive electronic equipment!
–> Reduces harmful effects caused by electrical noise!
–> Power Factor Optimization!
The enhances capacity of the existing electrical system has my BS meter starting to twitch.
I have no idea what power factor optimization! is or why it is important.
To my uneducated eye the rest of it seem to be a surge protector, with possibly a big capacitor to help with the starting current on an electric motor.
I am very doubtful about a 25% lowering of my electrical bill.
The other thing that is making my BS meter go off is the specification page 404s when I try to bring it up.
So does anyone have any experience or clues they could pass on to me?
Thanks.
Search isn’t working for me, but we’ve done this before. If I were you, I’d try searching for “power save” and if that didn’t turn anything up “inductive loads” since I’m fairly sure that phrase was used last time.
All it is is a capacitor added in parallel to your loads to correct the power factor to about 1. This only works for heavily inductive loads–which you probably do not have at a car dealership–and does not generally save any money unless your power distributor is charging extra for power factors significantly less than 1. Since these tend to be industries, power companies don’t normally bill residential and light commercial customers for power factor. Power companies like power factor to be close to 1 because it means maximum power is being delivered to your load, which in turn means the billable amount of energy the utility is generating is maximized. While the company itself sells a legitimate product which does have use in heavy industry, it’s essentially a scam to push it on people who don’t need it.
Well I do have a couple of pretty healthy air compressors, but I seriously doubt we could see a 25% savings on just those alone. I would bet most of my energy is going to lighting (I have a shit load of lights)
I do not believe that this device can get your power factor to 1. The inductance that your house presents changes over time. The amount of capacitance you need changes when your AC compressor motor turns on or fridge motor etc. I suppose they could have fancy electronics that monitor this and change the inductance on the fly but I bet they don’t
Just to expand on what Q.E.D. said. The capacitors are placed in parallel to offset the effects of inductive loads on the line. Simply put, if you add power factor correction your incoming voltage doesn’t change, the power consumed by the devices doesn’t change, what changes is the current drawn by each load. When power factor becomes too far out of phase the extra current causes line losses which have a big effect on the power utility. If you needed power factor correction you would either be having problems within the facility with motors burning out too soon, neutral conductors overheating, etc. or the power company would be coming to you and letting you know you need them. It really takes quite a large inductive load to cause a problem though. Large office buildings with a lot of electronic ballasts, a factory with a lot of induction motors.
Residential power factor tends to run really, really close to 1 anyway. In any case, industry applies power factor correction to individual inductive loads with a calculated capacitance to bring each particular load to PF=1.
It should be noted that these caps that Power-Save sells aren’t entirely useless; they do have surge-suppression characteristics, as claimed. Whether your entire building really needs such protection is another matter.
You’re probably safe, the smallest facility around here I’ve heard of needing PF correction was a sawmill, drawing over 1000 A with everything running.
The start capacitors on single phase motors is to provide enough phase difference between the start and running winding to allow the motor to start turning. Without the start winding the motors will just sit and hum until you spin the shaft manually.