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Deceptions

This was originally just an article on the misunderstanding of power factor correction as a way to reduce residential power bills, however as readers sent in more questionable links, the list grew quite large.

If someone were to tell you there is a pill that will guarantee that you will live to be 100, cure most cancers or allow you to lose 60 lbs in two weeks, you would know instantly that these claims were outrageous and unlikely to be true. Unfortunately, when it comes to energy savings, most people don't have the background to be able to recognize similarly outrageous claims. I see a lot of claims I know cannot be true and yet search engines only turn up glowing reviews and advertising material promoting them. To fill this void, I started creating pages for each new deception I came across and over time, some of these have become quite lengthy.

I've also received my share of physical and legal threats and hate mail as well as thank you letters, and have had time to reflect on the whole mess. Here are some observations in no particular order:

There seem to be inventors that truly believe they have a product, but are misguided. Sometimes they have others marketing their device and these marketers make unwarranted claims. I get e-mails from these inventors, who are clearly upset, but as long as there are web sites out there claiming these devices do fantastic things I consider about as likely as the tooth fairy being real, I will classify them as scams.

Another common scam is the e-book claiming to teach you something (go solar, build wind turbines etc.) with grossly misleading claims. The quality of information in these books is often so poor that they are essentially useless. e.g. "when finished building your house, attach the roof. A sloped roof works best." They are prolific because affiliates can easily market them with nothing more than a download link to a file and a payment processor.

There are also scams so outlandish that I am convinced they are designed as a scam from the beginning. These include things like perpetual motion machines that generate lots of electricity and can power your house, or hydrogen generators that power your car with water. I wonder what the creators of these scams really think, and whether they find the whole thing funny. I even toyed with the idea of publishing "Home Made Nuclear Power Plants made easy by A. Q. Khan" as a joke to see how many would download it.

Scams are also big business. When the State of Texas sued Water4Gas, they estimated 3,197 Texans purchased the water4gas manual for a total of $310,109. This is serious money when scaled up world wide. Google also profits handsomely too. Thousands of affiliates install pre-packaged web sites to promote products and have to pay Google for every ad clicked. Given that many scams return hundreds of thousands of google hits and the high cost of certain key words -- I expect that Google makes more money off scamming the public than anyone else.

You will find some of the scam busting like the power factor correction units to be very engineering oriented. When I can, I will prove why these devices cannot work. In other cases I can only show the absurdity of the claims and you can make up your own mind.

There is a community of people that believe perpetual motion like machines are possible because there are energy sources, undiscovered, that actually power them. These forces might be in the ethers, in the earth's core or perhaps everywhere. My answer is this: this is very unlikely because there are no unsolved scientific problems that have us out there looking for a missing energy source. Until I actually see the tooth fairy or one of these machines working -- I will classify them as delusional. If they are marketed as being able to power your house, I will call them scams.

Finally, I have contacted journalists about their irresponsible articles, in particular, printing press releases as if they were news. It appears that journalists are forbidden about saying anything bad by their corporate bosses. To make matters worse, most universities will not comment either. That leaves nothing except a few people like myself to fill in the void.

Angry mail and hate mail:

I get a surprising amount of irate letters that leave me speechless, and I can't tell whether the writers are baiting me or just unstable people. Some of the more common complaints I will address below:

Reporting Scams

It is important that you report all these scams. The more complaints there are in the federal databases, the more likely these scams will be investigated and shut down.

Federal Trade Commission Complaint Assistant

How you can help

Exposing scams carries some risk. Here is an true example: A scammer with lobby monies (USD$60,000 year and a recipient of congressional funding requests from a infamous US senator) is upset at being exposed. They file suit in their jurisiduction and demanded that the Australian domain registrar divulge the private registration information. The registrar rolls over (they are generally spineless) and provides the address. The original suit was then retracted. The firms lawyers then retain a foreign lawfirm in the site owner's jurisdiction to demand the page be taken down and that all references to their name removed.

As a practial issue, if you don't vigorously defend a case, you can easy lose -- especially where the Judge has no more science knowledge than the average consumer. Currently, I simply archive such pages, post the C&D letter to www.chillingeffects.org and bide my time. What I'd like to do is to have these pages undergo a legal review and repost them -- while lining up expert witnesses with Ph.D's and some pro-bono legal work so that I don't inadvertantly establish some really bad anti-consumer case law.

Any suggestions are welcome.