Metropol

My mother has just bought herself one of these things
http://www.standby-saver.co.uk/energy_wizard

It's by the same company who make the standby saver plug who were on dragons den and that thing now sells in Tesco.

The thing i'm wondering is how exactly does one of these things work? I see words such as filtration and voltage regulation and my mind is telling me "bullshit" and "dowsing" but I honestly don't understand electric enough to give it a proper yay or nay.

There is a lightbulb wholesaler who mentioned it on their blog and claimed an "over-enthusiastic rep" had given them one and then they noticed their power consumption did dip.

Some marginally useful facts about my own setup, I live in a c1920 tennement that was either completely or for the most part rewired in 2004/2005 [walls moved around but some sockets look older than others]. The majority of my appliances are plugged into extension plugs and I have a selection of eco crap already (such as CFLs everywhere bar the kitchen, an energy monitor from Scottish Hydro and a remote control surge protector for my PC that lets me cut the power to the printer, monitor etc from a switch on my desk)

First thoughts lead me to think that, if it is a valid product, the device tunes the domestic circuitry to improve the Power Factor of the dwelling thus getting more 'useful power' and wasting less.

Find it hard to accept it though.

Power Factor on en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Others might have better ideas.

Seems I'm on the case .... which is rubbished in several articles searched (with relevant terms) on google- Click.

Just thinking in terms of the numbers: my tv goes to 1W in standby. So per day that's 24 Wh, and so it'd take about 40 days to get to 1kWh, which is about 20p. So you're looking at £2 a year saving.

Is it perhaps more likely that you buy these if you're generally trying to save money, and the savings these people are seeing are the net result?

I understand the Standby Saver. But the Energy Saver? The very lack of any detail in their "explanation" of how it works tells me all I need to know.