If you've looked at the title of this blog entry and said to yourself something like "why would anyone ever want to do that?" ... this isn't the blog entry for you. Rather than subjecting yourself to something you aren't interested in and then feeling terribly compelled to tell me all about it...do me a favor and just don't. Go find something else that's more in line with your interests.
Still here?
It's summer time here in the northern hemisphere and the Seedy Advertisers of the Web(tm) are out in full force with wireless cameras in case someone steals your stuff, portable "air conditioners" to help you keep cool and "power misers" if you need to run your central air conditioning anyway and happen to find yourself blindsided by your next utility bill. I would hope that everyone reading this realizes all of these products are of dubious repute to varying degrees. (In case you're unaware: the little cameras are junk, those portable "air conditioners" are nothing of the sort and the power misers are the worst offenders, being nothing less than a complete scam. Any other products you'll see being advertised in this way are also dubious. If you must buy any of them, at least try to find out what the actual product is, and buy it from somewhere more reputable so you don't overpay.)
In addition to their dubious utility, these products all have one thing in common: they're all advertised with breathless ad copy that goes on for pages and pages. (Some might say it's the kind of thing I'd write, but I have standards.) I've wasted some time reading the sensational garbage on these pages, and soon noticed that just about all of them have the following phrase in common:
"Don’t get stuck with some ancient prototype!"
I don't know if these advertisers are all part of the same organization or if they have just ripped that line off from one another to the point where the true author has been lost to time. (If you really want to know, I'd guess it's the latter.) Intended to induce a sense of urgency, the real meaning here is "don't even think -- just buy this product at a grossly inflated price from us or someone we have an affiliation with".
I decided for no very good reason at all to run this phrase through a web search. I was not disappointed at all by the results. Page after page of scammy "advertorials", often with highly questionable grammar, abound for all manner of products that are likely subpar at best and unlikely to work for the claimed purpose at all.
Extra reading: out of all the products mentioned in this posting, the only one that could actually work is the portable "air conditioner". However, it's nothing of the sort. It's little more than an evaporative cooler, often also known as a "swamp cooler". These are used to great effect in parts of the world where humidity is low and the temperature high. In those places, the evaporative action of the water as air is moved over it really does produce a cooling effect. For a large system, this effect can be substantial. If you live in a place where it is both of hot and humid, no evaporative cooler can help you. You'll just be adding humidity to the air and making the problem worse.
With regard to "power misers", while it is true that highly inductive (or capacitive) loads can distort the AC waveform, residential utility customers are not assessed a fee for doing so and your electric meter's accuracy is not impacted by this taking place. Nor is your electrical utility "benefiting" in any way from this. Some commercial and industrial utility customers may be assessed a fee for operating low power factor loads and causing this distortion, though many install large capacitor or inductor banks to offset the source of the distortion.
Even if you did need to worry about this taking place, a small capacitor placed across the hot and neutral lines feeding an outlet in your home is not going to accomplish anything. Many of these devices are nothing more than a small LED fed by a circuit known as a capacitive dropper. Ironically, this means that they might actually introduce the very distortion they claim to prevent. Safety is another concern: the power line is a nasty place and these devices are unlikely to have been vetted by any reputable electrical safety agency.
