Is this dribble?

[dmc]

always imagined he would be a dailymail man. Is that a pair of combis in the background I see?

Darren

[Paul Herber]

[EricP]

"Ecowatts says the device will cost between £1,500 and £2,000, in line with the price of traditional systems."

LOL So that's a 20 year payback. Nothing new there then. :))

[Andy Hall]

It does seem to have more than a passing similarity to electromagnetic water conditioners......

[Peter Parry]

[The Medway Handyman]

> > I

And magnetic fuel consumption improvers...........

Snak oil is alive & well it seems.

[Doctor Drivel]

No. It is now out of the lab and now ready for production. At £1,500 to £2,000 initially, it is the price of a quality gas boiler. And will cost half of what? Of what electricity cost to heat the house? If half of what gas is then this is a breakthrough. Then if a gas powered Stirling unit is used to generate the electricity, then maybe even cheaper to run, like 1/8 to 1/4 of current gas costs.

[Andy Hall]

No.

There's one born every minute.

Let's see if there's a money back guarantee.....

[Doctor Drivel]

> Seems

They claim 200% out. So a 3kW heater will give 9kW out. About the same as gas to run.

Or part and service backup with friendly staff and music while you wait on the phone.

It was on breakfast TV an the man held it up. Richard & Judy next!

[Andy Dingley]

It's the most arrant bollocks, the Daily Mule believes in it and _you_ believe in it.

What more convincing argument do you want?

[Doctor Drivel]

It seems a few unis do as well. It will still be cheaper to heat via gas with current prices, even if they cut 2/3 of heating by lecky. But is is small and maintenance free.

[dom]

Yup.

Quoting from the Telegraph article of 18th May 2003: ... According to Prof Smith, if there is a flaw in the company's claims, it lies in the measurement of the amount of electrical energy pumped into the cell. It is possible that, as sparks pass between the electrodes, there is an energy surge which would not be picked up by the instruments measuring the electrical input.

Prof Smith said: "This needs to be very carefully checked, as there could be far more energy going in than the makers think." ... "According to the Gardner Watts team, it will take about six months to carry out tests putting the reality of the effect beyond all doubt."

-------------------

So after 4.5 years they still haven't got independent conclusive proof energy out exceeds energy in.

More likely they keep chewing through "partners" as each gets suspicious of being required to test only in one prescribed manner - and new and more gullible partners are sought out.

And yes, those can be found in universities - just encourage an expert to work outside their exact field of expertise - and they can be hoodwinked too.

[dom]

Universities don't "believe" in anything. A few individuals working for a university have expressed interest - none have said they have conclusive proof.

It's noticeable comparing the older Telegraph report and the recent Daily Mail report that all the partners are different.

"Proof" - particularly in terms of university research are independently verifiable and repeatable results published in a respected peer-reviewed journal.

Years roll by and this doesn't happen.

As MH says - snake oil.

[Andy McKenzie]

>>> Seems

If you get 200% more energy out than you put in, then all you have to do is connect the output to the input and all your energy is free. Can I have my £20,000 cheque now please? (Of course you will never see this post because of a conspiracy by the oil companies, George Bush and the Dalai Lama, who are keeping the technology secret as aprt of a grand plan to sell beach huts in Greenland).

Andy

[Dave Baker]

On the face of it it does appear to be about the simplest thing to test you could imagine. You really only have to measure two things, the amount of electricity going in and the temperature increase in X litres of water in the device. Multiply that by the specific heat of water and see if you have more joules coming out than going in. A morning's work for any semi competent physicist.

[dom]

To re-quote my earlier post:

"According to Prof Smith, if there is a flaw in the company's claims, it lies in the measurement of the amount of electrical energy pumped into the cell. It is possible that, as sparks pass between the electrodes, there is an energy surge which would not be picked up by the instruments measuring the electrical input."

[Dave Baker]

I'm not sure what he's on about because if there's a meter measuring the kWhs going in properly the electrodes inside the gadget can do what they like. It ain't rocket science. The electricity board seem to manage it in every house in the country without too much hassle.

[dom]

Every instrument will have a limited bandwidth of some kind.

Traditional electricity meters I think would be unlikely to register short (

[Andy Dingley]

Actually it's harder than you might think. Measuring errors here are what tripped up Fleischmann & Pons.

[Andy McKenzie]

Agreed, but then Flieschmann and Pons cells were meant/claimed to deliver less than a watt of heat, and often people were looking for fluctuations of less than 1% of the input power. I can see those measurements being hard to make.

This particular brand of mongoose-snack lubricant is meant to deliver house warming levels of heat, I guess in the multi kilowatt range. It would seem fairly easy to derive an experiment that used, say, two batteries (with inverters as one to power a conventional immersion heater, another to power the device, and measure the time taken to heat one domestic immersion tank to a given temperature, versus the resulting use of energy.

In addition to measurement errors the possibility that a chemical reaction is occurring - that will end whenever the secret supply of 'catalyst' is exhausted - within about n days of the cheque clearing your bank account, where n is a small number.

Andy