this is the most important invention since the printing press it comes in
many shapes and sizes and has even more names but don't worry about that
according to the sellers of these amazing little gadgets they do
everything from saving you money to cleaning your dirty unstable electricity
to helping you finally get a good night's sleep but you better hurry we're
almost sold out there's no time for research when other people are buying
them all just look at this graph
and if you act right now you'll get 50
65 no wait 70% off look at all these
logos of news organizations that you might trust don't they look nice here or
maybe over here wow these sites really
are a master class in scummy marketing
but the craziest thing about these little miracle gizmos they aren't
actually a scam I mean they absolutely
are a scam but at the same time you know what this is going to take some
explaining up roll the thing for our sponsor big thanks to seic for
sponsoring this video they are Prime and focus series power supplies come with a
12year warranty and we're going to talk about how they could actually save you
some money on your power bill a little bit later on let's kick off with the
beef you're feeling one with the all metal housing if this thing's just a
rock and some hot glue this is going to be a real short
video man this thing is cool we can see
every individual wire in here on the next slide we get a really good look at
a couple of resistors a diode uh We've
also got what looks like a little LED here and this boxy structure if we alter
our view a little bit enhance shows us that this is in fact a capacitor we can
see the two conductive plates inside of it now if half of the manufacturer
claims about these are true that right there is the hardest working capacitor
on the planet let's change gears and move over to our plastic ones
well seems like they've got a couple more components on their boards
including some capacitors on the boards themselves but the design is similar
overall so why don't we change gears and talk about what these things are
supposed to do if you're familiar with electrical circuits you might already
know about inductive resistive and capacitive loads for everyone else
here's the tldr if something is mostly just making heat like a hot plate or an
old school incandescent light bulb it's a res resistive load and the voltage and
current remain in Phase or lined up if
something is moving ceiling fans and washing machines are good examples here
it's probably an inductive load and the current legs behind the voltage by
90° capacitive loads meanwhile tend to be more hidden especially in the home
this is where the current leads 90° ahead of voltage so these loads are
typically used to balance out inductive loads and they're mostly found in well
stuff that has capacitors in it like this Prime PX power supply from our
sponsor C Sonic who has more models rated at Titanium or above by
cybernetics than any other manufacturer that means more than 90% efficiency with
a power factor of 98 or better that
power factor thing that's going to mean something to you in a minute coming back
to different kinds of loads if you've got a big industrial building that is
stuffed full of AC Motors Transformers and the like you can end up with so much
inductive load that it actually starts to impact the efficiency of the power
grid itself and I'm not talking efficiency like some waste heat from
your noodle extruding machine I'm talking the power company needs to send
you more power than you're actually using harming their efficiency that's
where something called the power factor comes into play it's a measure of how
much power is doing work called active power versus how much power it looks
like you're using called apparent power and we can find it with this very
Pythagoras looking formula here the ideal power factor is one meaning that
all the power you're drawing from the grid is doing actual work anything lower
and you are impacting the efficiency of the grid which your power company is
100% going to charge you for so then how
do you reduce the inductive load so your power company doesn't start piling on
sech charges capacitors the power system
in any big industrial facility likely has one or more more capacitor Banks
which act to smooth out their heavy inductive loads hence the capacitors
that showed up on our CT scans but here's the thing while the theory is
actually sound residential customers you
know the people they're marketing these devices too don't get charged based on
power factor a big part of the reason for that is pretty much all of the heavy
power devices in a house are either a resistive load or they already have
capacitors build into them to compensate for their inductive loads we looked from
Alberta to Zimbabwe and across the board residential and small business customers
are build only for the active power used
now I'm sure there's some outliers that you guys are already furiously typing
comments about but generally speaking it's only when you ramp up to large
commercial and Industrial facilities that power factor really enters the
equation and the folks selling these magical gizmos know all of this they
just don't care power factor is that
convenient Little Nugget of truth that they can wrap in the layers and layers
of BS marketing that your conspiracy loving uncle needs to convince them to
buy these things for the entire family for Christmas this year and some of them
take their scam even further let's crack this one open using our handy dandy
Precision screwdriver kit from LTD store.com built-in bit storage fidget
spinner worthy uncap and built-in magnetic Parts tray with the one screw
removed uh yeah there's not a whole lot
going on in here we've got a basic LED power circuit that's how you know it's
on then we just go ahead and remove this second screw and this IC right here is a
bridge rectifier that converts AC to DC so far so good but this is the part
where we get into some funny business do you see our um capacitor here well one
of the two leads going to it doesn't seem to actually connect to the rest of
the circuit you can see it in the X-ray or actually just by holding it up to the
light there's no Trace to that pad so my
question now then is if this is just here for looks is this even a real
capacitor let's find out before I connect this it's worth
noting that this is in nanofarads right now that's effectively zero Moment of
Truth is it a real
capacitor survey says no I got to say
I'm actually kind of surprised that it is more cost effective to build a fake
Capac fer than it was to drop the 15 or maybe 30 cents on a real one it's got
some weight to it at least I cut one open see what's oh did you cut one open
let's have a look at our fake capacitor oh is that like a little bit of cement
that they just smeared on it it kind of looks like that whatever it is the
bottom line is if you want to save some money on your power bill maybe you
should consider upgrading your rig to a new 80 plus Platinum rated Prime PX
power supply from our sponsor seic the prime PX series is fully modular and has
you covered all the way from 650 watts to
1,600 Watts backed by an industry-leading 12year warranty it uses
a 135 mm fan to keep things cool and quiet and that fan doesn't even spin up
until it reaches somewhere in the neighborhood of around 30% load with
power supplies this efficient more of your money is going right into those
sweet sweet FPS instead of being wasted
generating excess heat and if you're not sure how much power you need you can
just click on the calculate button on their website and they will help you find the perfect fit so find your next
power supply at the link down below and find your next video to watch at this
video right here where you can watch me get shocked repeatedly as we figure out
if those Wireless anti-static wristbands are a scam with the help of our friend
electroboom yo Jordan how much did we spend on these things um about 20 bucks
for four well I mean at that price at least it's uh decent value as a
nightlight $5 nightlight