Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss KVAR

Does anyone have any expereince with a product called KVAR Energy Controller?Its supposed to drop your power bill anywhere from 8 to 25%.It only works on motors,but my shop elec bills are killing me cause of the heat here this summer.thier web address is http://www.kvarec.com

I've never heard of them. How much do these suckers cost? 3 year payback doesn't tell me a lot.

I'm thinking 20 yr. payback, if any. The deal about a qualified electrician to test, tune, etc. by itself would eat up a good bit. But how would you know unless you read the meter with only 1 item running, with and without this device, for long enough to see any differences.
There are other ways, but unless you are heavily into electrical consumption analysis, you wouldnt know how to.
Save your money for something else, such as poles, lures, docks, turn the AC up 1 degree. There are no magic bullets for costs of electricity.

I was told it would run about $600.00 installed.Sorry,I forgot to mention that.

burger, did that gobbedly-gook looking info at the website make any sense to you?

I could sell cow magnets to install next to people's power lines to fine-tune their electricity usage for less and claim power savings as well. (They work such wonders on gas mileage already.)

I replaced my water softener wit' 'em

Theo, I kept opening different windows in hopes of reading their methodology. It all said the same thing. No teck talk.
The only thing I could get out of it was maybe they are trying to say they are capacitors placed in parallel with the windings of the motor that would make a resonant circuit and reduce the reactance. But, for a motor to work, still I X R = P. And as you know P is what we're looking for.

It's been a few decades since I had a class on power, but IIRC businesses with large inductive loads (lots of motors) are required to balance it with capacitors to keep the power factor close to nil. I wonder if this thing monkeys with the power factor, putting enough phase shift in to get more of the power for "free" since it's not detected by the meter. If so, the power company isn't going to like it.

O.K.,a little more info.I talked to a friend who is an electrition and he descibed this thing as a "whole house surge protector".It is installed at the top of the breaker box to "balance the loads on both 110 lines.He said although I probably wouldnt see much of a savings on my power bill,I would definatly get extended life out of all my major appliances.It would also control power surges which I seem to have a lot of in my area.
Another friend,who told me about this to begin with,has had the company come out and do an evaluation on several of his busnesses and should get a report back next week.I will keep ya'll updated and if he goes for it I'll find out the results from his power bills and let you know if he got duped or not.
An on the side,I've read several blogs about this and the electritions are saying its hogwash,with a few exceptions from the few that are installing them.The installers claim they work,and all thier customers that have them are very pleased,but noone on either side of the debate has posted any documented facts.And thier debates have gtten pretty ugly too.Makes me appreciate this forum all the more.Even though we freqeuntly disagree with each other,at least we are always polite about it.