How do those “power saver” boxes work, if it all, to reduce household appliance electricity usage?
In: Technology
Other commenters answered but they didn’t really eli5 so I’ll give it a shot. Power production and consumption consists of three elements, real power (W), reactive power (Var), and apparent power (VA) but that means nothing to you if you’re not an engineer so let’s use an analogy.
Say you’re at a bar and you order a glass a beer. What you have paid for is a glass full of beer and some foam, think of that as your apparent power. In the actual glass you have the beer itself, what will get you drunk. This is your real power. Lastly, you have the foam on top of the beer. It can’t get you drunk and just takes up space in the glass that could have been used for beer. Think of this as your reactive power or wasted power. In order to be the most efficient you want there to be as little foam as possible to get the most for your money. The same goes for power. You want to have as little reactive power as possible.
What these devices claim to do is reduce the amount of reactive power your home is using so in our analogy it would be reducing the amount of foam in the glass. As others have pointed out, they do not do this. Also, it’s worth noting that residential customers consume very little reactive power. It’s so small that the power companies don’t even put it on the bill.
I hope that made sense and I didn’t sound like a guy just rambling about a glass of beer.
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