Enthetan may be right on this.
I did some research and found the exact GIG 2 that they brought to the meeting. It was tested as described below. The test results do not look good, in fact it does look like a hoax.
One other thing. I went to
www.newagepowerbids.com/ This looks like a different company than what Enthetan found. It looks like it is a legimate company dealing in electrical service. Their website doesn't mention anything about the GIG 2 device. They just extoll the virtues of deregulation and claim that you can save big money on your electrical bill by choosing a provider with the lowest rates. They claim that they gather bids from the various providers and lead you to the lowest bid. That seems to be all they do, they find rates from all the independent providers plus the big Utility companies and make sure you get the best available rate. The bill you get from your big utility company is adjusted by whatever it is they do and it is seamlessly incorporated into the monthly power bill which you receive.
The promoters of the event I attended appear to be combining two business ventures and making it seem as if it were one. They tie New Age Power Bids in together with the GIG 2 as if it were all one company. New Age may be an honest power bidding provider, locating the best rates for its clients while GIG 2 may be a scam company selling a worthless electrical box for $600. The box apparently does nothing at all. By the way, the testing agency says that the company does not offer any warantee whatsoever on the GIG 2, i.e. they do not give you back your $675 as they claimed in the meeting.
THIS COULD BE A SCHEME TO SELL THE $600 GIG 2. That is where all the money is for them, in the sale of that product which though highly touted does not have any tangible benefits. Selling that product probably was difficult so for marketing purposes, they brought New Age Power Bids into the picture and combined New Age and the GIG 2 into seemingly one program. On New Age Power Bids, they make $9 a sale plus typically 6 cents a month indefinitely from every sale, this part of their business is set up on a multi level marketing system but the amounts earned are tiny unless you sell to thousands of people. The real money both for them and for anyone joining this program is the $600 box for which they pay you $150 commission. That box probably only costs them something like $25 to manufacture and is apparently worthless. They put the box on a multilevel marketing plan as well.
Anyway, I now believe Enthetan is right about the GIG 2. Signing up with New Age Power Brokers may be okay, but you are only talking about $2 per survey and $7 per sign up plus 1.2% residual on the persons electric bill. On a $50 bill, this would be 6 cents a month. Therefore, your potential on a given client is only $9.00 up front and 6 cents a month residual. You would have to sell over 500 clients a month to make $5,000 per month. That means you need to sell about 25 people a day, working a 5 day week. There appears to be no money in that and who can drum up 25 sales every single day. The theory is that everyone needs power any and they will usually sign up to receive lower rates if there is no additional cost to them. Using this thinking, it might be possible to sign up thousands of clients if large rallies are held. Maybe buying your power using New Age power bidders is sensible. At least you save on your monthly bill but that is about it. The program taken as a whole appears to be a scam.
Lakey
HERE ARE THE RESULTS OF TESTING THE GIG 2 WHICH I FOUND ON THE INTERNET - I SHOW ONLY THE HIGHLIGHTS
HomeProductsDeceptions
..........snip other tested products to get to the GIG 2>...............
Contact usPrivacy StatementNews Voltage Control Guard or VCG1
AC neutral bus electromotive power rectification device
The GiG 2 web site claims savings of 15% to 28% in single phase applications (household power is single phase). I'd classify it as an unworkable device except that the sales pages lead consumers to believe that they will get substantial energy savings when the most likely improvement is zero. Most residential loads are purely resistive (electric hot water tanks, baseboard electric heating, electric stoves, incandescent lights etc.) and there is absolutely nothing you can do to improve these kinds of circuits.
After my first version of this page, I received correspondence, including some lab results from the company and it appears that like many inventors, they really believe they have a technological breakthrough and that success is just around the corner. I wish them luck. Unfortunately, other than notoriously unreliable consumer testimonials, there is nothing to back up these energy saving claims.
I reviewed the lab results and found the experiment to be fundamentally flawed. It consisted of a single 24 hour kWh totalization of energy usage with an undefined variable load (a bank of PC's). The single data point indicated a reduction of 7% in energy use. You have to control all the independent variables and show that results are repeatable. As for the testing company -- shame on you for shoddy work and providing a report that would have received an F as a university lab assignment.
If the claims were true, using a savings of only 5% on the US generation capacity of 4157 million MWh (in 2007) -- the annual savings would be in the billions of dollars in the USA alone. The obvious approach would be to patent, publish and then license the technology -- it would become standard equipment everywhere, the inventor would be richer than Bill Gates and a Nobel prize would follow.
There is no electrical theory to support the idea of any device that can perform this feat. The closest device is the power factor correction unit, but this only saves money in a commercial setting with inductive loads. So, immediately we are off to a bad start. Claims that defy our current our understanding of physics should immediately raise red flags.
From the marketing material, we have the following claims:
The Voltage Control Guard is a revolutionary device that returns unused energy to proper phase and polarity on the neutral side, thus decreasing the over all demand within the system. It does not store or consume energy, and it has no moving parts, capacitors, or resistors. Additionally, the VCG does not require the use of surge suppressors or spike protection. ... we use no capacitors, resistors, surge protection, spike protection, or moving parts. Our technology is revolutionary and patented, it has been independently proven, third party tested and supported by substantial case study data and consumer testimonials to verify that our product provides the savings reflected in our literature.
Consumers are not equipped to test energy saving devices and their testimonials are meaningless, even if well meaning. No device that connects to incoming power lines has ever been demonstrated achieving massive energy savings - so don't hold your breath.
Voltage Control Guard has a UL 916 rating and is approved by Met Labs. Additional third party testing was performed by an independent laboratory and achieved positive results. Independent lab tests are an ongoing part of our research and development.
In single phase electrical installations we are seeing savings ranging from 15 to 28 percent reduction in daily KWH. This is not believable. These are huge savings. The sponsored lab result provided showed 7% savings and this can be explained by other uncontrolled variables.
we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, and specifically disclaim, following the term of the limited warranty, any warranty of merchantability, fitness of the device for a particular purpose, ... That at least, seems like a good idea.
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Reference material for the curious:
1.The current company making these is GIG2 Group, Inc. website is
www.gig2inc dot com
2.The previous name of the company was CUTT-A-WATT Incorporated. The old sites are archived at
http://web.archive.org/web/20030618020052/http://www.cutt-a-watt.com/index.html and a similar site is at
http://web.archive.org/web/20071012135343/http://cawenterprises.com/index.php
Technical analysis
Here is an analogy. You want to save on your water bill and are interested in the "miracle flush". You purchase it and a plumber comes to your home and installs an extra 1 inch pipe in parallel with your 4" sewer pipe. The toilet is supposed to now use less water to flush. The problem is that the toilet flushes a volume of water equal to the capacity of the flush box - so you achieved nothing. Same goes for electrical appliances -- if you turn on a 1000W hair dryer for an hour, you burn 1kWh of energy. It doesn't matter what you do to the sewer or bus bar, the hair dryer is not going to get hotter, blow harder or somehow use 30% less energy to dry your hair.
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What we don't want is the riff-raff crowding out our treasures
We want to keep our treasures uncrowded and un-sullied
