EMI monitor & filters

[Rathji]

So my grandparents are visiting for the day and brought this EMI (electromagnetic interference) monitor to test my house.

They claim several positive effects from installing a EMI filter like health related and energy savings. Obviously, I am not concerned about the health stuff, but I am wondering if there is any possibility of the filter, which is supposed to reduce spikes in the electricity, saving energy in any meaningful amount.

Would it be any different than a power conditioner? Obviously, I can't get any answers from them, because they are just relying on something they tag online and are taking as gospel, without understanding how it supposedly works.

I am sure if I had a few minutes online A I could figure this out but was hoping someone on CP would have an immediate answer that I could use as a basis for discussion before they had home after dinner.

[Northendzone]

Dinner the airing grievances....have fun.

Sorry I have nothing else to offer

[sclitheroe]

Best plan of action is to mock them throughout dinner. Ask them repeatedly which one of them is the electrical engineer.

Nothing short of a proper professional power conditioning system is going to have any improvement on residential power. And nothing designed to run in a residence is that susceptible to power line quality issues, unless gramps happens to live in an iron lung, in which case I might be more concerned about it.

[Rathji]

I tried to keep the mocking to a minimum, he is old and stuff like this is what keeps him busy. I think it might be something he is marketing.

He did give us a demo of this product though, which involved plugging 2 little boxes into 2 separate outlets in my house, while measuring at a third with this strange meter which indicated in a unit, mG (gotta look that up), that indicated how dangerous our house was, in terms of EMI. It reduced from 480, which I think that indicated that tumors were due any day, and to just over 100, which the chart said was a lot better.

[Regulator75]

Plus you can talk to spirits with those devices.

[Traditional_Ale]

So Gramps got a PKE Meter for Christmas? How's Sigourney Weaver doing?

[Ducay]

With EMI that high in your house, you'll probably need a Q-Ray bracelet to offset the bad magnosphere joojoo

[kermitology]

Power conditioners only have value for commercial applications. Nearly every appliance in your house likely has a power conditioner at its power intake, but none of that is actually going to save you money. The concept is based on energy companies measuring real vs actual power whereby the power factor (the ratio between them) is what is used to determine how much power you're using, therefore using power co diction era, you bring your power factor closer to unity and then save money on electricity.

Sounds great except that's only used in commercial applications and you get charged for massive machinery not having a power factor closer to unity.

In the home, power factor isn't considered at all, so your grandparents got 100% scammed. You can look up power factor and enmax to prove it to them if you like. My neighbour had the same thing in his head until I showed that stuff to him and he then decided not to buy the power conditioner.

[Northendzone]

I think I saw the stay puffed marshmallow man lurking around the mckenzie retirement home....

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by kermitology

Power conditioners only have value for commercial applications. Nearly every appliance in your house likely has a power conditioner at its power intake, but none of that is actually going to save you money. The concept is based on energy companies measuring real vs actual power whereby the power factor (the ratio between them) is what is used to determine how much power you're using, therefore using power co diction era, you bring your power factor closer to unity and then save money on electricity.

Sounds great except that's only used in commercial applications and you get charged for massive machinery not having a power factor closer to unity.

In the home, power factor isn't considered at all, so your grandparents got 100% scammed. You can look up power factor and enmax to prove it to them if you like. My neighbour had the same thing in his head until I showed that stuff to him and he then decided not to buy the power conditioner.

Awesome info, thanks

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by kermitology

In the home, power factor isn't considered at all

I wondered if this would change with widespread deployment of CFL bulbs - all of which have a lower power factor than incandescent due to the miniature step up transformers inside them.

And from my research it turns out that electric companies widely deploy power factor correction at their substations, and can also do dynamic power factor correction to minimize loads. So even if you had a home device that did power factor correction, it would only be between you and the substation, making it effectively invisible to the power generators in the first place.

Neat stuff.

[kermitology]

Yeah, like I said its only really important for massive pieces of machinery that have motors (inductors) which can imbalance the power factor and I think even throw off phase. I'm guessing a little bit, but I'm thinking back to my power systems labs in third year university, where we had to match up a generator with the phase of the power grid before syncing them up.

Heck I did that in high school come to think of it. Neat.