1982 the power company suspected me of stealing electricity. I noticed they replaced my house watt meter over and over many times in 6 months. One day I came home from work there was a box setting in the yard with wires going up to the power lines with a clamp device on the wires. A week later the box was gone. About 2 weeks later the power company called me, my power use had dropped 90% and they wanted to know why.
I built 30 flat plate solar hot water panels and put them on the roof of my house. I mounted a large radiator inside the house. When the sun came up every morning a thermostat inside 1 panel warmed up to 70 degrees it turned on the water pump. When the warm water reached the radiator in the house a thermostat on the radiator turned on the fan. The system ran all day while we were at work. In 15 degree weather I could get the temperature inside the house to 98 to 100 degrees every day and 90 degrees even on a cloudy day. Wife and I were young we stripped off our clothes and wore swim suit until bed time. We slept with no blankets until the temperature dropped then we used quilts and blankets to keep warm. Temperature inside the house never got below 55 about 8 am the solar heat came on and when we returned home it was 100 degrees in the house again. We never used the house heat system all winter. We had a clothes line in the back yard we used it all winter and all summer. The electric clothes dryer was 40% of our electric bill I bought my own watt meter to test every thing at home. The hot water heater was 12% of our electric bill it was on a timer it came on 30 minutes before bed time so we could take a warm shower then hot water heater shut off for 23 hours. Our electric bill all winter was never over $40 a month.
After talking to the power company they sent the theft inspector to our house. I had fun talking to the theft inspector and showing him what I was doing. The theft inspector told me about all the people they catch trying to steal electricity. The big red flag is sudden drop in the typically power use that they keep on record for every customer. Some people cut holes in the walls to try and rewire the wires on the back side of the watt meter box. People try magnets and all kinds of things but there is 1 thing that really did work in those days. Get a large magnifying glass project a 5000 degree hot spot through the watt meter glass, use the hot spot to distort the turning device inside so it locks up. If the meter locks up it will not read power use but the power company will notice that next time they read the meter and will replace the bad meter. If the power company has to replace a bad meter over and over they know your doing something to the meter. You can not cheat the power company and get away with it for very long. The theft inspector said, if people would only cheat us out of 5% power we would probably never catch them.
The new digital meters these days are high tech. I don't know if they can be defeated. Maybe a 5000 degree hot spot will destroy the circuit board.
When I was in college we were told voltage is out of phase with the current on a large 100 hp electric motor and a watt meter will not read the true power used. You could use the motor to run a generator to power your house. But the biggest problem with that is do the math, idle current with no load attached on a 100 hp motor is about 20 hp all the time, current for a 20 hp motor will be 4 times more than running the AC unit or the Electric dryer none stop all the time. Just because voltage is out of phase with current does not mean you save big money the phase shift is only about 3% that is very little on a sine wave. Draw a sine wave on paper as the wave goes peak to peak 3% less it still about 99.8% full power. The largest electric motor we had at work was 60 hp the power company told me they test every ones power shift from time to time so they can make adjustments to the bill for power factor loss, we pay for it anyway.
Hi,
Very interesting story. I worked on a house years ago that had a large solar heating system. It was a house built to study the effects of having solar energy for both electric and hot water heating. The tanks for the heat system were large and insulated and i think they had rocks inside to hold the heat from the daylight hours.
The facts about motors and energy usage though is pretty well understood. If a motor draws power with a current phase angle of 60 degrees (just for this example) then the power is E*I*cos(60) which is E*I/2, so that is half the E*I product. That's half the power. Now let's say that it is driving a generator and the generator is putting out some power to some devices like light bulbs, and the phase angle again is 60 degrees. Now with 120vac and say the current measurement is 10 amps, with that same phase angle we get 120*10*0.5=600 watts going into the motor. What that means is that the maximum power that we could ever get out of the generator is 600 watts, and that would only happen if it was 100 percent efficient, which BTW no typical generator is. But even if it was, we are seeing 600 watts go in and 600 watts come out, and that's it. We'll never see 600 watts go in and 601 watts come out, that's physics for ya. So we drive 600 watts worth of bulbs but still have to pay for energy use of 600 watts times whatever time it was on for. In reality though the motor and generator would use some power too, so if we see 600 watts on the output we might see 650 or even 700 watts on the input depending on how good the motor and generator were made.
In all likelihood what would happen is once we connect the load the power factor would go down, because then we'd be using more real power, but in the end the real power in (the stuff we pay for) will always be more than the power we get out (the stuff we use). That's a basic law of physics.
So in short, the phase angle can be anything it wants to be we pay for the real power which is E*I*cos(phaseangle) no matter how it is converted and reconverted.
As a side note, some things can be made more efficient with better design, but nothing goes over 100 percent and most things do not get too close to that either. An example would be the LED which we all know and love. The efficiency can be raised by converting the heat from the device back into electrical energy which then helps run the device. That's fine, but there is never more heat than the energy we put into it that made that heat so we never get better than 100 percent, in fact, still much lower because the energy conversion devices are never that good either.
