How? You might be asking yourself followed by hundreds of ideas that all relate to altering your life style or worse yet spending a ton of money. Well I hate to disappoint but you can cut your electric bill by up to 25% or more per month by improving your power factor.
Again, I am sure you are thinking, “could you be a bit more specific?” OK lets get into what exactly is power factor. Your home or business power factor is a measure of the efficiency with which you utilize electricity from your buildings electrical distribution panel. Otherwise known as your breaker panel or just the electric panel but not to be confused with a fuse box which I will explain later. The average home in the US today has a power factor rating of approximately .70 which is equated to being 70%. Now if your automobile were 70% efficient with your gas mileage then chances are you would have it in the mechanics shop every other week thinking there has to be something wrong with it.
Residential Power Factor Conditioner
Yes, your power factor rating can be improved and the quickest, most affordable way in which to do this Power Factor Correction is with a Power Factor Conditioner. This device is a capacitor based unit which can take a normal line voltage and through the inherent properties of a capacitor increase that voltage to several times the line voltage it was charged by and it will hold or store that energy until it is needed by the circuit elsewhere. Now let me briefly explain why you are burning through more electricity than you actually need.
Every appliance in your home that runs by use of an AC motor is what we call an inductive load. These motors spin by means of an electric current being applied to copper coils with an iron core which induces a magnetic field that is used to make the motor spin. There is a far more detailed and technical explanation I could offer but lets keep this simple for the layman out there. Based on this very simple type of motor are nearly every major appliance used in any home or business such as Refrigerators, Freezers, Washers, Dryers, Air Conditioning units, Fans, Blowers, Compactors, Dishwashers, Water Pumps, Compressors and the list goes on and on.
Every time one of these appliances is turned on, the motor which makes this appliance do whatever its function is will draw up to 6 TIMES the amount of energy it requires to operate normally and when this huge draw of power occurs it will spin your electric meter to get that power. Now let us consider how many times per day all of these wonderful appliances that make our lives so much easier turn on and off everyday. Obviously there are a great many appliances that we ourselves must turn on when they are needed and as only you know what those are I will not go into a listing of them but just know that they require this huge amount of energy to start. The appliances I will focus on are those we generally take for granted and for the most part we do not notice them much until they breakdown or stop working correctly like our refrigerators, air conditioning systems, well pumps, sump pumps, freezers and the like.
Given the number of times all of these appliances and systems turn on everyday if we place a power factor conditioner between that appliance or system and your electric meter we have in effect placed a large reservoir of energy into the circuitry so that whenever that appliance or system turns on and requires this additional energy it will drain down the power factor conditioner to get it instead of spinning your meter. It sounds very simple and in reality it is very effective at greatly reducing the energy consumption of your home or business every month. No this is not a new technology that we need to prove as it originally was introduced during the last energy crisis in the 1970′s but has in fact been greatly improved upon today. The power factor conditioners sold and installed by Global Team Direct, LLC also have built in Surge Suppression and being as these devices are installed on your electrical distribution panel will effect and protect every device, appliance or system you have energized from that electrical panel. Checkout a power factor conditioner demo video so you can see how and why these very simple devices can give you great savings on your electric bill every month!
Another very important fact that should be mentioned about power factor conditioners is that they will only allow the exact amount of energy needed by a given appliance or system to be drawn from them. You are probably wondering how you can tell if a given appliance is receiving too much energy. Simple, just place your hand on a ac motor that has just turned off to see if it is warm or hot to the touch. Heat dissipation is a sure sign that your appliance is literally wasting energy and appliances that are running with the use of a power factor conditioner will actually operate cooler than they would without and as heat is a primary cause of motor failures you would have to agree that the cooler your appliances can operate the longer they will operate without failure or breaking down. This little fact will save you hundreds of dollars in needlessly having to replace these appliances in the future.
To wrap this topic up I am going to leave you with this mathematical thought: Jane Doe has an average monthly electric bill of $900 before she decides to have a power factor conditioner installed on her breaker panel. Her electric bill on the first full month after its installation she noted that her bill had dropped by $225, and subsequent monthly bills were averaging a $200 per month savings. Given this trend and the fact that her power factor conditioner came with a 5 year manufacturers warranty and was expected to last for a period of 20 years she was able to forecast the following: $200 x 12 = $2400 x 20 = $48,000 which if you think about it is not bad considering that she only paid approximately $2,450 for her old outdated fuse box to be upgrade to an electric breaker panel and while the electrician was there he sold and installed the power factor conditioner. This example was based on what we here at Global Team Direct, LLC do several times for people in Southeastern Wisconsin every year and the reason we must upgrade old outdated fuse boxes aside from them being old technology that typically is found to be out of code for nearly all home inspections is because in order to use a power factor conditioner we must install a 2 pole 20 amp breaker on which to install the power factor conditioner.
