THIS BLOG HAS MOVED - click here for new site!

Blogsome, host of this blog since before it had a name, are closing down. The large and alarming message that now appears above all management-interface pages says they’ll be around until the seventh of December, so I’ve got a while to find a new host.

I’ve got an in-house expert on this stuff who’ll probably tell me where to go (a function she is sometimes called upon to perform on other occasions). But I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask my readers, too.

I’ve got a WordPress WXR-format backup of everything here (because all of my images are on dansdata.com, the whole backup is only that one 12.1Mb WXR file), so I’ll very probably be moving to another WordPress host. I’d also like to be able to run my own Google ads, as I do on this site. The new host also has to have a demonstrated commitment to freedom of speech, to make sure they won’t drop me like a hot rock if another Firepower debacle happens.

Apart from that, I’m open to offers.

What do you all reckon?

I wrote, in 2010, about the miraculous Keseco Current Improvement System. It’s a power-saving device that’s claimed to work because of, in brief, technologies unknown to science.

I like this kind of power-saving box. Most power-savers are claimed to be some sort of power-factor corrector. Ones like the Keseco devices that’re supposed to work by “rotating electromagnetic waves” or “non-Hertzian frequencies” are more fun. They still don’t work, but at least they’re more original.

When I saw a new comment on the Keseco post today, I presumed it’d be one of the spammers who occasionally get through the net and spray ads for handbags or wristwatches all over my old posts.

I was wrong, though. It was this:

We are representing Ultra device, made by Keseco in EU market.
We do agree that claims to achieve superconductivity in wires seem to be unrealistic. And we partly agree with that. However we confirm that we have tested Ultra in various cases: domestic and industrial. We have used Chauvin Arnoux ca 8335 power analyzer to measure w,kva,kvar,Amps, U, harmonics, cos fi, etc. We confirm that Ultra device really works in reducing active power, reactive power, slightly improving cos fi.It reduces total consumption by 5-12%. The saving % depends on a number of factors.It does not turn wires into superconductors, but reduces energy loses in them.Detailed reports can be send upon request. Currently Keseco obtained SGS, TGM reports on saving. The patent they have for energy saving device is real.It is not for design, it is for energy saving.See: http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2003061097&recNum=1&docAn=KR2003000104&queryString=AN:PCT/KR03/00104&maxRec=1 . Ultra device really saves energy For more information on research works we have done with ultra,please, send request to :info@energita.lt.

Energita

If it’s all the same to you, unnamed Energita representative, I’ll just wait for this miraculous device to make you the billions of dollars you so richly deserve. Then I’ll be able to learn about it from, say, the paperwork for the Nobel Prize the Keseco designers have won, or the sticker on the side of the Keseco box that I, like everyone else in the world, will have purchased.

Just look at that patent. It’s for a box…

…with some busbars in it, the busbars only being connected to power at one end, and the inside of the box provided with some mysterious ceramic coating and “conductive plates” that aren’t electrically connected to anything.

And that’s it.

Conventional electrophysics says that this box, plugged in parallel with household mains power, will do nothing. It’s not even part of a circuit.

You allege that you have real evidence that it’s a power saver.

So now all you have to do is send these patented boxes to universities, technical colleges and appropriate governmental bodies until someone takes notice, and then here comes all that money and that definite Nobel Prize, for the staggering discovery of how “rotating electromagnetic waves” make the magic happen.

(Or the people who invented it could, after patenting their discovery, have written it up as a scientific paper. Get it published and the results replicated, then sell licenses, and you could become billionaires without having to actually manufacture anything at all.)

You’d think that in the several years the Keseco device has been around, they’d have managed to do this. But instead, just like every other magic power saver or magic gasoline pill, the devices are sold piecemeal to whatever end-users can be persuaded to buy one.

Electrical components that aren’t connected to anything are strangely popular in scientifically… novel… devices and talismans.

Inside the “EMPower Modulator“, for instance…

…are three aluminium plates that aren’t connected to anything.

The “Q-Link Pendant“…

…is similarly electrically innovative. And now we’ve got this Keseco box-of-nothing, too.

Energita sell a few other odd devices (machine-translated English version).

This power-monitoring system (translated) seems kosher, as do these light bulbs (translated), and I think this gadget (translated) may be OK too; it seems to be some sort of improved thermostat for freezers.

But then there’s something called a “Fuel Activator” (translated), magnetic fuel improvers (translated) and, of course, the Keseco doodad (translated).

I’m never sure what to think when someone who sells these sorts of products remonstrates with me. I presume they quite often, especially when they’re a reseller instead of the originator of the product, actually believe what they’re saying. They’re seldom abusive or clearly mentally peculiar.

There but for the grace of critical thinking, I suppose.

I love it when I don’t have to go looking for an interestingly fishy business proposal, because some obliging organisation mails it to me.

(It’s even better than unsolicited crank e-mail.)

Strictly speaking, this one wasn’t actually mailed to me, but to my partner Anne. It wasn’t precisely aimed at her, either; they had our old address right, but if the recipient’s name had been Norma Jeane Baker, the letter would have been addressed to Jeane Norma Baker.

So anyway, it’s from an outfit called “CollectionPoint“, and they’re pleased to tell Anne that there’s $AU887.50 waiting for her in an undisclosed location. Apparently CollectionPoint do debt recovery too, for a fee of 25% plus GST. They don’t quote a fee for this other kind of money recovery, but I think it’s safe to say it’s not small.

We’re not exactly rolling in dough at the moment, so a forgotten nest-egg could be quite handy.

(Do send me some money if you feel like it. We’re hardly on the bread-line, though; I assure you that the lights will stay on, the cats will still get their little tins of fancy fish and the freeloading cockatoos will get their seed without your kind assistance.)

The questions that immediately occurred to me were, of course, “does this money actually exist?”, and “is this outfit charging a fee for something you can do quite easily yourself?”

The answers to these questions are surprising and unsurprising, respectively.

“Unclaimed money” has been a scam-artist favourite for a long, long time. Unexpected inheritances. Prizes in lotteries you never even entered. A permutation in which the money may not actually strictly speaking be yours, but a morally upstanding person says you can still get hold of it, for a price. Some sort of purported government involvement. The list goes on.

The unclaimed-money business has even spawned meta-scams, in which the sucker pays for an information pack or franchise opportunity or something so they can start a work-at-home business finding unclaimed judicial judgements, or whatever, and creaming off a fat commission.

But CollectionPoint actually are telling us about money we really can claim. We’ll claim it as soon as we can make a big enough pile of ID documents.

CollectionPoint are also, however, offering to take people’s money to help them do something that is not actually difficult to do - or at least not significantly more difficult to do - by yourself.

The Australian government has a site called “Moneysmart” that’ll point you at various unclaimed-money searches. Anne found the money CollectionPoint are talking about via the NSW Office of State Revenue site. Which is presumably the same way CollectionPoint found it.

So CollectionPoint do provide a helpful service. They alert you to the existence of money you probably can actually collect. And then you can throw the CollectionPoint letter away and go and collect your money the free way. CollectionPoint do not appear to be breaking any laws.

Well, they’re not breaking any laws right now, anyway. The Australian Government’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs are happy to list CollectionPoint on their scam information page - apparently CollectionPoint sent letters to war widows claiming to be acting on behalf of that Department. And it’s not hard to find other people talking about CollectionPoint in not-entirely-complimentary terms.

CollectionPoint come off pretty well in this blog post, for instance, until several allegedly separate people show up in the comments, all loudly defending CollectionPoint and all suffering from a suspicioulsy similar inability to construct a sentence, or in many cases even a word.

CollectionPoint also score themselves a mention in this Age article; apparently CollectionPoint have sent out follow-up letters implying - but not exactly actionably saying - that if you don’t use their services, you’ll miss out on the money altogether.

A commenter here says that after a CollectionPoint letter put him onto some money he could claim, and he claimed it himself without using CollectionPoint’s services, CollectionPoint sent him a bill.

This bloke says CollectionPoint offered to collect $500 owing to him for a mere $160 - a 32% fee. Even Today Tonight doesn’t like them.

Oh, and according (PDF) to the Consumer Action Law Centre, CollectionPoint charged a 25% fee for recovering some unclaimed superannuation money for an elderly client after he provided them with the identifying information he could have used to get the money back for free. But then CollectionPoint jacked up the 25% fee by adding another 10% GST charge (so 27.5%, altogether). The Consumer Action Law Centre took the case to court, and (another PDF) the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal decided that CollectionPoint were indeed gouging their client, and reduced the fee payable to CollectionPoint by 45%.

The funny part, though, was that in response to this lawsuit CollectionPoint filed their own, in the same court, against the Consumer Action Law Centre’s lawyers. They alleged “misleading and deceptive conduct” and an obscure kind of defamation, “injurious falsehood”, which is becoming less obscure after recent reforms to defamation law in Australia.

In my non-lawyerly estimation, I think the result of this counter-suit can fairly be described as “widespread puzzlement”.

So anyway, we’re getting our eight hundred and something bucks.

CollectionPoint won’t see a penny of it.

A reader writes:

Having read this…

…I became inspired to upgrade my UPS as it’s time to replace the 5.5AH gel cell, so why not kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately, I don’t know a heck of a lot about the ratings and other tech jargon behind what will make this all work, so I am sending this email in the hope that perhaps you could take a moment to take a look at what I have and let me know if it seems likely that it will work for a start and then what I should go out to buy to make it happen. I should at this point mention that I live in Thailand, the land where no matter what you want to buy, you can’t find it. But still, given that I have a UPS unit and access to a place that sells cheap car batteries, I figured there may be hope.

Firstly, this is what I have. (The specs are in English at the bottom of the page.) The gel cell inside is a “Model AC-1255″ rated at 12V 5.5AH/20Hz in case that means anything to you.

Does it seem likely that if I connect a car battery (or two) to this device I will be able to achieve similar results to what you did in your article? () Or is this UPS just not up for the task of keep a car battery or two charged and ready for the task at hand.

Out where I live power is OFTEN interrupted, but rarely more than 5-10 minutes at a time (90% of the time it’s just a few seconds), but of course those few seconds are the ones immediately preceding my clicking “submit” on a 2 hour email type-up marathon. I NEED to have some form of UPS going but am not looking for hours of use after power-out. Just enough time for me to shut down the system gracefully.

I would appreciate any insight you could offer to my options and if you need any further information on the bits I have here, just let me know.

Many thanks

David

Fortunately, this is a pretty easy job. If you screw up, though, it can be quite dangerous.

Here are the ways in which you can get it wrong when hooking up new batteries, especially bigger new batteries, to a UPS:

1. A given UPS runs from 24 volts, so it wants two 12V batteries in series; you give it one, or two in parallel.

Danger: Possibly high, if you thus barbecue the batteries with too much charge voltage. You’ll probably just get loud complaints from the UPS, though, and if you’re not completely daft you’ll disconnect the batteries before anything can go pop.

2. The opposite of the above; it wants one battery (as your particular UPS, like most small UPSes, does), but you give it two in series. (Two in parallel would be fine.)

Danger: Will probably kill the UPS. Probably will not set it on fire.

(Home/small-office UPSes are almost always 12V or 24V on the battery side, meaning one or two 12V batteries. Big serious UPSes may run more batteries in series - possibly built out of individual two-volt cells that are each bigger than the whole 12V battery in your UPS - because the higher the voltage the lower the current for a given power output, and big serious UPSes can usually deliver a lot of watts. Lower current is desirable because it means thinner wires and cheaper power transistors and other components. This is also, essentially, why big long-distance power lines run at such high voltages.)

3. You connect the battery or batteries backwards.

Danger: May or may not blow up the UPS. It’s quite easy for the designers to guard against this mistake, but I’ve no idea how many do.

If your new battery is the same type as the old one, you have to be pretty seriously dedicated to screwing up in order to connect it backwards. It’ll probably be connected with two spade lugs of different sizes; getting them the wrong way around can only be achieved if you’re the sort of person who hammers a USB plug into a VGA socket.

If you’re connecting a UPS to a bigger battery that has different connectors, though, it’s usually quite easy to connect it backwards.

Whatever happens, this particular mistake probably won’t set anything on fire.

4. You accidentally short out one or more of the batteries. Even little sealed-lead-acid “gel cells” can deliver a lot of current into a dead short, and very high current delivery is the major design goal of car batteries. The worst possible way to do this is to have a couple of batteries you’re trying to connect in parallel, and to accidentally connect one of them backwards. (This is also what happens if you get the leads mixed up when jump-starting a car. In that situation one of the batteries is usually pretty flat, but a quite stimulating physics demonstration may still ensue.)

Result: From alarming to spectacular. Red-hot wires. Smoke and possibly flame. If you break the short-circuit quickly, though, the batteries themselves should be OK.

If you’re building a battery pack for a cordless drill or R/C car or something, you can do it with discharged cells, which makes accidental short-circuits harmless. You generally can’t do that with lead-acid batteries, because running them flat damages them. On the plus side, if you’re upgrading a UPS battery you’re probably not soldering any cells or batteries together; on the minus side, while you’re running longer wires to connect a bigger battery outside the UPS, there are many opportunities to short the battery out.

(If you’ve got a liquid-electrolyte lead-acid battery, you can drain it of electrolyte while you work, which makes it harmless, just like building a battery pack from flat cells. The best solution if you’re going to be fooling around with wires connected to a high-current-capacity battery is to buy a brand new battery that comes “dry”, and buy your electrolyte separately. Note that lead-acid battery electrolyte is roughly 30% sulfuric acid, and should be treated with respect; battery acid won’t melt the flesh from your bones, but it is still not your friend. This is all overkill for what we’re talking about here, but I want to be as exhaustive as possible in writing about this stuff for the benefit of readers whose situation is not the same as yours.)

By now you are probably just about ready to throw up your hands and trade your computer for a manual typewriter, but I really did mean it when I said this job is pretty easy. You’ll very probably be fine. Take your time, do not mitigate any uncertainty you feel with alcohol, and keep track of which wire’s meant to be positive. If you do not own a cheap plastic multimeter, buy a cheap plastic multimeter. Some basic soldering ability will also be handy for extending power wires, but you’d get away with using wire nuts or something. (You’d probably also get away with twisting wires together and then mummifying them in leccy tape, but doing so makes the ghost of Nikola Tesla cry.)

And now, finally, specific answers to your actual questions.

I don’t know whether your UPS will actually be happy running from a car battery, but it very probably will. I used to be less confident about this, but I’ve done it more times myself now and corresponded with plenty of other people about it, and it really does seem that most, if not all, consumer-market UPSes will work fine from much bigger batteries. They don’t charge a big battery very quickly, but unless your local electricity is a ten-minutes-on, two-hours-off sort of deal, that’s not a problem.

Car batteries are not an ideal choice for running UPSes, because they’ve got less capacity per kilo than batteries made to run, for instance, golf carts or fishing-dinghy trolling motors. Car batteries also don’t like being run flat. But the price/performance ratio for low-end car batteries is much better than that of fancy deep-cycle batteries, and car batteries’ shortcomings are largely irrelevant to someone like you who mainly just wants to ride out short power interruptions, and doesn’t anticipate running from battery power for any great length of time.

(It also seems pretty definite now that lead-acid batteries that’ve “sulfated” because they were run flat and left that way can be rescued, with “desulfator” gadgets. I haven’t done enough research of my own to be able to speak authoritatively about this, though.)

The specs on the side of your battery only matter if you’re trying to buy a new one that’ll fit inside the UPS, without having to know the exact dimensions of your old battery or the one you’re buying. There is unfortunately no standardised naming for SLA batteries, so the “Model AC-1255″ on the sticker is not helpful.

The most common battery in small consumer UPSes is a brick-shaped 12V unit with about a seven amp-hour capacity; the battery you’ve got is I think probably this size, but it doesn’t matter since you’re not after another weedy little gel cell.

(I’ve no idea what the “20Hz” on the sticker means, by the way. Batteries are not alternating-current devices, so whatever that is, I don’t think it’s meant to mean 20 cycles per second.)

One cheap car battery will probably do the job for you just fine. If you needed longer run time then you could add one or more extra car batteries in parallel (preferably identical batteries, by the way, though in relatively low-drain applications like this you can get away with all sorts of unsightly alternatives), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Get a set of cheap jumper leads along with your cheap battery as I did, cut ‘em up and splice them onto the UPS’s existing battery leads, hook it up, and enjoy some relatively reliable computing.