Electricity Saving Box Review – Are Power Savers for Home a Scam?

Some marketers and websites are heavily advertising these power saver devices claiming that they can reduce your electric bill for up to 20-50% overnight.

Are these claims realistic, exaggerated, or is the electricity saving box just a scam that is sold to take your money?

I’m an electrical engineer and energy manager with more than 10 years of experience, and I wrote this Electricity Saving Box review in order to give you a definitive answer on these questions, and tell you which power savers can really help you reduce your bill.

Electricity Saving Box Review Summary

• Name: Electricity Saving Box / Power Saver
• Manufacturer: EcoWatt, OkoWatt, Heunwa, PowerVolt, Electric Saver 1200, PowerPro, …etc.
• Price: $10, $21, $40, and more.
• Recommended? No.

Overall BillsWiz.com Rating: 1 of 10

Summary: Electricity Saving Boxes (Power Saver devices) don’t work on reducing the electricity bill as advertised, and they are being promoted through deceiving consumers who have no knowledge about electric power consumption and billing.

What Are Electricity Saving Boxes?

Electricity Saving Boxes (aka Power Saver devices) are small devices that can be plugged into a home AC socket, or to the electrical panel of the house, and are supposed to work on magically reducing the electric bill all the way up to 50%.

These devices come in different names, shapes and colors, but internally, they are all similar as they consist of some electronic components such as a resistor, a capacitor, and a small LED lamp.

The Electricity Saving Boxes are falsely advertised as power savers that can reduce the electric bill, but the truth is that they do nothing that would make you pay less, as you will see in the next section.

How Do Electricity Saving Boxes Work?

They don’t work.

Promoters of the power saver scams are using unrealistic claims to justify selling these useless devices and boxes that don’t save electricity.

There are different types of these devices, and different lies given on how they work in saving electric energy, such as the following three:

1. By lowering the power factor.
2. By regulating the voltage level and limiting the unnecessary overvoltage.
3. By creating energy out of thin air and supplying it to your appliances.

And these all are unrealistic and misleading explanations on how these electric energy saving boxes work.

I have explained in details why all these explanations are incorrect in my article answering the question: do power savers really work?

But I will brief here why every one of the three justifications is untrue:

1. For the power factor correction through a capacitor device, there’s a component in electric power that is called Reactive Power, which industrial consumers such as big factories are charged for, and it increases when the power factor goes down. These consumers use capacitors in order to increase the power factor. When it comes to residential and small commercial consumers, the normal appliances at home don’t lower to power factor, and the utility meter doesn’t read this value in the first place, and therefore, there’s no meaning at all from using the PF corrector power saver devices at home.
2. For the power saver that regulates the voltage levels at a certain level, this claim is incorrect because the utility system does this job, and a very small increase in voltage that might happen at your home’s meter does not cause an increase in the power consumption even to the extent of 5%, then how can these devices save you up to 50% on the energy bill?
3. For the electricity saving boxes that create free energy out of nowhere, this is a flat out lie. As per the law conservation of energy, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another. This means that there’s no such a thing like energy that is created out of nowhere.

All the three given explanations about how these electricity saving boxes for home work don’t make any sense, and that’s why you should not buy any of these power savers.

And Now you might say:

But I saw a video where they measure the current before plugging in the power saver box, and then the measuring a lower value after they plug it in.

This is something a bit technical, but in short, the value measured here is called the current, and it’s unit is the Ampere.

And it is affected by both components of power: Active and Reactive.

However, the meter itself reads only the Active Power.

The current value can be reduced using these devices that have capacitors in them because these capacitors affect the Reactive Power component, and thus, they reduce the Reactive Power consumption only, but that doesn’t affect the bill because you are charged for the Active Power, and not the Reactive Power.

Therefore, the reduction of the current because of using a capacitor does NOT result in any reduction in the electricity bill.

And here’s another question you might ask now:

What about All These Positive Power Saver Reviews on Amazon from Real Customers?

These are either purchased reviews as many Amazon merchants bribe others to buy their power savers and give them five-star reviews, or they are misled by what happens with the buyers who think that the electricity saving boxes worked and reduced the bill, when the reduction actually came because they changed their behaviour in a certain month.

For example, you might use the AC for four hours a day on average during the month of August, but then, you only used it for around two hours a day on average during September.

And the same could be true for many other loads, and during different times of the year.

Or maybe, you had guests who spent a few days at your place in a certain month.

The result would be a lower bill in the following month, because your lowered your consumption through changing the behaviour.

And this might be the case for those who left a positive review thinking that the reduction came from the electricity saving box itself.

The evidence of what I’m saying is the fact that there are also many negative reviews that show that the bill has actually increased from the month before using the power saver.

If the electricity saving box works, then it should work with everyone who uses it at home, and not with some people only.

Conclusion – Are Electricity Saving Boxes a Scam?

Power Saver devices, also known as Electricity Saving Boxes, are scam products that are used to mislead people with no knowledge of how electricity works, in order to steal their money.

This is my conclusion of this electricity saving box review.

Are There Legit Power Saver Devices That Work?

Yes.

There are still some devices that can be used in order to lower your electricity bill, but these lower the bill to a realistic level based on scientific reasons, such as:

1. Using new technology, such as LED tech for lighting units instead of halogen light bulbs’ technology.
2. Devices that turn off the appliances when not necessary, like timer plug sockets, motion detector for lights, smart thermostat for heating and cooling systems.
3. Devices that transform energy from one source into electricity, and not magically create electricity from nothing, such as solar panels and micro wind turbines for homes.

And more.

You can learn more about these in my list of electricity saving devices for home.

However, if you want something to significantly lower your electric bill, maybe even eliminated it, then solar panels are the way to go.

It’s true that they cost some money to install, but the payback period is worth the investment, and anyway, there are funding solutions that allow you to install a complete solar system with $0 down investment.

SunPower is a leading company that can advise you on the available funding solutions, and they can give you a free quote for a solar panel system for your home, if you live in the area where they operate, and they cover most of the US.

If you are interested in a free solar quotation from SunPower, visit their website here, fill in the short survey about your house, and they will contact you in order to give you a free advise on the available funding solutions for your solar plant.

I hope that you found my Electricity Saving Boxes or power saver devices review, and that it would help you stay away from these energy saving box scams.

If you still have any question about these devices, or if you need help regarding devices that save on electric bill, please, let me know in the comments’ section below, and I will do my best to help you out