Mini Sun Power Saver - How Real is Real?

Over the weekend I took a stroll over Singapore's premier consumer electronics and IT fair Comex 2009. Besides the usual suspects like all the big brands in PCs, printers, cameras and TVs one can find curiosities and strange things. One of them was the " Mini Sun Power Saver" aggressively marketed by the H2H group. The flyer claims it can reduce domestic power consumption by 30% and stabilise your power supply. The strange part here is, that you just plug the device into a socket. So it sits in parallel to other consumers. The sellers claim the savings effect is due to the stabilisation of the power flow weeding out spikes and irregularities. The picture they use shows a zigzag line which isn't entirely accurate for AC, which is a sinus wave. Also the label reads " German's technology" which is at least a grammatical error. So out the question to the lazy web: Can anyone explain how exactly such a device would work (some complicated formulas are OK for me) and/or if it is just a repackaged snake-oil variant?
Update: CASE (our SG consumer watchdog) thinks it is Snakeoil.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel on 14 September 2009 | Comments (4) | categories: After hours

posted by Jonathan Wong on Tuesday 15 September 2009 AD:
Did you catch the other gem at one of the back booths of Level 6? You pay a one-time fee of SGD 178 for this USB key thingy, you plug it into your PC, and you get instant access to over 1000 live TV channels around the world in all languages!

Of course, no one bothers to mention anything about picture quality and SLAs or the fact that you can get the same thing for free with TvAnts, TVU, or SopCast...

posted by Fajar Priyanto on Tuesday 15 September 2009 AD:
The snake oil I bought was the magnet-thing that we put in our car that can reduce fuel consumption, by regulating the ion in the fuel so that it burned more efficiently. Not sure if it worked, but felt good. Emoticon biggrin.gif

posted by Bill on Tuesday 15 September 2009 AD:
Actually, if it messes with the electricity meter (and it is possible to do), then it *will* reduce your meter reading somewhat.

But its probably snake oil. Emoticon wink.gif

---* Bill

posted by Nick Halliwell on Monday 21 September 2009 AD:
They market the same product here but under a different name. I too am sceptical. However a friend of mine say that he brought one and his electrical bill went down for about 11,000 Baht a month to just over 7,000. Now he has a swimming pool with pumps and other things that consumes quite a lot of electricity. So it appears that it works, just would like to understand, like you, how.