This is the most important invention since the printing press. It comes in many shapes and sizes and has even more names, but don't worry about that. According to the sellers of these amazing little gadgets, they do everything from saving you money to cleaning your dirty, unstable electricity.

to helping you finally get a good night's sleep. But you better hurry; we're almost sold out. There's no time for research when other people are buying them all. Just look at this graph, and if you act right now, you'll get 50, 65... no, wait, 70% off! Look at all these

logos of news organizations that you might trust. Don't they look nice here, or maybe over here? Wow, these sites really are a master class in scummy marketing. But the craziest thing about these little miracle gizmos is that they aren't actually a scam. I mean, they absolutely

are a scam, but at the same time... you know what? This is going to take some explaining. Up roll the thing for our sponsor! Big thanks to SEIC for sponsoring this video. Their Prime and Focus series power supplies come with a 12-year warranty, and we're going to talk

about how they could actually save you some money on your power bill a little bit later on. Let's kick off with the beef: you're feeling one with the all-metal housing. If this thing's just a rock and some hot glue, this is going to

be a real short video, man! This thing is cool. We can see every individual wire in here. On the next slide, we get a really good look at a couple of resistors, a diode... uh, we've also got what looks like a little LED here, and this boxy structure...

Our view, a little bit enhanced, shows us that this is in fact a capacitor. We can see the two conductive plates inside of it. Now, if half of the manufacturer's claims about these are true, that right there is the hardest-working capacitor on the planet. Let's change gears and

move over to our plastic ones. Well, it seems like they've got a couple more components on their boards, including some capacitors on the boards themselves, but the design is similar overall. So why don't we change gears and talk about what these things are supposed to do? If you're familiar with

electrical circuits, you might already know about inductive, resistive, and capacitive loads. For everyone else, here's the TL;DR: If something is mostly just making heat, like a hot plate or an old-school incandescent light bulb, it's a resistive load, and the voltage and

current remain in phase, or lined up. If something is moving—ceiling fans and washing machines are good examples here—it's probably an inductive load, and the current lags behind the voltage by 90°. Capacitive loads, meanwhile, tend to be more hidden, especially in the home.

This is where the current leads 90° ahead of the voltage. So these loads are typically used to balance out inductive loads, and they're mostly found in—well, stuff that has capacitors in it—like this Prime PX power supply from our sponsor, C Sonic, who has more models

rated at Titanium or above by Cybenetics than any other manufacturer. That means more than 90% efficiency with a power factor of 98% or better. That power factor thing—that's going to mean something to you in a minute. Coming back to different kinds of loads, if you've

Got a big industrial building that is stuffed full of AC motors, transformers, and the like? You can end up with so much inductive load that it actually starts to impact the efficiency of the power grid itself. And I'm not talking about efficiency like some waste heat from

your noodle-extruding machine. I'm talking the power company needs to send you more power than you're actually using, harming their efficiency. That's where something called the power factor comes into play. It's a measure of how much power is doing work (called active

power) versus how much power it looks like you're using (called apparent power). And we can find it with this very Pythagoras-looking formula here. The ideal power factor is one, meaning that all the power you're drawing from the grid is doing actual work. Anything lower

and you are impacting the efficiency of the grid, which your power company is 100% going to charge you for. So then, how do you reduce the inductive load so your power company doesn't start piling on such charges? Capacitors! The power system in any big industrial facility likely

has one or more capacitor banks, which act to smooth out their heavy inductive loads; hence the capacitors that showed up on our CT scans. But here's the thing: while the theory is actually sound, residential customers—you know, the people they're marketing these devices to—don't get charged based on

power factor. A big part of the reason for that is that pretty much all of the heavy power devices in a house are either a resistive load or they already have capacitors built into them to compensate for their inductive loads. We looked from Alberta to Zimbabwe, and across the board,

Residential and small business customers are billed only for the active power used. Now, I'm sure there's some outliers that you guys are already furiously typing comments about, but generally speaking, it's only when you ramp up to large commercial and industrial facilities that power factor really enters the

equation. And the folks selling these magical gizmos know all of this; they just don't care. Power factor is that convenient little nugget of truth that they can wrap in layers and layers of BS marketing that your conspiracy-loving uncle needs to convince them to

buy these things for the entire family for Christmas this year. And some of them take their scam even further. Let's crack this one open using our handy-dandy precision screwdriver kit from LTDstore.com. Built-in bit storage, fidget spinner-worthy uncap, and built-in

magnetic parts tray. With the one screw removed... uh, yeah, there's not a whole lot going on in here. We've got a basic LED power circuit—that's how you know it's on—then we just go ahead and remove this second screw, and this IC right here is a

bridge rectifier that converts AC to DC. So far, so good. But this is the part where we get into some funny business. Do you see our capacitor here? Well, one of the two leads going to it doesn't seem to actually connect to the rest of

the circuit. You can see it in the X-ray, or actually just by holding it up to the light; there's no trace to that pad. So my question now, then, is: if this is just here for looks, is this even a real capacitor? Let's find

Okay, before I connect this, it's worth noting that this is in nanofarads right now; that's effectively zero. Moment of truth! Is it a real capacitor? Survey says no! I gotta say, I'm actually kind of surprised that it is more cost-effective to build a fake

capacitor than it was to drop the 15, or maybe 30 cents, on a real one. It's got some weight to it, at least. I cut one open to see what's... Oh, did you cut one open? Let's have a look at our fake capacitor.

Oh, is that like a little bit of cement that they just smeared on it? It kind of looks like that. Whatever it is, the bottom line is, if you want to save some money on your power bill, maybe you should consider upgrading your rig to a new 80 Plus Platinum rated Prime PX

power supply from our sponsor, SEIC. The Prime PX series is fully modular and has you covered all the way from 650 watts to 1600 watts, backed by an industry-leading 12-year warranty. It uses a 135 mm fan to keep things cool

and quiet, and that fan doesn't even spin up until it reaches somewhere in the neighborhood of around 30% load. With power supplies this efficient, more of your money is going right into those sweet, sweet FPS instead of being wasted generating excess heat. And if you're not

sure how much power you need, you can just click on the calculate button on their website, and they will help you find the perfect fit. So find your next power supply at the link down below, and find your next video to watch at this video right here, where you can watch me

get shocked repeatedly as we figure out if those wireless anti-static wristbands are a scam, with the help of our friend ElectroBOOM. Yo Jordan, how much did we spend on these things? Um, about 20 bucks for four.

Well, I mean, at that price, at least it's uh, decent value as a nightlight; a $5 nightlight.

I was SURE these were a scam

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
