In article ,
Dave Fawthrop writes:
On Thu, 7 Dec 2006 13:52:54 -0000, "rusty" wrote:

|
| [Slight topic shift - has anyone bought one of those power usage
| devices and found it useful? I'm thinking of checking out what power
| my various toys on standby use. For example, my laptop charger seems
| to cool right off when off-charge (although I tend to disconnect it
| anyway) whereas the brick for my DAB radio is always warm.]

"useful"? Probably not very, but "interesting", most definately.

|It probably also has a poor power factor as well as being left on 24/77.
|Someone said there's a move afoot to replace all consumer meters with new
|ones that charge by volt-amps rather than watts. They were coming to do
|mine this month.

I don't think domestic customers are allowed to be charged that way.
Only industrial customers.

Anyone selling mains power factor correction capacitors?
They should work, but I would want to use a meter which measured power
factor to check that they were not over correcting, which would cost money.

Power factor correction capacitors only work to correct lagging
current. Low power factor caused by modern electronic appliances
does not fall into this category (there's no phase shift), and
can't be corrected by factor correction capacitors.

--
Andrew Gabriel