Cut home electricity bills in half

Is there a device that can do this?

I'm trying to find information on how to reduce my home energy electric bills. I was told there is a device that you can plug into your circuit breakers that can cut home electicity bills in half, can you tell me where I can find such a device?

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Answer from Green Energy Efficient Homes

I am not aware of any device that will cut home electricity bills in half. Like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

There are devices that claim to reduce the energy cost of induction motors, I describe them on my Home energy saving devices page under the section "Bogus or questionable home energy saving devices". One specific example of this that gets a lot of attention and in my opinion does virtually nothing to cut home electricity bills are energy saving capacitors. These capacitor-based devices, which you connect directly to your main circuit breaker, do not claim to reduce energy consumption, because they don't. The best they do is reduce what you get charged for your consumption, by correcting a slight inaccuracy in the way your consumption is measured at the power meter. That is not the same thing.

While these devices work to cut the metered consumption of some induction motors so that the metered amount more accurately reflects actual consumption, many such motors such as those in current-day refrigerators already have capacitors built in to accomplish the same correction, and other than refrigeration very little of your home electricity load is induction based, so the overal money savings are negligible. Most sites selling these devices claim savings of "UP TO 20%" or even 50%, but if you read more closely you'll see these are estimates. Savings of 10% are the very best you're likely to see, and closer to 2-5% is more realistic.

One would assume that if there really was a device that could magically cut your energy use in half without requiring any change in behavior, the utility companies would have shipped one to every household in North America, because it's always cheaper for them to get us to cut our consumption, than to build more generating capacity. So the sellers of these devices tout some conspiracy theories, which if you think hard enough about them don't make any sense. Do the utilities really want to to waste electricity? If they did why would so many utilities provide so many incentives for people to cut their energy usage?

You can cut home electricity bills by as much as half or more, as I have done, by measuring your electricity use and targeting areas where you're using more than you need to. I explain this in How to save electricity and have other pages throughout my site intended to help you save electricity on refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, air conditioning, lighting, and so on.

Cut home electricity bills in half

Is there a device that can do this?

Answer from Green Energy Efficient Homes

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