I’ve been hearing an ad on the radio lately about a discovery that the power company doesn’t want you to know about from a guy named Frank Bates. He mentions that he could get in a lot of trouble for talking about it and calls the power companies and the government “incompetent, lying crooks who are counting on your ignorance and fear to keep your electric bills and heating bills criminally high.” OK, I’m intrigued, so what’s this guy selling?
He wants to show you the secret of how he beat ’em, and how you can beat ’em too. It’s described as a “weird” trick on the website. It sounds almost too good to be true. You can hear the commercial along with a video at the Power4Patriots website.
Upon looking further into what Mr. Bates is selling, I discovered it’s a CDROM and downloadable access to a series of pdf ebooks (about 300 pages total) and videos covering the topics of solar and wind energy. Much of it involves DIY information on how to build your own solar panels, wind turbines, and solar water heaters from components you can find in local hardware stores and online for less than you can buy equivalent off-the-shelf products. The value of this ‘package’ is $297, but with the 90% discount, the CD and downloads can be yours for only $27 + 2.99 S&H. After purchasing it, you’ll find that if you pay $67 more, you get a physical spiral bound book along with 3 DVDs that also cover solar and wind DIY projects which is basically the same material, just in a format that might be more convenient for you. If you turn that down, you’ll be offered the printed book for another $27. After that, you’ll be offered heirloom seeds for another $67 to help you through any upcoming societal collapse. So there’s a lot of upselling going on after the initial $27 investment. I’m also now on the email list and I suspect I’ll be hearing a lot more from the company in the future.
How do I know this? I know this because I invested the $29.99 in the ebook/CDROM product. After all, what kind of blogger would review a product he didn’t own? I gotta tell you, this guy’s good. I’m surprised I got out without spending another $134 for the physical book/DVDs and heirloom seeds.
You’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t heard all the fuss about how Chinese solar panels are coming down in price so fast that they are putting companies out of business that were trying to manufacture solar panels in the U.S. Witness what happened with Solyndra and Abound Solar.
One of the ebooks and 6 of the videos are related to making your own solar panels. I was curious to see just how cheap these homemade panels would be and the book shows a bill of materials of $175 for a 65 watt panel. That’s almost $3/watt not including your labor, and the amount of labor looks quite substantial. I’d estimate the labor at 10 hours per panel or more. That’s not cheap, especially now that you can get manufactured panels that are $1/watt that are already assembled and guaranteed. The manufactured panels are designed to last 25 years, are safety agency-approved, and can withstand all kinds of weather, including hail up to 1 inch in diameter. So trying to roll your own solar panels would be a waste of time and money. And the cost of a solar system doesn’t just depend just on the panel cost. The inverter costs about $.50/watt which is quite expensive in the grand scheme of things, or about half of what you’d be paying for the panels.
And then there’s the installation cost. Of course, you can do the installation yourself if you’re capable and comfortable working on roofs. Once you add in the other ancillary parts and equipment, you can put together a solar system for about $2/watt these days using off-the-shelf components. That’s about half of what they cost just 4 years ago, thanks primarily to the drop in panel costs.
A typical house in the U.S. uses about 730 kWh in electricity per month. To satisfy this need, you are looking at approximately a 5 kW system. That system would cost about $10,000 for materials even if you’re handy and can do the installation yourself. With U.S. electricity rates now at an average at $.12/kWh, it would take about 10 years to pay for itself. That’s not too bad, considering most things you buy for your home will just depreciate over time and not save you a dime, let alone break even or start making you money in the long run. My grid-tied solar system is 5.6 kW and I haven’t purchased any electricity since it was installed nearly 4 years ago but I do get charged about $8/month to be connected to the grid. I have accumulated a surplus (about 5000 KWh) on the meter that could run an electric car for more than 20,000 miles.
The radio commercials imply that you could slash your energy bills and live free of these greedy utility companies but you cannot do that if you install a grid-tied solar system with net metering, which is the most common kind. To disconnect from your utility company, you’d need to have a battery storage system, a charge controller, and a backup generator for those times that you may have a few cloudy days in a row. A set of batteries that would hold a day’s charge of 24 kWh would cost at least another $4K and generator would add another $1K to it. So you’re looking at a much bigger expense when you talk about completely disconnecting from the power grid, I’d say at least $5K more. And those batteries would need to be replaced every 6 years or so. That makes the whole payback period kind of a moot point because of this extra recurring expense so unless you live in an area where there is no grid power, or you believe we are on the verge of complete societal collapse, it’s hard to justify an off-grid system when you can get away with the less expensive grid-tied solar system.
There are some other books included in the package related to making and installing a wind turbine (probably good for 5-10% of the average household energy needs), and some simple solar hot water and solar hot air DIY projects. Bonus materials include ebooks on surviving disasters, storing emergency water, and building a solar cooker.
So for $27, you get 10 ebooks all of which contain some useful information, especially if you’re into renewable energy or worrying about Armageddon. I didn’t feel ripped off afterwards, although the quality of some of the graphic images in the pdf files was pretty poor. I don’t know what the printed materials might look like, but the numbers on many of the charts were unreadable like the image shown below.
The poor image quality of many charts used in the ebook files makes the text unreadable.
I’m always intrigued when I hear an over-the-top advertisement for an energy product. Most of the time they turn out to be truly worthless and horrible investments. But this one is harmless enough, and you might even find a few good ideas for your $27. But don’t get your hopes up that you’ll take your electric and heating bills down to nothing without a significant investment in time and money even if you follow all of the DIY information in the ebooks.
Thank you Lee for a real, frank and well researched review. It has saved me the 20 plus minutes hype and yet is a decient product and information.
Thanks to Rick, for his comments on the geothermal loop which I would like to know more about.
I was going to write to you about the complications and expense- and dangers of geothermal, but I decided not to except to say that if you have some amazing technical knowledge and know-how and the megabucks to back it, you’ll not be doing it anytime soon. but you are allowed in our America to dream the impossible dream and go for it. My blessings go with you.
I enter into this blog as, and throughout remain as, a “questioner”, never an “accuser”.
I do like Mr. Devlin’s seeming “objectivity”.
However: The matter regarding the promotion of the Power4Patriots material as he and others comment on here remains quite a bit more complex in my view. As to the complexities allow me to supply only a relatively few examples here, and not a more complete review.
1. Mr. Devlin, in effect, it seems to me, remains very careful, in the words he writes to not “libel” this Mr. “Frank Bates”. The name itself, “Frank Bates represents perhaps a “false name” or pseudonym, I simply have no clear idea, and I too have done at least some “homework” on this subject.
2. I do seem to agree with Mr. Devlin, I found Mr. Bates’ presentation, on the internet, shall I say “smooth”, or, as to another word I one might (probabilistic sense of this “modal” verb) employ “slick”, as, for example (but not necessarily limited thereto,) a word one might use for the patter of a “snake oil salesman”, of yesteryear.
3. On the other hand, how do we, except perhaps Mr. Devlin and Mr. Bates,
know Mr. Devlin, does not, as well, represent a promoter, in an even deeper and more subtle way, of Mr. Bates’ CD’s, with, shall I say, a “stake-in-action”, even a rather direct and profitable one?
4. Based on my research with the United States Postal Service (USPS), etc., on this very subject of “Power4Patriots”, the $2.99 “postage & handling” fee charged for the CD-ROM sent out represents, at minimum, something like approximately $1.62 for “handling”, as a “presorted” (PRSRT) “bound printed material” (BPM), which can only become sent out in groups of either 300 minimum as PRSRT or if also bearing a “Bar Code” a minimum of 50 in each bulk mailing. If my researches and calculations correct that means the underlying operation behind other publications such as the ones handled under the name “Power4Patriots”, yields either approximately four-hundred-eighty-five dollars ($485) or eighty dollars ($81). For a worker even paid at a rate of say $20/hour to mail by hand the material, that would make a very tidy extra profit, more or less minimally, of $60-460 and in fact probably hugely more, i.e., maybe even in the thousands for the way these mailings of the CD-ROM get handed out in “bulk” presorted, bar coded batches.
5. The CD’s themselves can become reproduced and packaged in their individually imprinted mailing “envelopes” cost something like maybe $1.10 each, for a production run of 1,000 copies, or even well under a dollar for the next level of 2,500 copies @88 cents ($0.88 per copy), and even lower for bigger runs.
6. Further research indicates the “Frank” on the sales internet video may even turn out as actor and none of the information the actor sends out there as true.
7. So far at this writing, I don’t yet have a reasonable “production cost” for each of the CD-ROM’s content as mailed out, but say for an overall run of one-hundred thousand (100,000) CD-ROMs as completed, say $100,000 all costs potentially get covered by a total say of maybe two-dollars ($2.00) per CD-ROM mailed out to Mr. Devlin, me, or any other consumer. That turns out potentially as a profit overall of maybe twenty-five dollars ($25.00) each CD-ROM.
8. Now in the end, though possibly fully legal, in terms of federal and/or state laqw (and maybe not), this represents in one of my meanings for the word, a “scam” pure and simple. Another word, as to my meaning as I might employ it, it represents a “fraud”, pure and simple, etc.
9. As indicated at the beginning I could put down more “suspicious” evidence, to my view, I’ve so far gathered.
In conclusion, I do hope Mr. Devlin, you do have a “legitimate” blog, and therefore you will publish this. And, again, I emphasize I accuse no one of anything in a manner that would constitute (in particular) a libel (as written). I’ve just reported some of what I’ve put together so far. If any want the CD-ROM great, even if somewhat of a “scam”. In one sense of meaning, now that I’ve done the research I have I find what I’ve discovered as “laughable” in a sardonic humor sense, i.e., as rather a sardonic “joke”.
Hope this all proves useful to others for the hours of additional research I’ve just done today while writing what here appears.
H.
Dear H., I can assure you that I am not affiliated with this company. I do promote other products on my site, including products for which I earn a commission, but this program is not one of them. I’ve written some other reviews on energy products (Cool Surge, and Heat Surge, and the Energy Saver 3000) that are not very flattering and I pride myself in being objective. When I first heard the radio ad for this program, I was pretty sure it was going to be a scam like a power factor correction device, since that’s how scams are often advertised, in a slick presentation style that you’re about to be let in on something ‘secret’. But in the end, the program was a set of e-books and videos, all of which had some value and so I was relieved when I found out it wasn’t some kind of a scam. I use solar energy at my home and haven’t purchased any electricity from the power company in 4 years. I’d like to see more people do the same. Even if the e-books don’t convince someone to build their own solar energy or wind energy system, they will at least educate the purchaser on the technology and get them thinking about it, which I think is a good thing. I’d like to see people become more self-reliant and less dependent on the power grid and the fossil fuels we use to keep it running.