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.
Lee,
I hope I do not seem too forward in leaving off the formality of the honorific “Mr.” and your last name, as I did use them in formality in my first blog to your blog site, out of a sense of respect and courtesy for you, at minimum, as another human being like myself.
I do like the less formal first name basis I now take the liberty of using –I hope without offense to you, as I have intended none in either my first blog posting or this follow-up one.
The fact you did publish my comment I find admirable and bespeaks a great deal more to me about your “legitimacy”, “forthrightness”, “honesty”than any amount of words you might have written in bothering to reply to my posting as well.
I have no specific argument with your reply. If Buying Power4Patriots at $29.99 a pop satisfies someone in their need to spend money for something the underlying “Power4Patriots” empire at a profit of about $25.00 a “pop” puts out there, (with perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies sold,) then more “Power” (for Patriots) to them the buyers — sardonic pun here intended.
My wife and I paid out a total of $59.98 for two CD copies, the extra copy unintentional on our parts, yet charged for by the company people that sent it. I did not open the prepackaged CD’s, and we plan to send them back, (within 60 days or you lose your money it now seems,) finally realizing, after great original care, I had become most likely “scammed” – something, under like circumstances I seldom if ever do under similar circumstances.
As I wrote as suggesting in my original posting, I learned more than I outlined there. I type very slowly with relatively poor editing (few “fast twitch” fibers in my fingers, remaining a problem limiting my touch typing speed to at most about 35 wpm and usually a lot slower, even though I largely do know how to “touch-type”.)
My wife when backing out the driveway to mail the DVDs back actually caused significant damage to her car (a day or two after to my recall from when I first posted to your blog and awaited for your approval in posting it so it would appear.)
Because we have insurance coverage the insurance company people will pay to get the car repaired, in the amount that may, exceed our $1,000.00 deductible – if it does, as it most probably will.
They (the insurance company people), and most certainly not the potentially ersatz “Power4Patriots” people won’t of course pay for the aggravation my having purchased the DVDs, and other matters, may have actually help lead to her accident. I could well argue, to my perception, the misleading nature of the original ad I saw on the Internet almost certainly led at least in part to a not totally insignificant portion of the $1,000 deductible we’ll have to pay regardless, to get the car fixed (though of course it will never “be the same”.)
So, in one manner of “speaking” (“writing” in this case) my getting fooled by the Internet promotion helped cause us, overall, more than just the $59.98 (for two DVDs inclusive of double postage and handling even though sent together in the same larger envelop enclosing the two separately packaged DVDs, for the same “postage and handling” as it would have taken for sending just one DVD or the two DVDs separately.)
We of course will have to foot the bill and the significant amount of other time and expense to return the merchandise, something I think think this supposed “Frank Bates” doesn’t warn you of in the Internet very “sophisticated” sales video.
Now because of the “agony” I go through in writing any blog posting I most likely will not write much more to your blog.
Lee, as I presume the “web-master” for your blog site, you have access to the e-mail address I supplied in registering. You might like to consider — in the case you might wish to privately contact me in accordance with the following proposal: send me an e-mail to the e-mail address you have for me with a return address I can address you privately at, and I will supply you personally with my private phone number which you can then “choose” to call me at so we can “talk”. I think you might find it quite “edifying” if you did.
On getting my private number, if you wish to call me from a “call blocked” number that will remain fine with me. You can, even in a very brief while set up a special e-mail address with say Yahoo, that will further protect your identity. I will take the chance you will not misuse the fact that you then have my “private” phone number, which you could use to reverse look me up, where I live, etc.. That chance I will take. Either I privately will hear from you or not, the decision remains yours to make.
In goodwill and caritas to all, I remain,
Sincerely,
H.
P.S. I normally consider almost anything I write, even to your or other’s blog sites, as copyrighted by me or any of the entities I in any particular case represent. I do so in the technicle meaning of the term as “common law copyright”, thus I here append the following:
©2013, by “Hugh”, CC licensed use permitted.
Lee,
Thanks very much for your review. It provides much more information than the Power4Patriots video.
I didn’t like the false premise of the video. namely that there is a power conspiracy to prevent patriots from accessing alternative energy.
If that is the case, then why do power companies provide subsidies, the government provide tax credits, and billions of public money being spent on researching solar, wind, geo, and other forms of alternative energy.
If Mr. Bates was such a patriot he would point out that much of the information he provides is already on the Web.
Mhyke
I purchased the P4P CD-ROM system. I was unimpressed with the documentation, mainly due to the lack of detail. Take for instance the videos on how to make a solar panel; more time was spent on how to make an angle cut in the frame then how to wire the series of cells for proper function. Needless to say there is no video on what to do with your panel once it is completed. In all I would say that the package is a hodgepodge of materials on the principle of solar and wind and no real help on how to go about putting together a working system.
One good thing, the money back return does work, as I did receive a full refund.