Police Secret Crackdown Home Electricity, page 2

Originally posted by James Random
[SNIP]

Considering that the construction of such a collider would

1) Require millions, possibly billions of dollars
2) Require its own power source to get started in the first place
3) Is not a precise science even by the most qualified minds in the world
4) The magnetic field would tear your street apart
5) Even these best scientific minds can't get a LHC to work correctly (yet)

I find your claim to be dubious at best.

Mod edit: Removed quoted T&C violation.

[edit on 15-10-2008 by Gemwolf]

This is almost as silly a statement as made by the OP. Particle accelerators aren't some arcane science. Low to medium energy cyclotrons and linear accelerators are VERY well understood (they've been around for over 75 years), and have several practical everyday uses (in medicine and industry). The cost is, for a reasonable model, from a few million dollars down to a couple hundred thousand dollars.

The reason the LHC is even notable, as well as so prone to breakage and delay is simply the sheer size of the thing. Lets see you build a machine the size of a small city, which by it's very nature requires the very highest levels of precision available to mankind, and get it to work right out of the gate.

Of course, nobody needs a particle accelerator in their basement; they use huge quantities of power, and turn it into harmful radiation. any model that fits into a basement isn't going to discover anything, and probably won't be good enough to even replicate very many famous discoveries from the early 20th century. It'd be like buying a toy telescope from a gift store and trying to do real astronomy, only unfathomably more expensive.

There ain't a damn thing it'd do to help with your power consumption. This is an obvious hoax thread.

Anyway, if you really want to pay less for utilities, without committing outright theft, you can wire a big capacitor in series with your house, or wind a big, high current inductor and place it in parallel. Since most loads are inductive, your power factor is probably lagging, so doing so will either move the power factor closer to one by canceling the inductance with a negative impedance, in the case of the capacitor, or by reducing the total inductance, by adding a parallel inductor. The power companies won't be happy with you for doing this, though, because it's rather unsafe, and they don't like to be sued when your house burns down due to an electrical fire as a result of shoddy DIY wiring. They'll generally add capacitors themselves, if they see you're too much of an inductive load for the system, but you'd probably see some reduction in your bill.

Apparently this is pretty common out in the country, with coils made of bailing wire. Figures.

Even though improving your power factor means you pay less to the utilities, it's generally in their interests too, because it costs THEM money to have a lagging power factor.