A fuse blows when a certain current passes through it. P = V I cos (theta); power is voltage x current x power factor. Thus you can supply high power at low current if you use high voltage, which is how a thin wire can be used to sneak in high power. Jed made the same mistake as you, thinking that you need high current to get high power; it's not necessarily the case. Incidentally, I've known all this kind of stuff since age 9, when I began building radios.
The other aspect of the power meter measurements by these physicists is the shape factor, which has been mentioned here. It was apparently out of range of this instrument. It makes perfect sense that, since the majority of folks here seem not to be EE's, then all the possibilities for fraud on the input side simply don't appear within the scope of their understanding. That's just the way it is. And I suspect that the testers were similarly cognitively constrained. Andrew ----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Veeder To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 3:15 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:The inanity of the hidden input power hypothesis I am not an EE...i'm not even a electrician...but I thought a fuse blows when a certain level of power passes through it. harry On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 6:11 AM, Andrew <[email protected]> wrote: What about a giraffe wearing a beret? Did you mean for that to make sense? ----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Veeder To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 3:08 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:The inanity of the hidden input power hypothesis what about a fuse? or a light bulb(s)? harry On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:20 AM, Andrew <[email protected]> wrote: Nice idea in principle, but if the power actually supplied lies outside the frequency range of the measuring equipment, then this won't work. Come to think of it, are there any EE's on this list except for Duncan and myself? Andrew ----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Veeder To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 1:10 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:The inanity of the hidden input power hypothesis No knowledge of the waveform would be required if a circuit breaker were used which trips if more power is getting in than Rossi claims. Harry On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Andrew <[email protected]> wrote: Probably; in any case, it would be an improvement. The majority of the paper is taken up by detailed calculations on the thermal emissions from the device - i.e. on the output side. On re-reading the paper, I'm struck by a detail from the March 116 hour test. When the input is on, the power supplied exactly matches (up to error bars) the output power, namely about 820 W. I for one find this a curious data point. It's stated that there's a 35% duty cycle on the input, and for that reason alone we get an over-unity COP result. The TRIAC-based control box appears to have two modes - auto and manual (the paper makes no attempt to help us understand this). In auto mode, there's a switchover to pulsed mode but it's unclear what triggers this. I can only assume it's due to sensing the resistor temperature indirectly via a resistance estimate. In manual mode, the authors describe setting the power level, so presumably this is also an externally available control on the box. But who knows, really? And what is really happening during the OFF state of the waveform? If power is being snuck into the device here, then the COP = 1, and there is no magic. Note that, if this be the case, then it doesn't matter if you run the device for a day or a year; you will always measure over-unity COP even though the real COP is unity. When they describe the dummy measurements, they mention placing the meter in single phase mode directly across the resistor feed wires (it's single phase for the March test). They therefore have access to that place electronically. So in principle, they could have attached a spectrum analyser and a scope. But they didn't, because it wasn't allowed in pulsed mode; they were only allowed to do it in manual mode.
