Not from a sceptic, but...

[Shekhar]

Hi!
I'm Shekhar from Calcutta, India.  I've recently been interested in the so called "Free-Energy" (or ZPE) devices, especially those which claim to provide substantially higher  power output than the input power, so that they can  operate in  self-running mode.  I am a member of a local  organisation that works among  poor slum-dwellers and one of our main activities is to develop cheap, clean and useful source of Alternative Energy and fuel. 
I visited many Net-forums, read quite a few good books (e.g., Patrick Kelly's marvellous compilation), watched quite a few Youtube videos (a lot of them quite obviously fake – making fake films has become an art these days) .    I want to share my observations on this whole topic. Here I go: 
1.    Everybody takes the name of Nicola Tesla, talks about his devices and copies and pastes  his patents and schematics in every other article. It is all very well, but please tell me the name of any living inventor who has replicated even one of his devices successfully; 'successfully' means the device is providing ample power and gain to justify its practical utility ; charging cellphones and lighting a few LEDs are not something that Tesla himself would call 'success', I guess!

2.   Certain names are very familiar and quite justifiably respected in ZPE forums and articles – Mr. John Bedini being one of them.   Men like him are inspirations to many free-energy enthusiasts and replicators. Unlike fraudsters who are out there to make a few quick bucks by selling 'Free-Energy' dreams to the gullible millions, people like Mr. Bedini and others are true-blue scientist-inventors who share their secrets with the society.  But let me put just one question to all of you – is Mr. Bedini employing the output of  his inventions to provide even 20% of the power required in his own house ?  We all talk about 'freeing ourselves from the clutches of  Big Energy and Big Oil' by doing away completely with Grid electricity, but is it not the duty of the  leaders to show the way? (I myself use biogas from kitchen waste to cook my food so that I can recommend the same to the poor slum-dwellers).

3.    I am a middle-class Indian and like most Indians, I do not waste and cannot afford to  waste power in gizmos like Washing M/c, Vacuum cleaner, Air Conditioner / Room heater, Microwave Oven, Car Battery charging, Water heater etc.  My power requirement is very low compared to an average citizen of the 'advanced' (?) West!  Can someone tell me how to build just a 1 Kw. Output ZPE device that would run on a rechargeable dry-cell battery and recharge the battery from its own output? Please note that I want to hear only from someone who has himself constructed and is using himself such a device. In fact, a slum-dweller  typically has one ceiling fan, a few CFL lamps and a TV set  to supply  power to, so mere 250 W output will do just fine!

4.   There are many patented devices that simply don't work (like Daniel Cook's battery and Leal-Barbosa transformer). Yet nobody is telling the truth. Even when replication fails the poor replicator blames himself and certain other aspects of the materials!  Often he is too ashamed to admit failure, and so he provides spurious proof of his 'success' – who is going to verify his claims in cyberworld? There are many quite astounding devices like the Georges Mourier's COP=10,000 Motor/Generator, patented in the US. I often ask myself a very simple question – why on earth no profit-hungry Capitalist ever tried to market such incredibly useful products? There are no dearth of such men and women in this wretched capitalist system, are there? Yes, Big Energy might persecute him, but that they would do only after he manages to sell at least a thousand such generators – my common sense tells me as much.

5.    Inventors typically seen in videos are quite well-to-do men of above-50 who have a lot of space (garages, backyards, basement) in their respective houses to do experiments with high-voltage equipment and heavy machinery.  Besides, they seem to have loads of money to spend on projects that may not ultimately yield anything.  They are just men of science trying to satisfy some very noble curiosity of theirs.  That's all very fine – these are the kind of invaluable men who gave us most of our 'modern' technologies.  But when we try to replace the 'grid' system altogether, any claim to usefulness of a product must be backed by the economic viability of that product in comparison to existing utility costs.  Nobody seems to be doing that calculation.  If a ZPE machine needs Rs. 100,000 (Indian currency is Rs.) to build and if my monthly average power bill  is Rs. 500,  then why would I buy that m/c ?  It is equivalent to more than 16 years of electricity bill!  And as a Mechanical Engineer who builds things, I know that Rs. 100,000 is not a lot of money at all when you look at the machinery that Mr. Bedini and others build.  Steel structures, motors, permanent magnets, bearings, flywheel, coils, electrical gears, electronic items  etc  cost serious money! And the production of these components and  items itself needs huge factories  consuming hundreds of Megawatts of electricity (for example – steel plants, mines, mineral processing etc.)!
Please understand that I'm no sceptic – I desperately want ZPE to challenge the monopoly  of profiteering Oil & Energy Corporations.   But we must begin the fight in our own backyard, and then we must empower the majority of this world first – the poor and underprivileged.

[TinselKoala]

You've made this post several times now so you must really want a reply. OK... I'll bite.... From a skeptic.

1. Nikola Tesla never made any claims about "free energy". He spoke of someday being able to hook up to the "Wheelworks of Nature" as a metaphor of accessing the relatively boundless stores of energies that definitely do surround us but are so far unusable, like the orbital momentum of the Earth for example. Genuinely successful applications of Tesla's _actual inventions_ are all around us: radio transmission of information, digital logic gates, polyphase AC electric motors, resonant coils boosting voltage, robotics, remote control and so on. The name of Tesla is used in vain by promoters of FE scams and errors. This isn't Tesla's fault and he shouldn't be blamed for the hype that now surrounds his legend and his name.

2. John Bedini is as big a fraudster as all the rest of them. Your trust and admiration of Bedini is misplaced. Everyone who builds and tests his devices eventually realizes just what Pirate has posted: The spike charging ruins batteries fairly quickly and there is no "free energy" appearing anywhere in any of his fancy pulse motors. In fact the MHOP Better-Than-Bedini does the same thing with spikes, is easier to build and to control properly and is based on sound engineering principles. And it self-starts. The reason Bedini can't use the outputs of his machines to run his house is because his machines have efficiencies less than 100 percent and it costs more power to run them than they "produce" as usable output. Bedini and his partner Friedrich are definitely NOT "true-blue scientists and inventors" at all. Where is one single credible report of an actual True Experiment that these people have produced? Nowhere, that's where. They do confirmatory demonstrations and do not support their claims with actual credible and properly performed experiments, like a "true blue scientist" would do.

3. No, no one can tell you how to build "a 1 Kw. Output ZPE device that would run on a rechargeable dry-cell battery and recharge the battery from its own output". Not here or anywhere else. "...A slum-dweller  typically has one ceiling fan, a few CFL lamps and a TV set  to supply  power to..." Wow. It sounds like your slum dwellers are living in the lap of luxury. Ours live in cardboard boxes and have to use their cellphones to watch videos and supply light at night. Ceiling fans? I don't think I've ever seen a ceiling fan in a USA slum dwelling, they have all been ripped out and the copper wire sold off to get money to buy wine or crack cocaine.

4. See #2 above. The reason why no capitalists have bothered to develop any of these claimed FE devices like the laughable Georges Mourier's COP=10,000 Motor/Generator is because _none of them work as claimed_. That is right, dear Shekhar, there are no FE or OU devices, patented or otherwise, that actually work as claimed. Just look at the QEG which is presently being discussed. The claimants are claiming 33x OU now and a self-runner right around the corner. Yet even their own data indicates a true efficiency of well under 50 percent, they have failed over and over to meet self-imposed deadlines and they have lied repeatedly in order to obtain funding from their True Believers. And this story is repeated over and over, if not quite so blatantly fraudulently.

5. Certainly, wealthy persons with time on their hands are more likely to be able to tinker and fiddle about with interesting electrical or mechanical devices. But if you look carefully you will generally find that these people are not scientists and they do not approach their problems in a scientific manner. Generally they might have ideas or even revelatory experiences, channelling, etc and they proceed to try to _prove_ their ideas by constructing something. They do not explore the problem space by varying "independent variables" and carefully observing the effects on "dependent variables" so they wind up chasing wild gooses down blind alleys that will never ever lead to success. Just look at all the gravity motor - Bessler wheel fans who make all kinds of fancy variations on the same basic theme... which has absolutely zero chance of success. Do they even test properly to see if their "improvements" or design changes actually work as desired? Not usually.

You can desperately want "ZPE to challenge the monopoly  of profiteering Oil & Energy Corporations" but if you don't even really know or understand what Zero Point Energy really is or how it behaves, what chance do you have? The Universe doesn't really care what you want. It works in certain ways, and only proper application of the Scientific Method will allow us to find out what those ways actually are.

[Hoppy]

The Bedini Wheel Energiser is not a battery charger according to Bedini. It is intended purpose is as a battery conditioner and must be sized to the battery. Bedini often warned about the danger of damaging batteries from powerful 'spikes'. The wheel is a gimmick, as the trigger pulse can be produced just as effectively from an oscillator and applied directly to the transistor base connection without any alteration to the basic SG circuitry. Having said this, Bedini does argue that the wheel is capable of holding an optimum output waveform whilst impedance changes are taking place in the battery and that this gives it an advantage over the solid state version of his SG.


I think it is fairly widely accepted that although a Bedini energiser will charge a battery, it is painfully slow at doing this when it is correctly sized to the battery. The main purpose of the energiser is to condition batteries by gentle desulfation and over the years I have experimented with energisers, I have found this to be effective when a battery is subjected to multiple charge and discharge cycles. As TK points out, wam, bam, thank you Ma'm 'spike' pulsing is not good for batteries, especially sealed lead acid types with pasted plates. The objective of a good and effective lead acid battery charger is to ensure that it is capable of taking the battery terminal voltage to a point where the cell voltages can equalise and this is invariably a higher voltage than most commercial chargers are set at. This is where the sizing of the energiser is important. Most lead acid batteries ideally need to be taken above 15V during a charge cycle to minimise the long term build up of sulfation and to do this the energiser output power needs to be limited, so that heating of the battery is kept to a minimum (at voltages above 14V where cell gassing starts to occur), by minimising gassing . This requirement dictates the charging rate of the battery.


Bedini has with collaboration from Bearden, created an industry and cult following with his technology and has been clever in never claiming OU for his devices themselves. Instead he claims that with proper conditioning, a battery or bank of batteries undergoing continuous charge / discharge cycling on a correctly sized energiser can eventually exhibit OU as measured by a ratio of energy in to energy out. IMO this will never be convincingly demonstrated because battery vagaries and measuring compelxities prevent this.

[vasik041]

Hi Shekhar,

You will see a lot of arguing and arrogant claims, like "Tesla never claimed FE".

It is true that there is no ready avilable ZPE device which can be built in back yard, but there are perfectly working ideas which could be developed.

People with money not intersted in developing FE, so we not see such devices on the market.

That does not mean that it is not possible :-)