Electric Co-op Today

Looking at its Web site you can see why people might be attracted to the RPU-190.

This is what Rural Missouri Editor Jim McCarty got when he ordered the RPU-190. (Photo By: Jim McCarty/Rural Missouri)

“Cut your power bill by 50 percent,” it blares atop the home page. The manufacturer of the $199 device goes on to claim that it uses “genuine power-saving techniques” and that “if you can plug in a power cord you can install the RPU-190.”

To consumer-members it might sound impressive. But Brian Sloboda, a program manager at the Cooperative Research Network, has another word. “I call it a potential deathtrap,” he said. “This might kill you.”

CRN and some local co-op engineers have been taking a look at the RPU-190, which Sloboda described as a shunt that’s slightly larger than a stick of chewing gum.

“All it is is a strip of copper that you place between the contacts on the meter base,” he explained. “Shunting means it sends the electricity around, so it’s never counted—assuming it works, which could be illegal.”

Following co-op complaints, Electric Hero, the manufacturer of the RPU-190, removed from its Web site a video that Sloboda called “scary.” In it, a young woman demonstrated how to install the device.

Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and wearing what appear to be lineman’s gloves, she opens a meter, sticks the copper strip in and closes the meter. “There is the potential for serious harm,” Sloboda said, expressing amazement that the woman was not injured or killed.

Electric Co-op Today made phone and e-mail requests for an interview with an Electric Hero official.

The e-mail was not replied to, and a man answering the phone said the owner, whom he would identify only as “Mike,” would call back. That had not happened at press time.

Tags: News Roundup, Safety