Want to lose $49.97 in a few seconds? One way to do it is to buy the “blueprints” being sold by the “Stirling Power Generator”. We fully understand your frustration with electric utilities and their regulators and we are all tempted to find ways to reduce our electric bills while still being able to use this valuable commodity to power our homes and lives. We’ve even authored a guide about how to reduce your electric bill. It is this frustrating scenario that unscruplous marketers seek to exploit. Much like the discredited String Generator scam and the almost identical to the discredited “Power Innovator Program“, this Stirling Power Generator rip-off offer claims to teach you how to make this work for your home and how to cut your electricity prices by 75% guaranteed in as little as a month.” Oh, give us a break!
This scam is almost a pitch-perfect copy of other such “free energy” inventions such as the “Ambient Vibration Generator” and the “Tesla Fuelless Generator”. Another one, called Sky4Energy is largely pitching the same scam. Each of these other schemes charge $49 (not a coincidence) for the details about how to build them. They want $49.97 for the same bogus information (if you try to leave the page, they’ll drop the price to $29) but anything you pay is simply wasted money. It’s not the only fiction being peddled here; more about that below.
But first, a short discussion about the Stirling engine. A Stirling engine is a heat engine operating by cyclic compression and expansion of air or other gas, the “working fluid”, at different temperature levels such that there is a net conversion of heat to mechanical work. There are several design configurations for Stirling engines that can be built, many of which require rotary or sliding seals, which can introduce difficult tradeoffs between frictional losses and refrigerant leakage. Essentially, it is a heat-powered engine that has been around since the 19th Century. Heat engines are readily assembled by skilled engineers who know what they are doing — but it is not a project for a DIY neophyte. If you want to try building one, here’s a free site that will instruct you step by step. In fact, there are a number of free Web resources that help you build a Stirling engine. For more advanced applications, this site offers legitimate kits. However, the Stirling Generator marketers take this highly-regarded technology and attempt to make it appear as though you are “harvesting” electricity from the heat. It’s bogus science.
There are a number of large warning fraud flags flying all over this scam. The first one is: “who is making this offer?” You’ll never find out. They can’t be located in search engines and apparently has never published anything, except for this fraud-laced Stirling engine pitch ripped off from all of other energy generator scams. But a big warning flag is when a website fails to feature the credentials of the author and/or if a Google search turns up nothing about this person, you can bet this is a marketer-driven product.
Another warning flag: the sales pitch is slick — they spend a lot of marketing money to get it to you. The so-called “inventor” turns out to have a trained narrator’s voice” and the video is professional quality. Who is paying for that? You are. And, like so many scammers, they are using Clickbank to sell their ebook so don’t assume you’ll get a refund. Clickbank is almost always an indicator that the product is questionable.
A third warning flag: if you look for a review of the product, you are deluged with lots of fake review or “scam” sites that simply direct you to the main sales site or offer some officious pablum talking about how the product is highly rated or recommended. (such as energypowerbank.com and dailyreviewmag.com) The marketers for this service pay a reported 75-100% commission for any referrals they generate. So these “affiliate marketers” create create fake review sites which effectively thwart any customer who is looking for real reviews. It is also a tactic to obscure any customers who have posted complaints or alerts about fraudulent claims. This affiliate marketing trick makes it very difficult for consumers to detect this and other such scams, like the Nikola Tesla Secret Scam and the Joe’s Wise Generator scheme. As one persevering blogger has noted, energy scam artists rely upon these fraudulent reviewers to be using tags like: “does it work?”, “is it a scam?” or “verified review” to suck unsuspecting consumers into this fraud.
One additional warning: once you give them your money, you’ll be tagged as “meat”. Once they know that you’ll fall for this pitch, the same marketers will be coming back to you over and over and over for other such pitches. So understand that if you pay these marketers anything….let alone $49…..they’ll continue to hound you with more slick schemes designed to prey on your fears and concerns. Our advice: don’t open your door or wallet to them. If you are looking for ways to reduce your energy costs, we recommend reading our brief energy savings guide or checking out Smarter House for ideas about how to cut your electric bills a smart way.