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total BS?

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ivymike

ivymike

Mechanical
Nov 9, 2000
5,653
this sounds like total BS to me, but they're trying to sell it to a friend of mine so I thought I'd ask for some additional input - see the "enercat" tool on this website
 
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I ran across an excellent example of BS just a day or two ago. It was an electronic pest-repeller. Plug it in, it drives away pests, supposedly. The funny part was, it was sold as the "Ultrasonic Pest Repeller". Then in the sales blurb, it quite clearly said that it produced sound of a frequency too LOW to hear, and that dogs and other pets couldn't hear it. I thought I'd misread soemthing, had to go back and double check the name and description. And no, it was not a huge subwoofer type thing, just a little gadget that plugged into an outlet.

And, long long ago, I remember seeing them sell plastic owls. In the gardening magazines, plastic owls would scare off crows and other birds. In the hunting magazine, "Crows hate owls and will gather to attack". So the same plastic owl either attracted crows or drove them away, depending on what you were wanting it to do. I'm not sure how it knew the difference though.

And that reminds me of another story, where the person described how a thermos bottle kept hot liquids hot and cold liquids cold, whereupon the other person asked, "But how does it know?"
 
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I remember the plastic owls at Oshawa Bus Terminal... once the birds got used to them, they were covered with pidgeon sh*t...

Dik
 
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I see the plastic owls at evaporation ponds all the time. They are always covered in bird crap. Makes me smile that someone you trust with a multi million dollar design can actually think that the plastic owls actually do something.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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I bought some aluminum stakes at Costco that had a battery powered periodic vibration motor in them to drive off moles. Knowing that moles hunt by "hearing" worms, I figured it might be legit and having tried everything else to no avail, I invested in them. It actually worked perfectly, for me anyway. The moles moved over to my neighbor's yard. The funny thing was, eventually I could see the range that the vibration effect had on them, because there was an arc of mole signs that followed a consistent distance away from the stake in my yard, about 30ft.


"You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals" -- Booker T. Washington
 
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Funny you bring up the mole things.

I have prairie dogs infesting my yard. I tried all the usual chemical deterrents to no avail. My father-in-law has a Sweeney's gopher and mole "ultrasonic" solar powered stake. He doesn't seem to have a problem anymore, so with how cheap one of them was on Amazon I bought it on Sunday. I'll need a week to see if it's working. If not, I may go to Costco and find your solution.

--Scott
www.aerornd.com
 
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