inside a computerised pipework scale reducer. 

Honestly, I was kind of expecting the internals to just be for the LEDs.

I use something similar, it's called the Placebo Mark VI and it works great. It works just as good as my unicorn repellent. In all the years I have lived here, I have not seen a single unicorn.

The Chase light led display whiffs of late night advertorial marketing quackery.

Once again, another great teardown, schematic and output capture. I'm 52 years old, can build anything, and still I love watching the way you present your videos. It makes me feel like there are few normal people left on the planet that actually understands how everything works. I've been tearing apart everything I could get my hands on since I was old enough to pick up a screwdriver and it still never gets old. (I don't know why my parents didn't just buy me broken toys to disassemble.) 👍👍👍👍👍

As a test, we installed two of a similar device in two brand new houses in a four house development, all using city provided water. Absolutely No difference. After four years every one of the four test locations had the same corrosion, scale buildup and deterioration. Our test was for the builder because he was sold these. We told him to do the test to confirm what the quack salesman told him.

An uncle I visited like 10 years ago had one of these, and it seemed 10+ years old already. He said he was convinced that it was crap, it wasn't worth a damn thing. Still didn't take it down. Because he paid for it, so he was going to squeeze every single bit of LED blinking out of it, even if it didn't do anything else. It's probably still there, blinking away, a memento of man's stupidity.

The transistor in this case is used as an emitter follower, applying about 4.5V across the emitter's 1k resistor. The resulting emitter current is sent up to the collector's 1k resistor, but is 180 degrees out of phase. Note that the collector never gets low enough to saturate the transistor - about 12V. Because the two "antennas" are single-ended, there is zero current being sent into them, so no magnetic fields can be generated by either. Thus, all this thing does is to apply two anti-phase voltages to the two wires that you wrap around the pipe and which are only slightly coupled by a very weak capacitance between them, a picofarad or less. What they do after that is voodoo electronics - total hooey. Commenter emcgon rightly calls is "homeopathy for domestic plumbing." There is zero science backing what this sham electronics contraption claims to do. They are usually passed off as "a better water softener," total BS.

It probably functions better as a VLF radio jammer than a pipe descaler.

How could you *lose* that other calculator? It was about the size of a door!

Many years back we had an instantaneous gas water heater in a very hard water area. British Gas installed a small inline salts unit that prevented the unit scaling up and it only needed changing once every yoear or two. Some time in the nineties they discontinued the support for the scale preventer and said that we could fit a magnetic one, that was all the now supplied. We moved soon after, so no idea how long that kept things scale free. The latest house came fitted with a similar unit to this one shown in the video, but not quite as flashy. The previous occupant was so proud of it, he cut a hole in the pipe boxing so you could watch the LEDs! We still get scale and watermarks....

the casing and the LED seems nice though

"I connected headphones to the output" - of course you would

I asked a local plumber about these and he said they were completely bogus. If you want to de-scale water, you pretty much have to use the salt-based resin tank type conditioners.

I was extremely sceptical about the operation of these powered electric water softeners, I still am with regard to those that use an open circuit antenna dipole to couple to the water pipe. However there is some evidence that those that use a coil to magnetically couple to the water in a pipe do work There are a number of university papers which descripe tests that show the effect of high frequency magnetic pulses on hard water. The principle of operation is not to remove hard water ions, such as Ca++ and Mg++, but to change the structure of the salts that precipitate out of the water. Changing them from needle shaped calcite crystals that readily stick to each other and the pipe work to an amorphous form of powder, which will not stick and is washed through the pipe. While the researchers were hard pressed to explain the effect, they did produce some convincing micrographs that showed the different structure of the precipitates between water exposed to a rapidly pulse magnet field and that not exposed. There are a number of industrial users who have installed such systems to keep their water pipes free from scale build up. It is difficult to believe that business would fall for a scam technology that did not produce some money saving results. I remain very sceptical about the operation of the dipole wire devices, as it is difficult to understand how any significant part of the field could penetrate the pipe to interact with the water flowing through it. If the dipoles were subject to excitation close to RF resonance, then one might expect some of the near H field to penetrate the copper pipe, but most of these devices use an audio frequency FM square wave to excite the coil. The best, discharge a significant charge, stored in a capacitor, to maximise the induced magnetic field. You would be doing the world a service if you repeated part of the university research and published it here. This involved passing hard water through a section of pipe, with either the device fitted or not. A sample of the water was then taken and evaporated to dryness on watch glasses in a standard environment. I think a simple comparison would do. The resulting salt precipitate was then observers under a microscope to determine the shape of the salt crystals that formed. In the case of the university study, I recall that X-ray examination was done to identify the shape of the crystals. If I can find a link to the papers involved, I will post them here. I am sure I have a copy in my archive. To be fair, there are a huge number of reports on this subject, many from university engineering and chemistry departments. There appears to be as many claiming that this is pseudoscience as claiming it is a real observable effect. Ref New Scientist 18, February 1988 Lifting the scales from our pipes Magnetic fields change the way crystals form in fluids. This could prevent the formation of scale in pipes and boilers John Donaldson and Sue Grimes In this case the output drive circuit is horrible, not even giving a low impedance, push pull, output to the dipole, but then I suppose that if the circuit is not really doing anything useful, you might as well used the cheapest drive circuit you can reasonable get away with. It would be interesting to put a current search coil inside the pipe and see if any B field can be detected inside the pipe.

There are similar looking units which pass a large dc current through the coils which generates a magnetic field along the pipe and through the water. The dc current is generated by a mains transformer that has a large number of primary turns and a single heavy gauge secondary turn connected across the coils via a rectifier. The resistance of the coil limits the current. The theory is that the movement of the water in the magnetic field aligns the ions nose-to-tail because of their asymmetric charge distribution. This causes them to join together in long chains which then have no tendency to attach themselves to the pipe walls. It can also be done using permanent magnets. I'm not sure it this has any scientific validity but I have observed that some large organisations that ought to know do use these devices, for example at each vending machine.

The most interesting thing about this device is the way that the LEDs are driven. The rest is prime grade bs.

This device is amazing. It also prevents elephant infestation (in UK only). But... the most amazing thing is that it works just as well when it's not powered, although of course it need power to work the pretty LED display. .

Don't pronounce full bridge rectifier in that way or your eyebrows might grow together.

I like how it takes more electronics to run the leds than the actual de-scaler itself

Homeopathy for domestic plumbing.

If you think this is bad, you should see some of the stuff the “audiophiles” play with...

I can't imagine how this could work. Limescale is caused by calcium salts, especially calcium carbonate and bicarbonate, precipitating out when the water is heated. See the Wikipedia article for how this happens. Preventing this would have to mean either removing the calcium ions or stopping them from precipitating in hot water. In the case of a water-softener, the calcium ions really are removed by an ion-exchange medium which replaces them with something less likely to cause trouble. The calcium goes into the water-softener and doesn't come out. If these coils were stopping the calcium from getting past, you would expect limescale to form where it is wrapped around the pipe! On the other hand, as far as I can see there is no way for the coils to influence the calcium ions not to precipitate out when the water is heated elsewhere. That would be magic.

It's amazing that even after so many years, selling these things still isn't considered to be fraud, and not heavily penalized.

You used Autoscale on the scale reducer. Was expecting the world to end.

When I read the title I genuinely thought this was going to be some sort of device that shrinks pipes.

I always love when RU-vidrs shoutout other RU-vidrs in their wheelhouse. Spread the love Seems like all the electronics, Chem, and mechanical junkies are all here to have fun. EEVBlog, AvE, ElectroBoom, CodysLab, NileRed, and BigClive. Love ya'll

Hoy Clive, let me put a story, about 15 years ago, we have big trouble maintaining an big boiler. the boiler excists of a steel tank 2 m3 size a circulating pump two heat exchangers steam/water ,and a pump feeding the hot water trough the factory. one heatexchanger standby the other heating the water coming from the ring and or circulating the water trough the boiler. the heatexchangers last 1 week then had to be opened and a bucket minerals came out, forget to clean means trow it away, imposible to open it again. the solution was a firm offering no cure no pay for a unit about 8000 Euro. he installed a cabinet and 10 windings around the pipes round the boiler. After a week the heatexchanger was clean! the other one was clean after 2 weeks and so on, cleaning after 10 weeks production only a cup of scale in it!. a few years later after rebuilding the hotwater supply, the boiler was filled up with about 700 liter scale from the pipes and boiler, and al the metal was clean! we paid the man, and we saved us thousends of euro ia a few years on maintenance. sinds then every house i live in I put a few magnets op the water pipe entering the house and near the hotwater unit. never have any problems with scale on my kitchen equipment. greetings Jos

Did it descale your ears while listening?

I have a similar device, installed on a plastic water pipe, working for 16 years now! All I will say is that I have very few scale problems.

The weird connector and screw arrangement might be because it was originally meant for the strain relief of the mains input cable. Anyway I bet it's complete BS but they where clever enough to make it actually do something so it would be harder to conclusively prove that it doesn't work

I had this exact same product installed for about 2 years, fitted at the same time as my new oil fired combi boiler. When the heat exchanger scaled up after only 2 years ago I removed it and threw it away. I then spent several hundred pounds on a proper water softener. 19 years since then and no problems! I live in an extremely hard water area. So hard that sometimes leaks 'heal' themselves due to scaling in only a few weeks!

The less current you couple, the better it works. This is a high end device!

you are the best clive!.

The more LEDs on these sort of things always equates to more quackery.

That scope printout really came out beautifully

Haha. Love your videos. When you first opened it up I thought - bridge rectifier, smoothing cap, microprocessor to run the LEDS...which is basically what it was. What a load of bollocks - I was playing about with those chips in the 1990s when I was at school. Keep the videos coming! ❤️

I bought one of these sort of things out of curiosity. Fitted it at the same time as a new cylinder. 10 years later, the cylinder had failed (mega hard water area) and I can see no difference inside the "new" (10 year old) pipework to the original. It's all scaled up and manky inside. Maybe this is because the one I bought just has 2 blinking LEDs and not a little Knight rider thingy?

It''s an old 007 product: Connery. The transistor 'C945' will likely be a 2SC945, not a BC945. Thanks BC.

Transistor is a 2SC945, the base pin on the end gives it away; a BC would have the base pin in the middle. It is any 'old' transistor with much better options available today. Yes looks old. Nice enclosure.

I'm not mechanically inclined at all yet I still thoroughly enjoy your content

I assume that it is just a impressive looking box of deception, with a full wave rect. ,current smoothing, and a oscillator chip to make the lovely, flashy LED's chase. and are used primarily to fleece susceptible pensioners,into spending what little money they have, on useless junk. with nothing of real value in return . . . Awesome Video, as always Clive! Thanx Jim :)

If you put it in a metal bucket with a TV aerial it turns into a free energy device.

Nice to see the scope shots and have them explained :)

Pretty cool. Thanks Clive. I would not waste my money on it unless I just wanted to play around with it.

14:36 Taking the liberty to speak for all of us, we would like to hear a recording of that particular noise.

A pure placebo device - as soon as you heat the water above 75-80 degrees the lime drops out the water and the scale starts to form

I’ve always wondered and now I know. Thank you BigClive🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿😃

I loved the Electro Boom reference!

...snif...snif...snif... I smell fraud, gullible, fake, phoney! Kind of like the whole house bug repellent that turns your house wiring into a "virtual fence" for bugs... yeah right!

It's an old technology that requires no updating because how do you "improve" snake oil. I was almost fired from a job at a plumbing supply house when word came down the pipe (see what I did there?) that our company had gotten into bed with this manufacturer of a device that would prevent scale in water piping. Astounding! No scale buildup whatsoever! Push this product! The units actually DO prevent the buildup of scale (from calcium carbonate in my instance), however it only worked where the windings were around the pipe and perhaps a foot or so beyond. However after the "ions had reconfigured", or whatever, the problem was actually worse. My suggestion was to REMOVE the "hardness" but they seemed happier to keep the sh*t in solution and pass it on to the end user who was drinking, bathing and cooking with this funny water. Total crap! Nice vid Clive. Also liked the Canadian Sweets video over black russians with blinky beard and buddy. Btw, we call them candy. Cheers mate!

Your prints do look amazing.

After carefully considering your excellent analysis Clive, I have to call this device bogus. ~nice scope

7:45 FULL BRIDGE RECTUM FRYER

I was living with my uncle when he had one of these fitted, and I thought it was just flammery. Weirdly, it sort of worked. We lived on the South Coast of the UK where the water is VERY hard, and prior to having the thing fitted, we had to descale the kettle about every three months. With the unit fitted, the chalk seemed to fall out of the water as tiny flakes, rather than coating the inside of the kettle. That was fine (the kettle had a wire filter) but it was an ARSEHOLE for the shower, as the little flakes would get trapped in the holes and muss up the water flow. So yeah - not descaling as such, but it definitely made a difference.

Glad to see you pull this gadget apart. I was wondering what what inside. I too was hoping for some big type of induction coils and was a little disappointed.

Thanks for zooming in Clive.

A friend of mine had a similar device for removing iron from water. It worked quite well and collected enough iron to completely block the pipe where the wire was wrapped, leaving him without water for a day and bill for a plumber to replace 2 feet of pipe.

I'm saying it has no effect, for the simple reason that they didn't have the chase lights go in both directions. These cheap K.I.T.T. knockoffs should be illegal.

Bull's Height sounds a good description !!

My GF saw an ad for something similar. She asked me if it's worth looking at. I told her "they're woo". Then I remembered, Big Clive loves doing videos about this stuff. And sure enough, this is the first one it took me to. She was talking to the video a lot, and realized it is total woo. It's a lot cheaper to watch you tear one down, than for me to buy one to tear down. :)

Well the case is nice..... good for some outdoor project. The rest is pure horse dooky.

If anyone actually thinks this works, then it's the placebo effect writ large! I have an ion exchange softener and a reverse osmosis filter system, both of which can be proven scientifically to work.

I just purchased a home in West TX. The water there is horrible. I have been looking a all the methods to treat the water to make it better to drink and use whole house. I have always been skeptical about this product but (like you) always wondered what was in it and how it worked. I know that you can not magically remove the solids and compounds in water. I also expected to see BIG caps and coils. HOLY CRAP.. The second you opened it, I said SNAKE OIL!!! THANK YOU for driving the NAIL I that coffin for me. VERY GOOD tutorial and circuit explanation!! They spent more money on the box and LED chaser circuit to get you to fall for the hype. All the pipe in my TX house is PEX. Theres ZERO chance that this will properly work on a PEX system for the whole house.

Thanks for reposting these gems, big Clive. I see some comments (which are good but, have pretty much totally opposing efficacy views) skew from "helpful" to "ineffective". Myself, I have not owned a house so I have not formed a valid opinion. I did once get talked into a water distiller; a friend made a deal through a wholesaler, and made what he could charge. About a 1-1/2 ft. (.5m) tall and 1 ft. (.3m) aluminum hot pot with cooling tube attached above. Good for distilled water for irons, batteries. I think since this was 1980s my parents thought I discarded it, so it is no longer around! But it had limited use. Good video breakdown of electronics

It would be interesting to see a JW review on this.

So, if I wrap my speakers wires around my pipes and put on Zeplin, I'm good to go.

FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER! Loved it :)

Great video as always.👍🏻

My dad (an easily hoodwinked type) had something similar to this back in the 90s, it didn't work... :P You get less quacks from a duck pond... :P

Transistor is actually a 2SC945, which is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of a BC54x or 2N3904 type device. Pinout is B C E. And yes, these devices are utter bunkum

Hello Clive, First; what wonderful informative videos! Now I'll stop grovelling. I have a water descaler unit fitted by a well-known northern gas company as part of my combi boiler installation. It comprises a "transformer" winding around the copper cold water inlet to the boiler, a single winding where both ends of the winding plug into the descaler unit. I've no idea how well it performs in descaling because not long after the water descaler unit was installed, we had to switch it off due to excessive radio interference. I suspect it is performance is similar to how well snake oil performs. At this point, I point out that I am a radio amateur with an electrical engineering background. The water descaler unit literally causes such high levels of radio interference that all the Long Wave broadcast band is obliterated and up as high in the radio spectrum as 2 MHz, by 50 Hz modulated hum every 20 kHz. (Looking at your scope picture I can see this unit I have may be so so similar in output.) The unit itself is powered by a small linear power supply, so it is not a switch mode PSU causing the interference, but the descaler itself. We surmise that the water descaler unit puts 20 kHz RF-induced into the water pipe to descale, but I am guessing because I've never worked on water descaler units before and I refer back to my previous comment about “snake oil”. I only wish I could ship it to you, but because it is under contract with, it has to remains in situ (and we only plugged in when they do the annual service)! Regards, K.

Nice review Thanks for sharing 😀👍

glorified led chaser in waterproof case... theres no way that is going to descale water

I bet it outputs current into the wires solely to show it's doing something if tested, but not enough to risk any sort of injury.

Big clive I'm writing from the USA. Here in America we have a similar unit called a Scale Blaster. I know this because I work at a big box hardware store, and I heard rumors about this gadget. I actually heard about it from a customer who came to the store looking to buy a Scale Blaster. We didn't stock it but we directed the customer to our website to get it. I myself have a well water problem in my home. I have calcium chloride floating around in the water which causes scale to build up calcium deposits in my water heater (even with a water softner), and deposits in my toilet bowl, and around faucets. As a matter of fact years ago I replaced a 15 year old water heater and it took 4 men to carry it out because of heavy buildup of calcium. At any rate I purchased a Scale Blaster and installed it 6 months ago, and I will tell you flat out it works! It works as described in the instructions....It doesn't remove the calcium, it simply puts a charge in the scale molecules and keeps them from clumping together. I will end by saying I have received similar good result comments from other folks who have the units in their homes. Thanks for your knowledgeable teardown reviews, I am a subscriber and have watched many of them.

I have the exact same screwdriver big Clive. I switched out to one with a bigger handle but Precision tip.

the 1 thumb down must be from the person making this device haa haaa

I just put magnets on the pipe, and say thank you once a week. works well i think.

As usual, another great video! I wonder though, does this apparatus detect and compensate for earth rays too? 🤣🤣

my grandparents have this stuff. on the other hand i want one of those motorised feather dusters

Can't imagine how something like this would work. If you stripped off ions so that they separated from the scale, the ions would flow through the pipes and just reattach to each other at some point down the line. One concern I might have is what this current might do to lead solder joints. You're introducing a current into a pipe which woujld otherwise be "grounded" or "earthed". Would the "sound" introduced by the device make the pipe vibrate in such a way as to loosen and dislodge the scale? Again, I'd have to ask what effect this might have on solder joints. I'd have to see a thorough scientific explanation before I bought any device like this.

Funny, the sticker on the outside of the unit says that it is 230VAC when in fact, it should be a LOW DC voltage in...

This sort of sideshow quackery makes me so glad I live in a very soft water area. No limescale, ever!

Thanks Clive, my sanity is in check. I thought these things were hogwash.

I would have inverted the colors of the oscilloscope picture to save toner/ink.

didnt know you watched electroboom. nice

I see many of those units that just have a single wire to basically one antenna. I was considering getting one but it's pretty hard to separate the snake oil units from one that MAY actually work. Thanks for explaining the principle of operation. Yes..... they put a lot of thought into the case but very little into the actual effectiveness.

Love these videos. I can see how it's supposed to work but I don't know if this would do anything. Do scale reducers actually work? Some do. I used to think they were all snake oil until I moved into a new build flat 3+ years ago with a magnetic+electrolytic reducer fitted on the main pipe. I live in a very hard water area. After a few showers the dry, thickened, cracked skin on my hands just started to fall off in bits. Now I have minimal dryness on my hands and can't recommend a hood one enough. I don't think I'd recommend this device, though.

When transistor is close circuit the two coils are at the same potential about half of that voltage and then when it is open one will be a 17V delta or whatever that power supply was. Not sure how it works or if it works but the way it was designed with 1k resistors on each sides make sense so that current is limited on both of those outputs for protection.

So 95% of the circuit flashes some LEDs, and the rest of 5% does absolutely nothing relevant to the task at hand. Gotcha. Exactly as expected. Except of course I can do the exact same thing with nothing but magnets, without wasting any electricity - they fail to do anything at all equally effectively.

Ooh I can think of all kindsa projects for that scanning LED bar.

Naughty! I see the autoscale menu open!

I'm pretty sure it's fake. From a chemistry standpoint, I don't see how it would do anything.

Those things will not work any better than the ones for increasing fuel mileage on cars, which if they worked would come as standard on trucks and buses as well as cars.

Good morning I love all your videos I learn so much from watching what u do👍 I would love to see how u actually reverse Engineer some thing, thank you for your videos they r amazing 🍺

listened to it with headphones eh? What I've got from this is I can stick my earbuds into my mains socket and listen for the sweet sweet whispers of mother gaia.

Fools and their money…

I wish I had my own K.I.T.T. on my wall, Ohh or maybe a Cylon faceplate would make it even better.

My Brother-in-law got the farm when their parents passed away, the well on the farm gave very hard salty water. The plumbers installed a much larger filter thing that also was supposed to clean up the water and save the pipes which had indeed been clogging to such an extent that they needed to be replaced often costing big bucks. Well the filter did take a bit of the salt out of the water, but it was still the color of 1% milk mixed with water. When at long last the Missouri Diversion project was complete and farms in the area were served with water from the big muddy, the pipes were again removed and replaced. They still looked nearly as bad as the first replacement so other then improving the taste the device did little. Keep in mind this was a much larger device with filters that needed changing regularly. I know I would never waste my money on such a device, bottled water is cheap if you buy it by the case lot, and the filters you can pour your coffee water through are not all that expensive either. And as I say the problem was eliminated by the water from the Dams on the Missouri River about 80 miles North of here, they are now serving the majority of small towns from that project, the water isn't bad tasting and has been cleaned several times before reaching our homes, after all we all know what fish do in that water....

That resistor across the output of the regulator is likely there to ensure the 7805 actually regulates - those regulators need some minimal load current to stay in regulation and the MCU alone may not draw enough.