A  return  to  Cloud-cuckoo-land
 A  return  to  Cloud-cuckoo-land

                      Tom Napier

   Three years after the show and tell in Philadelphia which first brought "free energy" huckster Dennis Lee to PhACT's attention he was back in town with yet another scheme to bankrupt the electric companies or, more probably, his dealers.  Sadly, Lee's four hours of rhetoric in the First Union Center on the evening of November 10 were long on tell and short on show.  Despite this, there was one crucial thing Lee didn't tell his rather meager audience.  At his 1996 show he had promised us "no more electric bills" thanks to a heat pump/heat engine combination which would, Lee said, be installed on peoples' houses, "Before this year is out."  This machine has never materialized.  Dwelling on past failures is not Lee's style, he favors hush up and move on.  Now it is a "Counter Rotating Device" (CRD) which is to be installed, you guessed it, "Before this year is out."
   This time around Lee added the media to his enemies' list, up there with the utility companies and the government.  Attendances at his 47 city tour have been far below his expectations.  The audience in Philadelphia was, at most, 500 people, about a fifth of 1996's.  Thanks to skeptics around the country, the media knew Lee was coming.  They had time to dig into his criminal record and a chance to bone up on some physics.  Newspapers and TV news shows nationwide have been pointing out the fundamental impossibility of creating energy from thin air.  The inevitable conclusion: Lee is misleading people about the prospects of his technology actually creating any energy.  Two states have served Lee with cease and desist orders and his Washington show could only show video; Lee couldn't risk his equipment being seized in lieu of unpaid fines.
   Lee's response to his critics was characteristic.  When physicists say "free energy is impossible" they don't mean what regular people mean.  When commonsense people say energy is free, Lee says, they just mean that they don't have to pay for it.  As he says, "Solar energy is free energy."  So Lee gave lip service to the Conservation of Energy but then claimed that gravity is supplying energy all the time.  He also supposes that magnets create free energy.  Well, he's not the first to make that mistake!
   Some of the show was familiar.  A Brown's Gas generator, which uses kilowatts of electricity to electrolyze water, fueled a small engine.  This proved you can run cars on water.  Lee never explained why you would want to lug around a Brown's Gas generator when you could drive your car directly from the battery powering the generator.  For a given horsepower an electric motor is considerably lighter and far more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
   Lee is still spreading the dangerous myth that a Brown's Gas blow-torch can neutralize radioactivity.  It merely scatters radioactive material around the room.  The government ignores this technology, Lee says, because it wants to use nuclear waste as warhead material.  He overlooks that, unlike chemical or biological weapons, the harmful effects of radioactivity cannot be isolated from the people handling it.  A warhead full of radioactive waste would be far more deadly to the users than to the enemy.
   Lee does seem to have a low opinion of the intelligence and probity of the government.  He expects FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency which exists to help people in disaster situations.) to use Y2K hysteria as an excuse to impose martial law.  Lee wants us to keep our weapons ready to resist them.
   Lee's latest show had some new tricks.  He uses capacitors to "stop the current driving a motor from passing backwards and forwards through your electric meter."  This saves you being billed many times for the same electricity.  Duh!  If any current really went backwards it would slow down your meter and you wouldn't be charged for it.
   Tesla is (still) the greatest inventor who ever lived since he transmitted power through the air with no losses and no nasty EMF.  Lee claims that Tesla transmitted power for 26 miles with a 99.9% efficiency.  How he got around the inverse square law or radiated power without generating electromagnetic fields in the intervening space beats me.  Lee is offering $10,000 to anyone who can do as well using wires.
   As usual Lee has got things backwards.  The problem is not to prove that this result cannot be achieved by conventional means but to prove by experiment that Tesla could do what his fans claim.  I'd happily pay $10,000 to Lee, or anyone else, who can duplicate Tesla's alleged results.  Put up or shut up!
   The best Lee could do was to show that you can light a circular fluorescent tube dimly from a high frequency source via about twenty feet of wire.  Look, only one wire, said Lee, ignoring the return path through the floor and his and his assistant's bodies.  Anyone who owns a decorative plasma lamp can do the same, a fluorescent tube lights up anywhere near one.
   Another neat trick was dropping a powerful magnet through a 15 inch aluminum tube.  The magnet took some four seconds to fall through.  It wasn't clear what Lee was trying to prove but it sure wowed the audience.  When he switched to a copper tube I predicted the magnet would take longer to fall.  It did.  This gimmick is a demonstration of Lenz' Law which states that the field set up by the induced current in a conductor acts against the motion of the magnet inducing the current.  Oddly enough, this is why electric motors cannot have over-unity efficiencies but I doubt if many in the audience spotted that!  Although this "magnetic drag" effect is more dramatic if you can afford to buy a large rare-earth magnet like Lee's, it has been used in devices such as seismographs and even car speedometers for at least fifty years.
   Lee showed us a video of a magnet floating above two parallel cylinders.  Cute, but this was not, as he claims, a demonstration of the Mizner Effect [sic] in a room temperature superconductor, there are, as yet, no room temperature superconductors.  Lee thinks it's only scientific jealousy which is delaying his Nobel Prize.  Learning to spell "Meissner" correctly would be a step in the right direction.
   Then we were treated to a rant about the electric companies being scared to death of Lee.  It must be an uphill battle, portraying yourself as a martyr when in reality your "enemies" barely know you exist.  The power companies know quite well that none of Lee's "technology" can possibly produce any power and really couldn't care less about him.  The only people who oppose Lee are independent physicists and engineers who don't like to see fake science being used to rip people off.  The only group to whom Lee is a threat are those who trust him with their money.
   Eventually we got to the promised "Counter Rotation Device."  This is based on the Fourth Law of Motion.  No, you didn't miss that one in school, Lee has just invented it.  He claims that, since the reaction is equal and opposite to the action, you can take power from both without violating any physical laws.  Did you know that every time you bolt down an electric motor you are throwing away the energy of the reaction force?  Neither did I.  Let's hear it one more time, Force is not energy!
   So Lee mounts the motor body on bearings and uses gears to couple its rotation to the output shaft.  He then runs tests with the body fixed and with the body rotating.  Sure enough, the motor speed increases while the input power decreases.  The motor efficiency more than doubles and, since it is 75% to start with, it is now 150%.
   Hold on, who said the efficiency of the motor is 75%?  Well its makers do, but they measure it at some 3000 rpm.  In Lee's set-up the motor started off at 219 rpm.  Electric motors become horribly inefficient when you load them so that they run slowly.  Lee's own numbers show that the initial efficiency is 7.7%.  With the CRD in action the motor runs faster and its efficiency triples, to about 23%.  The funny thing is that you can achieve exactly the same result without the motor body turning.  Just connect a two-to-one reduction gear between the motor shaft and the output.  Then you won't need slip-rings to supply the motor with current, there will be less friction, and the efficiency will be even higher.
   Frankly I was aghast that Lee expected to fool people with such an obvious error.  At least with his heat pump device you had to know a bit about heat engines to see its fatal flaw.  The CRD is equivalent to a device to improve your car's gas mileage where you do the first test with the brake on.
   From the demonstration of the rotating motor Lee went on to the prototype CRD.  This looked like a giant hamster wheel.  It ran from batteries for 30 seconds and lit some bulbs.  No input/output measurements were made.  Is this the device which will revolutionize the power industry?
   Finally Lee showed us another electric motor.  This was hooked to a dynamometer to measure its output power.  He measured the electrical input as some 300 watts and claimed that the output was 3 HP, giving an efficiency of some 800%.  A witness at Lee's Oregon show alleges that the input current was mismeasured but given Lee's level of engineering proficiency the error could be anywhere.  For example, there was no evidence that the dynamometer was being used correctly.  After all, a 3 HP output will boil a gallon of water in nine minutes.  That would be a more convincing demonstration.
   One might ask, if Lee has an 800% efficient motor, why is he pushing his CRD?  It looks as if the campaign was built round the CRD and the over-unity motor was only an afterthought.
   Lee has set up a co-op system where groups of fifty people will cough up $200 each to install one 15 kW domestic free energy machine.  The savings from one machine will pay for the next.  Lee was collecting $275 a head but, due to contined legal pressure, the deal has changed.  You now pay only $75 but pledge to pay $200 when you see that first machine working.  The demonstration unit is promised to show a 15 kW output for 24 hours.  That will be with no input, won't it Mr. Lee, not a 20 kW input?
   That demonstration of a sustained net output will take a while to happen, in fact, I forecast that it never will.  Lee must really believe his own ballyhoo, he won't even cover his and his dealers' costs with a handful of $75 checks.
   The co-ops will also pay for the construction of huge "power-wagons."  These will supply electricity at 5¢ a kWh to keep us going during the Y2K blackouts.  Eventually that will go down to 1¢ a kWh.  At this price Lee expects to put the power utilities and oil companies out of business within two years.  And pigs will fly!

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This is an expanded version of an article which first appeared in the December 1999 issue of Phactum, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking.  It is copyright © PhACT, 1999.  All rights reserved.  The author can be reached at tom@phact.org

Eric Kriegs report from the outside:

Here's my early report for the Philadelphia Dennis Lee show at the First Union Center 11/10/99:

 The "show" at the First Union center was a highly promoted  culmination of a 46 city
nationwide promotional tour ostensibly to provide grass roots political support for free electricity.
  However, through the internet, many skeptics groups and a number of independent volunteers
also sprang into action and responded by alerting the press and in some cases passing out counter
literature.  Eric and a number of skeptics, physicists and engineers were quoted in many local
radio, TV and newspaper stories.  In addition, Good Morning America and USA Today (who ran a
paid full page paid ad) ran balanced stories.  The BBB and a number of state attorney generals got
involved to the point of serving papers and issuing restraining orders.
  Strangely, Dennis picked his final tour stop to be near the home of his most vocal critic.
Phact's presence at the show was a climactic show down of nearly 2 months of activism by
both sides of the belief question.
  Our local media did a good job of setting the stage: Channel 6 ran an investigative piece
days ahead of time.  The Inquirer (who made money on Lee's paid advertisements) ran
a quarter page story at the top of the business section and KYW ran reports.
I believe advance media coverage was behind this show having around 300
attendees vs a similar show 3 years ago having around 3000.
  A group of about 9 Phact members showed up at 5 pm at a near by diner to hang out before the show.
I split out early for a 10 minute taped interview with channels 3 and 17 in front of the center.
With camera's still rolling, I took my box of fliers and worked a very appreciative crowd waiting to
get in.  Member and social activist, Eric Hamel helped distribute literature and talk with people as well.
The looks on people's faces seeing  my literature was priceless.  Some of Dennis's
followers were telling people "watch out - he's paid by big business to deceive you - don't believe him".
 I just responded, "go listen to Dennis in there - but also read this and make up your own mind".  One
really angry guy yelled at me, "why don't you get your own damn show". Another said,
"you will soon have to pay Dennis the $50,000 you promised when he delivers working machines".
I said, "you folks told me that in 97 and I expect to her it in 5 years".  Other chances for witty
rejoinders included questions like, "who is paying you?", "if this is true, why isn't he in jail" and
"have you ever seen this stuff work?".  Once again I've found the appreciation for the skeptical
message to be inversely proportion to level of financial investment.
 After the other Eric and I had gotten our literature in the hands of most attendendees
- a phalanx of beefy security guards came to tell us that we could not distribute literature. My attempts to
get the channel 3 crew to cover this were met with a threat of them being ejected as well.
 They wouldn't even permit us in the parking lot. The channel 3 reporter's and my appeals fell on
deaf ears.   They just kept saying we'd be
arrested and my car would be towed.  As I was driving out with their goons walking behind my
car, the irony struck me: While Dennis was inside talking about the corporate conspiracy
to suppress his free energy information and threaten him with jail -
a powerful corporation was suppressing my free energy information and threatening me with jail.
. . .All the while that Peco's electricity was powering the lights and Lee's relentless PA system.
A third Phact member who lingered too close to me was ordered
to leave as well. They ended up physically carrying him at least 100 yards to the gate.
I doubt Lee came any where's near recouping the $40,000 site rental and the cost of large newspaper ads.
  I appreciate the many people (most who I have never seen) who have helped spread the voice of
reason on this issue and I'm happy for the many new press contacts for PhACT and a number of
other local skeptics groups.
 

Dave had the following to say:
Dennis claimed he could neutralize nuclear waste using a machine about the size
of  lawnmower that burns water for power.  In mentioning this, he said that he
had attend EVERY public meeting by the DOE in the last two years and no
officials would talk to him.  And why won't they talk to him?  He said it's
because they want to keep the nuclear waste and bury it so they can save to use
later on nuclear warheads.

The machine that burns water does so by using a molecular  rearrangement of
water.  The normal structure of water is H-O-H, whereas the re-arranged water is
H-H-O and is called "brown's gas."

Another use of brown's gas is a replacement for acetylene.  According to Dennis,
the flame from brown's gas automatically equilibrates it's temperature to melt
whatever is in front of it.    He said it would sublime tungsten at 13,000 F or
melt steel.  He claimed that the flame was subliming a thin stick of tungsten
(although the stick was clearly burning).  He also purportedly showed this by
waving his hand through the flame.  The problem with the waving hand demonstration
is that, using his logic (sic), his hand should have melted.

Within the next 2 years, Dennis will eliminate all forms of pollution in the
U.S.

Dennis was responsible for the action by Congress to de-regulate the utilities
in 1996.

Dennis has invited EVERY member of the U.S. government to attend his sessions.

Dennis said his top researcher invited the modern submarine and the device that
the astronauts used to communicate to earth while on the dark side of the moon.

The Y2K is not real.  What the power companies and the government aren't telling
the public is that every power plant has a manual override switch.  If the
computers go down, the power plant can use this switch (the PhACT members agreed
that on a nuclear power plant, this would be a very large switch).  Dennis
explained that the Y2K is really something created by FEMA and the National
Guard so that on January 1 they can go out and confiscate everyone's weapons.

Dennis is under much conspiracy pressure.  Here's just a list of the few he
mentioned as targeting him:  Good Morning America, USA Today, the media, the
physicists of America, scientists, the Better Business Bureau, the CIA, the DOE,
the "government,"  the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Shell oil, the States of
Washington and Tennessee.  He also noted that Scientific American suppressed the
Wright Brothers for 5 years.

Dennis says what he is doing isn't about the money.  He already has $1 billion
to invest.  When he gets his machines going, he will have a revenue stream of
$18 billion a year.

Much of this can be seen on Dennis's website, www.ucsofa.com
 

Ray had the following to say:
And in the list of conspiracies I do seem to recall that Lee mentioned that
Edison had plotted against Tesla and the Illuminatti plotted against everyone
else.     Also, as I recall he names George Bush as a conspirator ... he was
head of the CIA  ... and of course the New World Order.   I don't think he
accused the Queen Mother or the World Wrestling Federation of anything ...
not that night anyway.

 If his theory is so hot then why didn't he operate
his blow torch with no input power what-so-ever once the machine had been
started and had produced a small amount of gas?    After all... if the
machine produces more power then it consumes it is even better than a
Perpetual Motion Machine.   One machine would power itself plus at least a
fraction of another ... wow. what a deal!!!

 I especially was happy to be sitting near Tom and Paula, they being
physicists.  Lee did have me on a couple of his tricks... I did not know how
Lee caused the neon bulbs to light up or how the magnet happened to fall
slowly through the aluminum and copper tubes.    They set me straight on
those points and apparently those tricks are used as experiments at the
Franklin Institute education programs for kids!!!
On most of Lee's other sleight of hand it was easy to see straight through if
one can even begin to comprehend what he was saying ... it was basically
pphactho-babble.   His computations of power were not formulated correctly and
even his math within the incorrect formulas that he did use seemed suspect to
me but i did not do the computation.
 
 

I finally left at about 10:30.    That was the best snake oil presentation I
have ever been too.   Way better then the carnival magic rug-cleaning
solvents, Ginsu knives, cookware, etc.    Lee is good at his trade as a
scamster for sure.

Paul had the following to say:
Who else but the mighty Lee can, with a perfectly straight face, say the
Wright Brothers built a plane (out of supra-sublimated hydrolyzed titanium
foil) that could make a round-trip to Pluto on a single 12 volt battery? Back
in 1534!

I didn't make it to the Diner, but arrived at First Union around 7:00p, just
as the show was starting. I couldn't tell who or where the Phact group was,
so I took a center-stage rear seat.

I'm sure you have a full account of what took place, but I did want to relay
to you my "impression" of Lee's act:

1) I've seen more sophisticated, and far more intriguing demonstrations of
"cutting-edge" knowledge at elementary school science fairs! When all was
said and done, all we got to witness was a few 40-watt lightbulbs glow dimly
for a few seconds.

2) His re-telling of the Wright Brothers story was hilarious. His fabricated
chain of events incredible, and proved to be one of the interesting portions
of the show. Neither myself nor those around me could contain our bewildered
chuckles.

3) The most entertaining of all, I thought, was Lee's account of the
"battle" that took place between Edison and Tesla (with financier JP Morgan
in the background). Maybe it was my stomach reacting to the $5 hotdogs, but
I'm quite confident the audience let out audible groans of disbelief,
especially to his repeated remarks that Edison was "a nobody". I would never
have expected Lee to slam such a distinguished American icon.

4) I couldn't help but think, through the entire show, that something wasn't
making any sense whatsoever. Namely, why were so many of his gadgets
concerned with "saving" energy and being more "efficient", when every ounce
of power is free and the supply limitless?

5) He states emphatically (over and over and over and over) that the United
States government, and United States Big Business, and United States
politicians are too blame for his predicament. Why then does he continue
doing business in the United States? With the price of electricity about 10
times what it is here, I'm sure the Japanese would be quite interested in his
wares, and he'd simultaneously avoid all the "harassment" he gets here...two
birds with one stone!

PS - I don't know who the "copper tube and magnet" trick was done, but Lee
may have exposed the secret when his metal detector went crazy as he (and
then each assistant in rapid succession) passed it over the "solid" copper
tube... He played it off well, though, stating it "wasn't worth spending an
hour to figure it out".

>From a visual point of view, I should add, the "magnet thru the tube" was the
most impressive, and the only one that elicited genuine "oohs and aahs" from
the crowd.
--

   Prepared by Tom Napier. Copyright © 1999, All rights reserved.

   You would expect that anyone promoting a machine to generate free
energy would be an expert on the subject of energy and its measurement.
After all, if you can't measure energy input and output accurately how can
you tell that the output exceeds the input?  Of course there is a simple
answer to that.  Connect the output of the machine to its input and
demonstrate that it runs continuously while generating significant excess
power.  Failing this test, which no free energy machine has yet been seen
to pass, you must rely on measurements of input and output power.  You
must also know how to compare them.

   Well, if there is one thing which free energy promoters seem to have in
common it is a massive ignorance, real or feigned, about what energy is
and how to measure it.  Luckily for them, their audiences seem to share
this failing and thus cannot readily distinguish between the plausible and
the possible.  To remedy this lack, this note attempts to summarize the
basics of energy in two thousand words or so.
 
 

What is energy?

   In practice, when you convert energy from one form to another some of
it is invariably converted into an undesired form such as frictional heat.
This subtracts from the useful output energy.  Thus the useful output of a
conversion device always contains a bit less energy than its input.  This
is expressed in the form of an efficiency, (Useful output)/(Necessary
input).  Since useful energy is always lost the efficiency is always less
than one.

   We are used to the idea that scientists and engineers are making
constant improvements in things and efficiencies are always rising.  Is
there a limit to efficiency?  After all, the idea behind one type of free
energy machine is that one can make the efficiency greater than one, hence
the name "over-unity" applied to such devices.

   An over-unity machine would require an input of energy in some form to
make it run but it would generate more energy, in the same or a different
form, than it consumes.  As mentioned above, the simple way to prove that
a device is "over-unity" is to run it from its own output.  No matter how
many calculations you may be shown to "prove" that a machine is over-
unity, if it can't pass that test then it isn't.

Mechanical energy

   Because you lifted it, the weight has acquired energy which it didn't
have when it was on the floor.  You could get this energy back again by
letting the weight fall, for example by connecting a string to the weight
and letting it drive an electric generator.  (Of course you could just let
the weight fall.  Then its energy will go into making a hole in the
floor.)

   No amount of push represents energy unless the thing being pushed
moves.  One demonstration you might see is a car engine bending a torque
wrench.  Torque is just a force which tends to make something turn.  It is
measured by multiplying the force by the distance from the pivot.  Funnily
enough this also gives foot.pounds but this doesn't mean that torque
equals energy unless the thing the torque is applied to moves.  If the
shaft made a complete turn then the torque would have been exerted through
2 pi radians.  The work done would have been equal to 2 pi times the
torque.
 

Power

   One way of measuring the 1 HP output would be to apply a brake to slow
the motor down.  This is wasteful, all the motor output is converted to
heat, but it allows you to measure the motor's output at any speed you
want.  The torque exerted on the brake can be multiplied by 2 pi times the
rotation rate to calculate the output power.  For example, suppose the
motor was rated at 1 HP at 3000 rpm.  If you braked it to run at 3000 rpm
then in each minute it should generate an output of 550 times 60
foot.pounds.  At 3000 rpm this is 11 foot.pounds per turn, corresponding
to a torque of 11 divided by 2 pi or about 1.75 foot.pounds.  If you
measured the force on the brake at one foot from the motor shaft it should
be 1.75 pounds if the motor is performing as planned.

   Normal electric motors become very inefficient if you brake them so
that they run much slower than the makers intended.  When running at their
normal speed, motors are from 75% to 90% efficient.  If you hear of a
device which doubles the output of an electric motor this doesn't mean
that it has gone from 80% to 160%.  It is much more likely to have gone
from 10% to 20%.

   Mechanical energy is commonly measured in the foot.pounds used above
and mechanical power in foot.pounds per second or, with the 550 conversion
factor, in horsepower.  (This is all much simpler in the metric system.)
Since many over-unity systems use electric power either as an input or an
output we need to be able to measure electrical power and to compare it to
mechanical power.
 

Electrical power

   Since we usually encounter electricity in the form of a current which
supplies continuous power it is much more common to refer to electrical
power than to electrical energy.  Thus we talk of watts or kilowatts, the
units of power.  In mechanics our basic energy unit, the foot.pound, was
divided by time to get the rate of power usage.  In electricity we
multiply power by time to get total energy.  Thus the electric company
bills you for your energy usage in kilowatt.hours.

   Two things need to be considered next.  How to convert from electrical
measurements to mechanical measurements and how to measure electrical
power.  Let's take the easy one first.  If you compare the units in which
electrical and mechanical power are measured you find that one horsepower
is 0.7457 kilowatts.  One outcome of this is that if you had an over-unity
electric motor it would drive that brake I mentioned at a 1 HP output
level using less than 0.7457 kilowatts of input.  If the motor is 85%
efficient, a typical figure, it will actually take 0.7457/0.85 or 0.877
kilowatts to drive it.
 

Measuring electrical power

   If the voltage changes when the current changes, which it almost
certainly does, then measuring the mean current gives quite the wrong
value for the power.  What you have to do is to use a wattmeter.  This
multiplies the instantaneous voltage by the instantaneous current to get
the power and then averages the power to arrive at the mean value.
However, even accurate wattmeters can give spurious results if the current
contains very fast spikes.  The current into electric motors often does.

   Things get much more complicated when the power source is alternating
current (AC).  Then, even if the mean current and voltage are absolutely
constant the power can be changing.

   There are two ways of measuring AC voltages and currents.  Cheap meters
assume that the AC voltage is always a pure sine wave.  They turn it into
half cycles all in the same direction and measure the mean value.  Then
they apply a correction factor to convert this into a true voltage.  Since
the AC voltage is rarely a pure sine wave and AC current almost never is,
cheap meters are unreliable even when measuring voltage, much less power.
They only give reliable results if the load you are connected to is a pure
resistor such as an electric heater.

   The alternative is to use an RMS meter.  (Root Mean Square, it's a
description of the averaging method they use.)  This will give a correct
voltage or current reading unless there are spikes in the current.

   There are two standard ways of measuring current.  One is to pass the
current through a small resistor and to measure the voltage.  This is
potentially accurate but is prone to error in practice since the voltage
measured is usually in the millivolt range.  It is easy to pick up
interference or to include more resistance in the circuit than you mean
to.  The alternative is the "clip-on" ammeter.  This can also pick up
interference and may not be better than 5% accurate anyway.  Not all clip-
on meters can measure DC.
 

The power factor problem

   The PF of a device can range from one down to zero.  Resistors have a
PF of one but pure capacitors and inductors have a PF of zero.  Most real
devices are designed to have PFs close to one but the real power input or
output of a device can be close to zero even when input large currents are
flowing.

   To take a dangerous example, if you connected a big capacitor to a 110
V outlet a huge current would flow through it but your electricity meter,
which measures watts quite accurately, wouldn't register any power drain.
Unfortunately the current flowing through the wires leading to your house
would make them heat up so the power company would be supplying power
which no one would be billed for.  They don't like doing this which is why
they are likely to disconnect you if you try this experiment.

   Electric motors are quite inductive and show a similar effect.  This is
why large electric motors are fitted with capacitors.  These stop them
taking more current than their power rating would indicate.

   Thus to measure the output power of a device you must use a meter which
takes the power factor into account or which uses the same instantaneous
multiplication process mentioned above for DC power measurements.

The last resort

   Luckily there is a way of measuring electrical output power which
cannot be fooled.  If you drive a resistive load the rate of heat output
is an accurate measurement of the electrical input power.  Some RMS meters
actually measure the heat generated by the input power.  A good way of
measuring the output of an over-unity device is to connect it to an
electric kettle containing a known amount of water.  If the room
temperature is known, and the kettle is well wrapped in insulation, the
time it takes to bring the water to the boil will indicate the true power
output.  Just don't bank on any inventor letting you run this test!

Conclusion

I'm a skeptical electrical engineer fascinated by the 100's of people who have claimed to have free energy.  I saw Dennis Lee's full page ad for energy independence and apparently paranormal devices. For the sake of the world I wish such extraordinary claims were possible, but I'm concerned for his many investors if this follows most similar claims I've studied.
 

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Eric's History of Perpetual Motion and Free Energy Machines
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Eric's Page examining Pphacthology of fringe inventors
300 MPG Carburetor is there such a thing? ( debunks a common urban legend)
What about strange claims involving BROWNS GAS?
Did the British get the steam engine wrong? ( by Tom Napier)