AQUAPOL - Bullshit Altert

[EEVblog]

Some grade-A bullshit here 
http://www.aquapol.co.uk
Dry out your walls with a couple of passive coils, because, you know, zero point energy...

And they have a scientific paper on it, joy!
http://www.aquapol.co.uk/Drupal8_mion/sites/default/files/files/Aquapol%20dissertation%20-%20Scientific%20Geoconference%20SGEM%202015.pdf

BTW, does the forum need a Debunking / Pseudo-scientific Crackpot section?
I'm always unsure were to post this stuff, and often it ends up

[TerraHertz]

I like this! Very fine quality weird science bullshit.


The intelligent Aquapol technology - full

It's great how this video is a perfectly reasonable review of rising damp processes, then suddenly at 4:39 it goes all weird science.

Edit: Odd low level echo sound at 15:05. What is it?

BTW, does the forum need a Debunking / Pseudo-scientific Crackpot section?
I'm always unsure were to post this stuff, and often it ends up

Apart from being too close to legitimizing that stuff, it would also make your 'electronics only, NO politics' policy less justifiable. And what's the point of 'chat' if not for random bullshit?

Btw, if this magneto-drying-out thing had any effect at all, shouldn't it be a health hazard to anyone in the vicinity?

[Bashstreet]

The abstract concept is somewhat feasible but the application here is...   

[Vtile]

BS thread a day will keep doctors away. 

edit.  uses technologies invented by Nicola Tesla, the father of all tinfoilhattery ... sad actually.

[TerraHertz]

The abstract concept is somewhat feasible but the application here is...   

This 'abstract concept'? :-
http://www.aquapol.co.uk/Drupal8_mion/sites/default/files/files/Aquapol%20dissertation%20-%20Scientific%20Geoconference%20SGEM%202015.pdf

Some really fine quality bullshit there.
The best part is, if the effect was real it would be so easy to measure. Water wicking height into a porous material. Does it vary when an Aquapol coil-thingy is placed nearby?
Anyone want to bet on whether there is such a demonstration?

[Bashstreet]

The abstract concept is somewhat feasible but the application here is...   

This 'abstract concept'? :-
http://www.aquapol.co.uk/Drupal8_mion/sites/default/files/files/Aquapol%20dissertation%20-%20Scientific%20Geoconference%20SGEM%202015.pdf

Some really fine quality bullshit there.
The best part is, if the effect was real it would be so easy to measure. Water wicking height into a porous material. Does it vary when an Aquapol coil-thingy is placed nearby?
Anyone want to bet on whether there is such a demonstration?

Well some of us "believe" in Electromagnetic effects on water. 

[kalel]

I don't know anything about effects of various fields on water, but a good point was made in this thread that a thing that affects water in the walls could affect humans/animals. Unless it is designed to work when no one is there.

[Cyberdragon]

I don't know anything about effects of various fields on water, but a good point was made in this thread that a thing that affects water in the walls could affect humans/animals. Unless it is designed to work when no one is there.

No, you can safely effect water with electricity. However, electric fields ATTRACT water, so it would make the problem way worse.

[TerraHertz]

The abstract concept is somewhat feasible but the application here is...   

This 'abstract concept'? :-
http://www.aquapol.co.uk/Drupal8_mion/sites/default/files/files/Aquapol%20dissertation%20-%20Scientific%20Geoconference%20SGEM%202015.pdf

Some really fine quality bullshit there.
The best part is, if the effect was real it would be so easy to measure. Water wicking height into a porous material. Does it vary when an Aquapol coil-thingy is placed nearby?
Anyone want to bet on whether there is such a demonstration?

Well some of us "believe" in Electromagnetic effects on water. 

What, you mean like that magic fairy dust known as NMRI imaging?

Or the quite interesting semi-stable alternate geometry of the H2O molecule, achieved by vibrating the usual form with microwaves?
  http://watergas.nu/inhoud/pdf/HHO_KLEIN_Santilli_2006_IntJofHydrogenEnergy31_1113_CombustibleFormWater3.pdf
  http://www.santilli-foundation.org/docs/Santilli-43.pdf
  https://benthamopen.com/contents/pdf/TOPCJ/TOPCJ-5-1.pdf

You should be careful with that word 'believe'. For instance the HHO stuff I just linked, I consider an interesting and apparently feasible hypothesis. Which is on my list of things to try for myself someday. Since it would be quite easy to experimentally verify.

Incidentally, water in its usual form is a highly polar molecule, with very complex long-range (multiples of the base molecular unit) structuring. Of course there are complicated interactions when water is excited with RF.

Here's a few more water-related surprises:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26319/
"Quantum Water" Discovered in Carbon Nanotubes
A new quantum state of water found in carbon nanotubes at room temperature could have important implications for life


http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-discovered-a-second-state-of-liquid-water
 Second state of liquid water, Science Alert - Physicists in the UK looked at a number of specific properties of water, like thermal conductivity, refractive index, conductivity, surface tension, and the dielectric constant - how well an electric field can spread through a substance - and how they responded to fluctuations in temperature between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius. Once the water hit 40 degrees, things started to shift, and properties were changing all the way up to 60 degrees. Each property had a different 'crossover temperature' somewhere within this threshold, and the researchers suggest that this is because the liquid water had switched into a different phase, a fact that could be linked to why H2O has such unusual properties in general.
http://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJNT.2016.079670?journalCode=ijnt   Paywall $40


https://phys.org/news/2017-06-liquids.html
Water exists as two different liquids


What's ridiculous about the Aquapol thing, is not that they claim some field effect on water. It's where they talk about what that 'field' is, and where the energy is supposed to be coming from, that it falls into crazy hand waving crap. They'd have been better off to try making up some guff about 'focusing scalar waves', since at least that has some weird-science ancestry. And maaaaybe just a teensy chance of being on to something.

Edit to add:

No, you can safely effect water with electricity. However, electric fields ATTRACT water, so it would make the problem way worse.

Uh, it depends on the net charge on the water in question. Can repel too. For eg google Millikan oil-drop experiment. (He used oil for low evaporation, but would work with water too.)

Also, a work project I was involved with in the 90s, was developing a large-scale ink jet printer, that used electrostatic deflection of ink (mostly water) droplets. Each nozzle had a fine ink stream jetting out continuously, with a piezo-constriction tube as part of the nozzle. This controlled the breakup of the stream into drops. The stream also had a HV analog drive, and the voltage of the stream at the moment a drop separated, set the voltage on that drop. Then deflection plates (just like in a scope CRT) could steer the individual drops on their path to the surface (cloth, spooling off industrial size rolls at high speed.) Unwanted drops were deflected into a waste gutter.

The whole thing was a stupid idea. Probably just a tax writeoff scheme so far as I could tell. But the parts I did worked fine: HV supply, HV analog piezo driver, and a big AD2100 DSP board stack that handled deflection data queuing to the rows of nozzles.

[Cyberdragon]

ANALYSIS:

11:20ish he says that the water ingress can be addressed by other methods, I.E. I bet the walls just dry out naturally once they are properly sealed

13:40 place walky talky on ceiling

the 15:05 sound, "quick, they're getting bored, smack your finger on a random button on the soundboard". Either that or Rainer Ottenweller, sober up and get your fingers off the damn keyboard

Anyone know if the other equipment they use is real like the silver probe thing or the one with the wires nailed into the wall?

INCOMING! Prepare your braincells for the radiation eminating from the following video!

[Echidna]

Nice find!

Some highlights from the references section of the "paper":
[1] Mohorn, Die Kräfte des Universums (Engl. The forces of the universe), 1996.
[4] L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology 0-8: The book of basics
[8] Christian Werbick, Elektromagnetische und andere Zustände an physikalische Zustände an sogenannten Reaktionszonen (Electromagentic and other physical conditions of so-called reaction zones), diploma thesis, University of Technology, Vienna, 1978.
[10] Gerhard Spatzier, Einfluss des Aquapol-Geräte-Wirkfeldes auf Pflanzen (Influence of the Aquapol device's field of action on plants), diploma thesis, University of Technology, Vienna, 2007.

Does someone have a copy of [1] (that's the author of the "paper")? I bet that book must be a nice read! Also, citing a scientiology handbook is a great idea, I'll do that too now.

I find [10] particularly interesting. Can someone find out who the thesis advisor was? Is there some Aquapol crackpot working at the University of Vienna as a professor?

Also, the "author" mentions in the abstract that "the effect got proofed by a lot of experts, dissertation-work...". Now, I understand "dissertation-work" as dissertations, and this is PhD theses, dealing with this. This was actually what I was looking for in the references but there are only diploma thesis (that's like Master's thesis). Does anyone know if there are really dissertations on this?

[Echidna]

I found some further nice material:

The abstract and full text of the diploma thesis [10] is here: https://zidapps.boku.ac.at/abstracts/oe_list.php?paID=3&paSID=6024&paSF=-1&paCF=0&paLIST=0&language_id=DE. The advisor was Ao.Univ.Prof. Dr.phil. Winfried Kronberger. I'll do some more research on this guy.

There's a very very interesting blog post (in German) on Aquapol: http://blog.justizfreund.de/abzockmasche-die-nicht-tod-zu-kriegen-ist-aquapol-bautrocknung-wie-sich-buerger-durch-anwaltsschreiben-einschuechtern-lassen-18-11-2013/.

One more find: A short video by the German broadcaster ZDF on Aquapol is here .
At 1:54 they actually do a teardown of this device, hilarious!

Moreover, and that's what I thought already, there are some reports on pseudoscience and crackpottery going on in one of the departments of the university: http://scienceblogs.de/kritisch-gedacht/2014/04/24/esoterik-und-pseudowissenschaft-an-der-universitaet-fuer-bodenkultur/.

[Cyberdragon]

I can't believe there's actually something inside it! It looks kind of cool in low res, until they show it up close and the construction is absolutely disgusting! It's just some coils zip tied and hot glued to some dowels and plastic mounts at certain angles! It looks like a kid made it!

[TerraHertz]

On the other side of the coin, it's also quite satisfying when some major element of mainstream 'big science' turns out to be bullshit.

Dark Matter for instance. I've been haphazardly following that story, and the impression has been growing that things aren't going well for the Dark Matter/Dark Energy theorists. Which has always to me instinctively seemed a lot like the Aquapol kind of 'can't see it or experimentally demonstrate it, but we're sure it's there, give us lots of money' line. That the 'Dark Stuff' theorists completely ignore Electric Universe theorists, just made it more suspect.

Anyway, I came across this today. Not very well produced, but the content is fun. (For Dark Stuff cynics, anyway.)


The Dark Matter Fail - From Someone Who Predicted It

[justizfreund]

Aquapol is a million scam.

The bullshit-"antenna" has a material price of about 10 EUR and he sells it for about 5000 EUR with a plastic ball around it.

Everyone can reconstruct or built the antenna for private or research purposes. The instructions are in his patent:
http://blog.justizfreund.de/abzockmasche-die-nicht-tod-zu-kriegen-ist-aquapol-bautrocknung-wie-sich-buerger-durch-anwaltsschreiben-einschuechtern-lassen-18-11-2013

I do not think he was granted the patent in Germany but everything is possible in Austria. There is also a company that bottles water at full moon which is sold very well: https://www.grander.com

>The abstract and full text of the diploma thesis [10] is here: https://zidapps.boku.ac.at/abstracts/oe_list.php?paID=3&paSID=6024&paSF=-1&paCF=0&paLIST=0&language_id=DE.

The guy who made the experiments take a laboratory experiment and a trial on the field.
The result with or without antenna in the laboratory was the same. That suppresses pseudoscientist mohorn.
The field experiment went only 2 years and is therefore not remarkable. The time is not long enough or there are too few attempts.
For reproducible results under weather conditions you need dozens of independent experiments.

[MrMobodies]

Got to wait and see if it would be as successful as the ADE-651 bomb detector.

[Brumby]

I am amazed.  Truly amazed ... at how this stuff can be so successful within bureaucratic circles and so unproven in the field.

I would be rather interested in seeing what "accompanying measures" were taken for those buildings where an accolade has been issued.  I can see telling someone to open a window as having a greater chance in affecting moisture levels than a passive ball of nothing.

[Thecheshirecat]

Is this the same or different https://www.driway.com/

[VK3DRB]

The background to the fraud...
https://www.heritage-house.org/damp-and-condensation/the-damp-con-collection/core-conservation-and-aquapol/aquapol.html

No surprise it has links to a bigger scam called Scientology.

[Halcyon]

No surprise it has links to a bigger scam called Scientology.

But the e-meter is a totally legit, precision scientific instrument! ;-)

[wilfred]

BTW, does the forum need a Debunking / Pseudo-scientific Crackpot section?
I'm always unsure were to post this stuff, and often it ends up

It would be a valuable innovation.

Leaving it in General Chat risks alienating the forum members who do not show any interest in such topics. Allowing them to ignore a complete board rather than using up the increasingly meager 100 item limit would give them peace of mind. Also it would avoid filling the unread items  display with a complete swathe of items of no interest to them.

It would also be a good way, in the absence of other means, to gauge the value of such topic to the forum members interested mainly in sound engineering and those who wish to confine their community engagement with others of like-minded interests. Thus avoiding the fringe-nutters who enjoy spending time in the rabbit hole of pointlessness.

It really depends on the level of overlap in interest of forum members between engineering and pseudo-science nonsense. I feel it is very very small just looking as I did recently in some threads. If you had available the stats on how many of the thousands of forum members there are above a certain activity level that participated in such threads than you would have a good idea as to whether a separate board is justified.

My gut feel is there are maybe 2 dozen members who make 96% of the posts in these threads. Might be possible to PM them individually.

I also have formed the impression those early members who came for the engineering or hobby level electronics  now have either left or find themselves knee deep in BS, worried the smell will only get worse as it rises. They may appreciate anything you can do to give them some respite from it.

Of course if you are embarking on a strategy to reposition the EEVblog away from engineering then separating things will equally appeal to the newcomers.

You can't lose either way.

[Cyberdragon]

BRUH



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