[ytjohn]

I remember watching the first E-cat "test". This is one of those things that is either an incredible breakthrough or a "the bigger the lie" type scam. The key thing to remember is that Rossi is not doing this to advance some scientific field, but to invent a product for commercial sale. To that end, any tests or data they release is not intended for rigorous scientific review, but to convince potential customers that they've got a viable product.

That being said, it definitely seems that they have some sort of energy breakthrough. Whatever fuel they have in the e-cat outputs more energy per density than any conventional fuel source. What is not clear is if this is a battery (like hydrogen) or genuine fuel source. They have been shown to produce a lot of energy over a period of several hours, but I haven't heard of any week or month long tests being conducted.

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-rossi-e-cat-energy-density-high...

[anovikov]

What i wonder about is how this scam holds for so long being so easy to test. You attach a simple electricity meter to this and run a lightbulb for a couple weeks, and when you reach the energy spent per unit of device's mass akin to gasoline (say 10 KWh/kg), you are onto something real.

[deletes]

Maybe you should read the paper conducting exactly such tests, where researchers concluded the energy density is at least one magnitude above conventional sources.