Steorn - 120 percent on Saturday?

There has been little official contact between us and Steorn, those plucky proponents of perpetual motion currently being coy with the conservation of energy in a Dublin den of demonstration. In fact, the last volley consisted of me being a bit world-weary in the official forum and CEO Sean saying that the ball was indeed in their court.

However, we do have certain other sources of information close to the Liffey. From these, we now hear that Steorn is gathering up its skirts to make an announcement tomorrow, a promise of a demo on Saturday that will demonstrate your actual over-unity: the Orbo device producing more energy than it consumes.

In the past, Sean has said that the Orbo will manage this to the tune of 3:1 - in other words, churning out three watts for every watt of input. The Saturday demo, our sources confide, will be less dramatic - if they can hit 120 percent, or 1.2 watts out for 1 watt in, it'll be a success.

As indeed it would. The experiment will start at 4pm, run for around thirty minutes, use the 10,000 milliamp-hour D cell (because using electronics to store and feed back the energy would make Joe Public - ie, us - more suspicious than using an enormous battery, apparently), and more than that, we'll have to wait and see. There'll be engineers on hand to answer questions, and more material released in February. But the experiment will "tell alL", and hinge on there being no back EMF on the motor (a technical point you can find discussed at length, though to no particular end, on that Steorn forum).

If I can keep an eye on them from afar, I will - although I have filial responsibilities on Saturday, so I hope that the Steorn lot, being good Irish family types, will forgive me for sins of omission.