Greg Potter with his GDS3000, which they will not be selling. The 5kW system will be the smallest output they will sell.

It's been one of the most popular things we've posted in quite a while -- even more popular than the stories we did on the recent E-Cat (cold fusion) third party test results being published. Our index of news coverage on the E-Cat development is just past 10,000 visits, posted October 9. Meanwhile, in just the first 34 hours, our PESWiki page on GDS Technologies linked above has over 8,200 visits.

Greg said he has received around 1500 emails since yesterday morning, and was on the phone 12 hours yesterday fielding calls. It took me four tries this morning before I finally got through -- first thing in the morning. Here's a link to the recording of our call.

He said he received 10 orders by PayPal and needed to contact them to have them cancel those. I instructed him how to issue refunds in PayPal (it's really easy).

He's not ready to take orders yet, and hadn't planned on receiving orders until he announced his product in a press release and/or advertising. He wants to introduce the product on around December 15, after they've had a chance to build up some inventory -- and get international patent coverage. He has a meeting this Thursday with the attorneys for that purpose. He said he has a Canadian patent filed.

An investor associate of mine said he called Greg yesterday and was told that GDS was expecting the first delivery November 15, but now they are backlogged to December 15.

Obviously, Greg is not that savvy about how the web works, nor about product roll-out. But we should cut him some slack for an innocent mistake. I don't see it as being malicious or fraudulent; just naively reckless. 

Presently, he's essentially a one-man-band. He needs a good team wrapped around him who knows how to run a business and product roll-out, including the engineering, testing, branding, website, teasers, setting up manufacturing, distributing, etc.

Greg said his tech guy hasn't been available over the weekend to make the needed changes on their site. They're going to take down the purchase buttons and modify some wording to make it clear that these are not yet available. He needs to change the wording on the title of his video, too. I hope he doesn't make it private or unlisted -- just add notice in the title or description to clarify.

In getting this news, Patrick Flanagan (Tesla in former life?), who is the one who informed me about it two days ago, saying he had purchased one, wrote the following: "I don't want my money back. I would like to be first in line. I could probably help him engineering-wise too."

When I pointed out to Greg that his website makes it look like they are ready to sell and deliver these units, he said that he had not intended for them to be public yet. I'm not sure how he expected that after having a YouTube video up with a reference to the site. Posted on September 7, that YouTube Video has just over 2,000 visits when I first viewed it Saturday night. By last night, it had over 17,000 visits. Now, as of 8:30 am MDT [GMT-6], it has over 27,000 views.

He said that someone posted a link to his site and video on several forums, which led to this inundation. Our coverage facilitated that inundation as well.

I assured him that the interest would begin to fizzle almost as rapidly, once we get this story up about them not actually being ready to go. He said he appreciated that.

He said something about his "team" and a "factory", but we were rushed, and I wasn't able to probe deeper on that one: how many on the team? what size factory? Their Alibaba listing for their GDS 3000 system says they are capable for producing 400/month. I'm not sure why they would have that page up, either, if they weren't yet ready to sell. Also, that page makes no mention of this not being available yet. 

I asked him where he got the idea. He said it came to him in a dream about 4.5 years ago: "Build a [water] turbo generator, it will work". He didn't take it really seriously at first, and basically just researched the ideas for about a year before launching into trying to build one.

He said he's built about ten now. He told Chet Kremens that the ratings of the three generators sizes they plan to sell are actually significantly underplayed, and could handle a peak load that is 300% of the name plate output rating. So if you have  5 kW system, it would be more than adequate to handle a continuous load of 5 kW, with an infrequent spike of 15 kW.
CORRECTION: He told Chet that in a 5 kW system, the actual output was 7 kW, and that 2 kW was needed to run the system, leaving 5 kW for external use.

They're still not optimized in their engineering. It gets warm, which isn't good for the wear of the moving parts. If you try and run it 24/7, you'll have problems. He doesn't recommend running them more than 12 hours. He suggests 8 hours, followed by at least a three hour cool-down period. He said he has run a 5 kW system 8 hours every day for two years now. He expects that if run this way, the system will last at least 6 years. Chet thinks that the heating problem should be easy to resolve with proper engineering, using the readily available parts.

He said they are not going to be selling the 3 kW system. The smaller parts needed are not reliable.

While he's not ready to sell yet, he said he is open to engineering help. I recommended he hook up as soon as possible with Mike Waters, President of NEST, who actually invented something quite similar to this and is presently working on a variation of it as we speak. Mike told me he's more than willing to drive up this week.

Someone asked whether groups would have permission to replicate the technology. My reply (this isn't coming from Greg) is that the principle is yes, you can replicate. He's filing for international patent coverage so that people will be required to work through him to be legit and not prone to law suit over patent infringement. I would think they would appreciate people replicating so they know what they are doing, then license for manufacturing.

Greg invited me to contact him weekly to get updates on their progress.