[syriacus]

50,000 hours of experiments, he says, he has recorded 50 times when the setup "unmistakably" produced excess heat.

I wish this had been worded differently, because it leaves the impression that 50 out of 50,000 experiments have produced successful results.

Was the author too lazy to find out how many times the experiment has been performed or did the author purposely tinker with words in order to give a negative impression?

It would be more meaningful to know how many times the experiments have been run.

I don't care about the number of hours of experimentation.

[JasonC]

It is not meaningful at all. Excess heat is an empirical measurement of a statistical quantity. There is no evidence from these mere allegations about occasional data points, that any underlying energy release is going on. Even as hand waving, they have no tendency to support the conclusion.

Is the idea instrinsically ridiculous? No, there are chemical cataylsts, it is conceivable there are nuclear cataylsts - though the forces they need to overcome are many orders of magnitude larger. But there is no evidence that anybody has ever found any. All there is, is some bad science overreporting unreproduced and merely alleged results, trying to hype a pretty lousy idea about how easy it might be to find such things, in order to scare up funding.

There papers get published, but are laughable. If such a thing exists, they haven't found it. And they never will, using methods and standards of experimental procedure that could have been taken from a perpetual motion machine patent application historical handbook. If anybody ever does find anything similar, it will be by quite different methods, and vastly higher standards, and it will be reproducible - readily, not hand waving about alleged outliers in integrated heat measurements.