Has anyone played with HHO generators?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=g0MOpSpN1KI&feature=related

I have been looking at HHO generators/ Fuel Cells for a while now. Some people are hooking them up to their cars and other small motors.

Are they snake oil?

Don't know about this particular one but, up to now, they've all been snake oil. Mythbusters did a segment on these things a while back, and never got close to getting one to work.

The bubbles are neat, and it appears hydrogen is being generated. The problem is, unless there's another electrical power source besides the battery and alternator, it simply can't generate hydrogen fast enough. You just can't get past the Law of Thermodynamics. A battery and alternator will not generate enough power to drive a car.

Onward and upward,
airforce

thats what I was thinking. The trick of getting more power out of something than you put into it is going to hold this stuff back. I have seen a few videos on the web where people show a car running on this type of design but then you have to deal with not everything you see on line is true.

I guess you could make one for cooking with if you had a way to generate power from wind/solar and stored in 12 volt bats.

I might play around with one just to see if I understand it all.
They look like something that might be fun to make and understand.

If you do, post your results here. I'd love to see them.

Onward and upward,
airforce

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oZYJ2FwjLy4

I am thinking that if I can get a solar setup to pull 11amps that I can get one to produce flame like you see on this video. If thats the case then why not get 4 solar setups to produce 11amps each with four HHO cells producing gas to cook with.

if this is doable, then you can use any type of water or piss from a bucket to produce HHO flame for cooking.

I hope you folks realize what it takes to get 11 amps out of solar?? You better have a lot of money to spend on solar panels! By the way, the HHO generators DO work and increase fuel milage up to 25%. I won't go any further so as not to end up like one of the guys that put this together! DEAD, police say murder! Same thing happened to Tucker in the 40s. Experiment and keep mouth shut!! It does work!!

How hard is it to get 11 amps from 12volt bats after they have been charged from solar?

I dont care where the 11 amps come from just as long as I can get them from something for 20 minutes at a time for cooking.



This is one seral setup I found on the internet, but the amount of power it takes to produce a fair amount of gas is pretty high. I am going to need to store that power from a few small amp sources like wind and solar.

Solar is free on the side of most roads and bridges now in case you guys did not notice.

That guy you are talking about is Stan Myers(sp?) I saw a few videos of his work on youtube while I was doing research on this.

the link died so I pulled this post.

I think that is a dead link, but it could be my connection. Anyways, let me know if this HHo thing works, as right now I am toying with the idea of brewing up butanol for the gas engines.

When working with something like this, think like women, bigger is better. The cathode is the one that puts off the HHO. Cathode will be your negative! The anode is the positive! Increse the size of the stainless 316L wire by using multible stands together. Wind them together and then wind the bunch around the plexiglass stand in the jar. For 1 qt of water add one teaspoon of baking soda! 12 volts DC and you are off. This will work! I won't go any further than that!!

AKA Brown's Gas, HHO has been around for over 100 years, and now that gasoline is over $4 FRNs per gallon, the cost benefit for experimenting with HHO is quite compelling.
I'm tuning up my rig so that it gets a consistent 20 miles per gallon with gasoline only, and then I will add the HHO and hopefully increase to 30 mpg.

I agree with Patriot that stainless is the only way to go!

EE here.

Trust me, it's all a bunch of BS. You can't get energy from water. The most you can do is use water as an energy vessel (think steam engine). Plain 'ol water doesn't have any potential energy. It's already burnt.

Surely you're joking here. Because an HHO generator will not increase your gas mileage at all. If anything it will decrease it.

I'll keep you informed of my experiment! If it works and you are in doubt, i will prove it to you by having you over to watch and ride while we do the test together!!

Why would it decrease it? it does not cost you any extra gas to use 12 amps off the battery is it?

I dont think my car stero burns up any extra gas.

anyone have a good cheap source of stainless steel? I cant find any local and I dont want to pay shipping.

http://www.hobbytron.com/vk8004.html#1304

pretty good deal on modulators that keep things at 6 amps or 12 amps depending on how much power you want to take from your car bat.

Virginia Jim, You can get 316L stainless mig wire from your local welding supply for about $25 a roll. The roll is pretty large! I'm getting ready to put one together in the next day or so. I will try one and see how it does. If it works, i will probably end up with two on each car!

I have to say, I never noticed all of the places you can get cheap stainless from. scrap electrical stuff and scrap sinks are all over the junk yards in this area. I scored two sinks and a box of old wall outlet plates that are stainless.

I have not done anything yet, still collecting parts and doing some youtube research. Looks pretty easy so far.

Of course it burns extra gas. Where do you think the energy comes from??

ANY electrical load you put on the car will make you burn more gas. Even turning on the radio will make you burn more gas.

If we assume you're drawing 11 amps at 13.2 V, and if we assume the alternator is working at 20% efficiency, then according to my calculations you're robbing the engine of about 1 horsepower. That’s not much, but it's certainly not zero, either.

But it doesn't matter... none of these schemes work.

I guess I should explain in a bit more detail on why ANY electrical load you put on the car will make you burn more gas.

In a vehicle, NONE of the electrical energy comes from the battery. The battery is simply acting as a very large capacitor, and its primary job is to simply start your car. ALL of the electrical energy comes from the alternator. (Even the energy to start your car comes from the alternator, since the alternator charges the battery.) The engine turns the alternator. Thus ALL of the energy comes from the engine. Gas is burned to turn the engine. Thus ALL of the energy comes from the burning of gas.

Here's the progression:

Burn gas → turn engine → turn alternator → electrical power

When you draw current from the alternator, the alternator will become harder to turn, and the engine will have to burn more gas in order to maintain the same RPM. The more current you draw from the alternator, the harder the alternator is to turn.

But again, NONE of these gas-saving apparatuses work. N-O-N-E.

OP has it right on the power draw! It takes right at 5.4 horsepower to turn an alternator @ 1000 RPM. If you load the alternator with a 5 amp draw the horsepower rate goes to 6.8 horsepower! Same RPM! The drag car i ran had an alternator switch to turn the field off when racing. It accounted for 3/10ths of a sec in 1/4 mile run! Makes quite a difference. These HHO generators should only take 1.4 to 2 amps a piece to run. Any more than that, you are using too much electrolite ( baking soda ).

But how does a Prius Hybrd work? It has an electric motor that runs off batts that are charged when the gas motor is running. How is this saving the system any fuel? Would it not take more gas to power the car then? The addition of HHO to a cars system should produce the same effect as the electric motor does if you maintain a small set amount of power from your batt to perform the electrolsis.

As long as the HHO output can produce a little more power than the offset of the fuel used to produce the 12volts at 9 to amps then you have a gain. Thats the trick right? The gole is to offset the amount of fuel you use to power the motor with another source of fuel that you can produce within a system. Just like what the other Hybrds do by design.

A gasoline engine running a generator that powers electric motors is a concept that has been around for a long time. At first you would think that it would be more wasteful than a purely mechanical setup. I mean, why convert the mechanical power from the engine to electricity and then back to mechanical power? Seems like the conversion to electricity is an unneeded and wasteful step. But in reality this "hybrid" approach can actually be more efficient. Why? Lots of reasons. For one thing, there's no mechanical drive train. (Mechanical drive trains are heavy and inefficient.) Secondly, the engine can run at a constant RPM as long as you use batteries or a solid state power controller. (A constant RPM engine can run much more efficiently than a variable-RPM engine.) There are other reasons which I won't get into.

It takes energy to separate the hydrogen and oxygen. The problem is that the amount of energy required for separation is always more than any energy you might get from burning the hydrogen. ALWAYS. It is theoretically and practically IMPOSSIBLE to get more energy from the burning of the hydrogen vs. the amount of energy required for separation. And when I say "IMPOSSIBLE," I mean IMPOSSIBLE. It's not like we will one day figure out how to do it using "advanced technology" or whatever. It is IMPOSSIBLE. I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E.

Suffice to say, the HHO device is pure, 100%, Grade A snake oil. If you're dumb enough to buy one of these things, I have a timeshare I'd like to sell you.

I know of a way to save gas... Drive in a higher gear (if you drive manual). My truck is supposed to only get 25mpg, but I can squeeze out to 30mpg if I drive under 50mph, on Gear 5. Course, my truck gets pretty sluggish, and it only really works on long stretches of flat road (hard to find here in Wyoming).

Thats a good rule of thumb. I try and keep my RPMs below 2k as the max. It looks like I can add an extra day before my fillup of a standard daily drive to work. I saw a guy on CNN.com that does whats called Hypermiling to his car and he gets 50mpg. He never uses the breaks and never comes to a complete stop if he can help it. He even push starts his own car.

My whole life I have listened to people like you who tell me it can't be done, but I refuse to listen to you.

You alluded to the Prius, but you quite obviously neglected to account for the Prius' and Segway's most noteworthy common feature:

Regenerative braking systems which are limited only by imaginative theory and physical principles.

Can you picture forced air generators and super-caps supplying amperage to separate HHO sufficient to boost octane for the 0-30 zone in our internal combustion vehicle?

This is a transitional technology which can and WILL work, and we need to start supporting more of these "impossible" ideas if we are going to survive and thrive during this "economic adjustment" phase in which we now live.

Our ultimate goal is off-grid, fully electric vehicles, but we need to convert our SUVs and trucks first...if you can imagine that.

www.knowledgepublications.com

These guys have books on solar, wind, biomass, wood gasification, hydrogen, alcohol and amateur rocketry.

Some books are more technical than others... but they do have a lot of hands-on info.

If the high oil prices do nothing more than get amateur experimenters working on projects... then it may have good consenquences for the long run.

It's not an opinion. It's a physical law. Physical laws cannot be broken. If you have any evidence of a physical law being broken, please provide a cite.

I agree that regenerative braking is worthwhile.

Compressed air and large electrolytic capacitor do not supply any energy. They are simply energy vessels. You still need a source of energy.

All-electric vehicles are still impractical for most people. This may change, however, if someone invents a much more efficient battery. Until something better comes along, the best approach is a hybrid technology where an internal combustion engine charges a bank of batteries, and the batteries in turn supply power to electric motors.

But it is foolish, IMO, to spend even one minute looking at any approach that violates a law of thermodynamics. You also have to understand the difference between an energy source and an energy vessel.

Look, energy is getting more and more expensive. There's nothing we can do about it. Right now, gasoline & diesel are still the cheapest energy sources for transportation. As oil gets more and more expensive, other energy sources will start to become competitive. But even so, ALL forms of energy will become more expensive. So how do we deal with this?

1. Tell Congress to eliminate all taxes on gasoline.
2. Tell Congress to allow for the drilling of oil and to relax environmental laws that get in the way of energy independence.
3. Spend less on things you don't need (e.g. entertainment).
4. Use energy more efficiently.
5. Use less energy.

Yea the Prius works but you will have to replace the cells after 5 to 6 years at a cost of about $5,000.

But it works.

VH is right by the time you buy new batteries for the car you could have bought a cheaper car and spent a little more on gas per year . We laughed about that when I was working at the Toyota dealership . I think cars should be like the Prius , like when it shuts off when you stop . I to have been trying not to come to a complete stop when ever I can help it , saves a little gas .

Well other sources of energy that Congress wont let us tap (because their all a bunch of evil, selfish, self-righteous sub-human pieces of garbage).

Shale Oil
Oil off of our Coastlines (Though they WONT protest that the Chinese are trying to tap it)
Coal-to-gas conversion
Liquid Natural Gas
Nuclear Power
Hydropower
Offshore Windfarms.

Yeah, Dont blame the oil companies and "Peak oil", blame those IDIOTS in Congress.

BINGO.

I second that. They dont want us to have the ablity to drive to work or heat our homes in the winter. We need to take care of our self and our own familes.


It just shows that when you depend on Government to take care of you, you will hurt the most when it all hits the fan.

HHO generators need to be Sealed, and made into the shape of an upward turned horse shoe to be able to create H and O at the same time.

Glass jugs can be used as long as they have a flow tube between them at the bottom to allow the water to be the same level between the 2 jugs. It doesn't have to be made that way, but it seems to work best.

When High Current at Low voltage is applied, H is created in one jug, as O is created in the other.

And if they are sealed, the Gas pressure can be vented and separately channeled into a carburetor to increase fuel mileage by almost 75%. But gas or some other fuel is needed to keep it going.

It would take a great amount of power to turn enough water into H and O to fuel a small car at any normal speeds. A car would have to have quite a powerful battery system, and an alternator large enough to charge it.

I'm not sure if a Higher voltage will make any difference. If it would, then by Rectifying 110 AC into DC, it could do what you need it to do.

If this is the case, then a small AC power generator could be used to power the HHO generator and the car can run completely off H and O.

Watch the video "who killed the electric car". Electric vehicles are not inefficient for every day use (to and from work). If we charge the batteries from the outlets at home and work, and those places used wind and other renewable power sources, our system would be such more efficient... not perfect, but more sustainable. Take into account that you could carry multiple batteries with you to increase the mileage (with a smaller battery- like carrying a gas can to get to a station). I believe that video says the technology in the early 90s was 60 miles per 3 hour battery charge, and now it was up to 300 miles/battery?.
Also watch the Modern Marvels on Batteries;
"2008 Tesla Roadster 100% electric vehicle"-
0-60 in 4 seconds, top speed of 130 mph, 0 emissions, 200 mile range, quiet, $100,000, made in silicon valley to compete with fuel powered vehicles. 3.5hrs to recharge it when completely dead. Costs roughly 2-3$ to fill it (at time of filming) which came out to a 200 mpg equivalent.

The technologies do exist, there are things that we still do not yet understand which are within the realms of the laws of thermodynamics. Tesla was waaaaaaay ahead of his time.

If everyone in America got an electric car, the Bankers, and Oil companies would Fold over night.

No the3y wouldn't. The oil companies would buy the patents (like they've been doing for years) & never put them into production. If they couldn't get their hands on all the patents, they'd start building the cars themselves. Then the bankers would be more than happy to lend money to the sheeple when they go to buy one from the former oil company-turned electric car company.

If people are so stupid to buy those New electrics from their Oppressors, then they deserve what they get.