Low Power HHO Fuel Generator for Off Grid Energy Needs
August 4th, 2007Electricity costs in New Zealand are absurd. A criminal cartel just bends us all over a barrel here. Wolves are in charge of watching the chicken coop. Take your pick of descriptive metaphors. Oh well. But that’s not the point of this post.
I started looking at ways of dealing with the situation myself by expanding on my creed of turning my back on the bastards to the extent of my ability. I quit thinking about viable solutions for society, because society has an uncontrollable death urge, and people, in general, doesn’t want to live in a sane manner.
There are a couple of reasons why we haven’t gone with wind/solar/hydro power solutions here:
1) We can’t afford them, even though our power needs are very meager
2) We refuse to use a massive lead acid battery bank
The battery bank is the main discouraging factor, actually.
I started looking at other “battery” options. The water battery is a great concept. With a water battery, you simply pump water up a hill when you have excess power. When you need power, the water flows back down and turns a turbine. Nothing weird here. Implementing that, however, would cost a mint.
But then I found the HHO crowd on Youtube. Did you know that you can generate a nice trickle of HHO gas with as little as a few dozen watts?
That is, with one medium sized solar panel, one of these HHO cells, some water and few conventional propane tanks (in series), one could store up, how much gas? I don’t know. Easily enough to cook with, at a minimum.
I don’t know if storing HHO presents the same problems as storing hydrogen. Pure hydrogen, as you may or may not know, would simply escape through conventional metal gas cylinders after some period of time. Would this happen with the HHO gas? I don’t know. The beauty of this is that you wouldn’t have to store too much of it. You could simply make more when the sun shines.
See the fascinating work of John Aarons. He has a cell called the Widow Maker which he demonstrates running on as little as 30 watts. It’s all open source. Anyone can build this:
I wonder if anyone out there is using an HHO stove???
If you want to see more HHO videos, there are dozens of people working on this. Just search Youtube for HHO.
Look at the gas this guy is getting from a double helix design. It uses more power, about 100 watts. Easily doable with one larger solar panel.
How about getting electricity and hot water from the HHO “battery”? Burn the stuff in a stirling engine like the Whispergen. Dean Kamen is also working on a stirling engine system.
I don’t even like talking about this stuff, because an army of trolls and finger waggers likes to push nonsense straw man theories and change the subject to how there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to save themselves. Doom. Doom. Blah. Blah. (Note for comments on this post: Strawman/off topic comments will not appear. Hmm. What a concept. I might apply these criteria to all comments in the future.) If you have anything constructive to add, go for it. I won’t allow trolls to shout you down.
Kevin, don’t worry about the trolls. It is inevitable that just as the sun rises and sets there’ll be naysayers. I’m always interested in whats going on in the alternative energy sector, especially when it doesn’t involve tax sucking corporations or scammers who bury their “discoveries” as soon as they’re told to. I keep a healthy list of bookmarks on all sorts of energy related topics. As I’ve told my son many times its when people have unlimited or nearly so renewable energy that true freedom can be attained. At that point you are no longer a slave to someone elses whims. What I’ve seen time and again is that there are “interests” that have no intention of letting anyone wriggle out from underneath their thumb. The moment it looks like it’ll happen some other “catastrophe” mysteriously rears its head to distract the masses.
i’d really like to suggest a flywheel here, but the consumer application appears off in the distance a bit yet.
and an interesting look at cost analysis for hho gas use/storage volumes/energy measures. i’m not sure a few propane tanks will fill the needs of an evening let alone an extended period.
http://www.aeri.org/wp/2006/06/01/why-we-have-a-ways-to-go/
energy density reference/wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
hydrogen on its own is certainly high in energy at current typical storage levels of liquid or highly compressed, but the comment regarding mole weights definitely applies in a mixed bag like HHO.
i’m going to keep thinking about this though. something’s tickling the back of my mind….
HHO or Klein Gas would appear to be a 2:1 mixture of H2 and O2, so yes it would be highly likely to diffuse through the metal of the gas cylinder … however I personally would expect that process to take some considerable time, so you’re probably not going to loose much over the space of a few days/weeks
The main obstacle I can see though is compressing the gas mixture, its a VERY explosive combination and any method of compression would add energy to it, and most likely cause it to explode.
I think there is probbly a reason why that guy named his cell ‘the widow maker’ 😉
Remember the Hindenburg zeppelin that exploded in 1937… (think “ancient B/W newsreels”).
That “lighter than air” ship was held up by hydrogen gas – which was a hell of a lot safer than an O2/H2 mixture.
Mixing hydrogen and oxygen and then compressing the combined gas *is* a recipe for absolute disaster. Pump energy in (via compression) and at some point, it *will* explode taking your house, your two goats, and you along with it.
In fact, that mixture (starting with liquified O2 and liquified H2) make an excellent rocket fuel – Fluorine/O2 is about the only chemical thing with more energy.
If there were some reasonable way to electrolyze and then separate the two gases (O2, H2) and store them separately, then it sounds like it could be a Good Thing.
Be very careful with this stuff Kevin – I enjoy reading your site several times a week to get your perspective and while I disagree with almost all of your politics/beliefs etc, I admire your independence/enthusiasm and would hate to see you vaporized in an H2/O2 fireball.
Stay as far away from the “Widow Maker” as you possibly can…
I fully agree with Alain, messing around with HHO you will blow yourself up quicker than you can say “KA-BOOM”.
Have you looked at building a small bio-reactor to make your own methane? You could use the methane for light and heat. I dont known how much a micro methane electrical generator costs for electrical generation if you wanted to generate electricity. Plus the waste solids are great compost.
What have you against lead acid batteries? Its valid at the moment, and if the world does go bang then replacing any chemical battery wont be possible. There are other chemical battery technologies around have a google.
If you have excess wood for burning then a micro steam turbine is a very mature technology (well perhaps not the micro part) and still totally valid.
What about using ethanol? Very hands on to create and you will have to get a membrane to srub the 85% pure alcohol from distillation to 100% for burning. Water really reduces the energy released when burnt.
Water shouldnt be too much of a problem. An old car has almost all the parts you need.
Also you don’t have to use just one technology.
A
The above poster made a great point. NG and LP dont have any oxidiser in the pipe or tank. No oxygen, no flame. HHO however has the oxidiser, namely raw oxygen, already present. This is an accident just waiting to happen…
Now seeing no trolls are allowed can someone explain to me how using a solar cell to make electricity, using the derived electricity to make HHO, using the derived HHO fuel to spin a turbine to make electricity and hot water possibly has ANY effaciency?? Why not just use the solar derived electricity??
Show me any logic here please! Im baffled…
I don’t know where you guys got the idea that this would be compressed to the point of liquid! HAHA
And Dennis, indeed, you are baffled.
But what part of “battery” isn’t clear to you?
Heh … our point is that ANY compression would cause that kind of mixture to go BANG in a very big way 😉
Also converting electricity to gas and back to energy again is incredibly inefficient.
Seriously, you would be far better off with lead acid batteries since when the world goes bang there will be lots of dead cars about which you can pull the batteries from and reuse/recycle them.
As and when you get hold of batteries you should first recharge them (to re-deposit as much of the lead back onto the elements out of the acid solution), then empty out the acid (and flush the cell with water) to stop the reaction which creates the electricity.
Then when you want to use them again you can pour the acid back in and they will fire up with as much life in them as the day you drained them.
While you’re at it, sell your computer controlled car with its built-in obsolecence and buy yourself a morris minor!
Those babies were designed to be fixed with a piece of string and some gaffer tape and with some attention they will keep on running forever and ever (stock up on gearboxes though, since they wear and supplies are running out)
Also when petrol runs out you can easily fit them with a wood gasifier or fuel them with alcohol 😉
@ Alain
You write:
“converting electricity to gas and back to energy again is incredibly inefficient.”
Then you suggest using a wood gasifier.
How efficient is a wood gasifier?
That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.
The most “efficient” way to capture and store solar energy would be in the form of heat. Heat storage has issues such as requiring very large masses and those masses don’t have a wide range between max and min temperatures. Still using heat capture and a highly efficient Stirling engine, you would be able to produce the hydroxide gas. Personally, I think you’d want to use wind to mechanically pump water up a hill into a pond also where you grow algae where you extract the oil and produce biodiesel. After extracting the oil, place the remainder of the algae into your compost. You would have a pond biome (fish, water plants) separate from the farmlet, a water storage facility, a fuel producing crop, and a very large heat mass all wrapped up in one package. Although each individual aspect of that pond would be fairly inefficient, the multiple use aspect would make the whole venture worthwhile.
Kevin, I understand the battery principle, but using HHO as a battery makes no sense..
Here is why: To run a typical stove top burner for an hour you will need over 300 cubic feet of this gas. As noted it cant be compressed into liquid without strong refridgeration so we are assuming that one is willing to take the loss of efficientcy converting electricity into gas, and storing a very hazardous gas. Compared to just storing the electricity I still would like to have the sensibility of this pointed out to me…
300 cubic feet is alot of storage, its not just a matter of a few 5 gallon DOT tanks. It produces nothing near the energy of LP on combustion..
Converting sunlight to fire could be a useful thing, but the losses from sunlight to electricity to HHO to fire coupled to the risks involved just dosnt make any sense, especially when you look at low tech flame creation, like wood or charcoal…
I understand the goal for energy independence, and its a good thing, but this route appears to me as a dead end. Can someone show me a practical use for this HHO tech?? HHO makes a lousy battery as you lose too much energy in the translations..
Why aren’t these guys quivering in fear about putting the HHO in tanks and driving cars around with it, etc?
http://hytechapps.com/
http://www.i-b-r.org/ir00020a.htm
FIGURE 25: The white Honda Civics operating on magnegasâ„¢ that was used by the EPA certified automotive laboratory of Liphardt & Associates for the exhaust measurements of Section 3. This particular car was injected and dedicated to magnegasâ„¢. With a tank of 2,500 scf of magnegasâ„¢ at 3,600 psi the car had about 2 hours of range in city traffic, while with a tank of 4,000 scf at 5,000 psi and the same tank size, this Honda had an autonomy of about 3.2 hours, thus being fully sufficient for all commuting purposes.
Can any of you people explain how that guy in the video is getting electrolysis to work like that at only 30 watts? That looks pretty impressive to me.
You could separate the gasses by containing each electrode in a glass tube open at the bottom and collecting from the top but as many others have said the whole process is dangerous and inefficient.
I’ve lived a low impact lifestyle for quite a few years (Although I’m stuck in a city at the moment) you don’t really need all the power a conventional western home uses. Use passive solar for heating the house and water with a wood stove and back boiler for topping up the heat in your hot water if you get winter ice dig yourself an ice house under ground and pack up ice in straw or hay and use it for refrigeration use a methane digester and put in all human and animal waste for cooking gas when you’re not using the wood stove and buy yourself a PV system a little bit at a time on ebay. (That’s what I’m doing started 2 weeks ago and all I need now are 2 175W panels and a charge regulator to have enough to run my music, my computer and some lights although not continuously) You could also help retain heat by piling up straw bales on the southern side of your house (I presume it’s the south that cold winds come from in NZ) It is doable as long as your gardens are up to feeding you.
Oh, and you can knock up a reasonable home build windmill reasonably cheaply http://www.scoraigwind.com/ and make sure you use leisure batteries and not car batteries as automotive batteries die very quickly used in a domestic setting as they aren’t designed for deep charge discharge cycles.
Don’t worry too much about power concentrate on food and medicine. If you have those you can survive and quite well too. Electricity is a luxury that you should sort out once you have the essentials in place. And get some bees if you don’t have them. As long as you have those you’ll always have honey and candles.
A few good resources.
http://journeytoforever.org/ (a good biofuel library amongst other things)
http://chla.library.cornell.edu (The University of California agricultural library huge resource)
http://soilandhealth.org/ (An Australian library concentrating on soil management and natural medicines amongst other things.)
http://backwoodshome.com/ (Quite a few bits n bobs about living off the grid.)
http://www.swsbm.com/homepage/ (Excellent herbal medicine and materia medica resource. Large library of pre drug company medicine. )
You can do electrolysis with as little wattage as you want, you just tend to get a proportional amount of Hydrogen and Oxygen back. Electrolysis has known efficiency limits, but if you know what your Hydrogen requirement is, you can just buy solar panels appropriately. It’s free energy from the sun anyway, so the efficiency doesn’t matter, it’s only the cost that is important.
Oh, and I second the comments about storing Oxygen with a flammable gas…. In fact storing the oxygen is probably more of a worry than the hydrogen, since it can cause all sorts of other things that would ordinarily combust in air, to combust in an a higher oxygen environment.
I’m guessing anyone using this on a large (car size) scale, is separating the hydrogen and oxygen, and probably also just releasing the oxygen to the atmosphere, then using atmospheric oxygen to burn the hydrogen.