Hydrogen Conversion

[dkjones96]

So 10 days to get about 2 hours of HHO run time.

This does make me think however that if you were to charge a car battery in your home, discharge it in the car for hydrogen production and take it inside to charge you'd be good (or plug-in the car and have a charger always connected). Lets say you run a typical 100 amp-hour car battery. That'd give you 4.5 hours at 20 amps reliably. I'd switch out batteries every 3 days at that rate.

Cars just don't have the surface area for solar to be feasible. There isn't enough energy created to be worth the cost.

[JanGeo]

Your solar panel numbers are a little big off - Sun Power makes a panel that is about 2.5x4 feet and puts out 5.5amps at about 36 volts a little over 220 watts which regulates down to about 11 amps at 15 volts to charge a 45amp hour battery in less than 1 day. You can get about 10 hours of good sunlight in the summer. Making HHO from a battery to power the car is not going to run the engine enough without gasoline to get it to even idle - it will help get more energy out of the gasoline however - at least that is what I have read. I would like to see some numbers to see what really happens.

Hydrogen can be compress in very high pressure tanks and cooled to a liquid but you don't want to have that much refrigeration hardware hanging around your house. Bottom line as stated above . . . there is just not enough energy in the fuel to be useful for the gas sucking vehicles on the road today. Same applies to electric powering them - the vehicles are just too big to be practical.

[JohnNeiferd]

I've been exploring hydrogen recently and here is what I've gathered. Those who actually take time to experiment with it still aren't sure how good it works but several are claiming results. They say you can't run a car on hydrogen produced from generators, thats true. They claim you can't get more energy from the hydrogen/oxygen mixture than it takes to make that mixture, thats true.

They claim it works by speeding up the speed of the flame when the spark ignites the mixture. This yields to benefits. Since the air/fuel mixture combusts faster you can retard it so it explodes closer to TDC for more efficiency. Second of all, it allows lean mixtures to be ignited much easier. This seems to be where they claim the main benefit comes from. It doesn't provide enough extra energy to make a noticeable difference but it allows the combustion of much leaner air/fuel ratios. That's were all the MAP/MAF Enhancers and EFIEs come in, getting the vehicle to run leaner.

Is that true? I'm not sure, it seems credible to me. I know hydrogen does burn darn fast when I exploded a few trash bags filled with it. So what I'm trying to clear up is you cant run a car on hydrogen produced through electrolysis. Mythbusters ran a car on hydrogen that was comrpessed in a tank, but they bought that commercially. It would cost you a mighty high electric bill or lots of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to compress it and run your car on it, not worth it. You can't get more energy from hydrogen than what it takes to make it. Hydrogen is super flammable, but its a very low energy content fuel. The only possibly reason that it could work is that it speeds up the combustion speed of the air/fuel mixture and it allows the use of leaner air/fuel ratios (and as I said before, that's the claim, not sure if its true).

[GasSavers_BEEF]

the thing I wonder is, you are leaning out the mixture which makes you use less gas. is that the only reason? some people on here have talked about using an EFIE to lean out the mixture WITHOUT using a hydrogen generator.

I wonder if the hydrogen really does anything at all. *edit* what I mean is that the extra hydrogen is offset by the current draw from the alternator thus yielding you no net gain or loss. I wonder if it is just the sensor adjusting devices that make you lean out your mix that gives you the fuel advantages.
also, you have to be concerned about detonation which a lot of HHO guys will tell you is not as big of an issue when running the generator. has anyone torn apart an engine that has been running a super lean mix using HHO to see what it looks like, has anyone seen a significant enough gain to worry about doing so, where is the data to back the claims that all these random web sites have?

I have a lot of questions myself but in the end, I have been asking them for a while with minimal feedback other than silence. maybe people just don't know. I still haven't completely discredited it but I am leaning that way. my car runs pretty good for a chevy with 177k on it and I am not willing to risk messing it up by putting this on there.

[JohnNeiferd]

BEEF,

I've wondered that as well. Once I get a generator built to my liking I'll do testing: leaning modifications alone, hydrogen alone, hydrogen and leaning modifications. I keep having overheating issues which prevents me from doing testing until I get those taken care of.

Your talk about tearing down an engine to look at it after running super lean reminded me of something. While I don't know of anyone who has done that, I know of someone who was using NaOH (lye) as an electrolyte to make hydrogen. NaOH also chemically reacts with aluminum and makes hydrogen but it also destroys the aluminum. Well, there was some NaOH vapor in the hydrogen, even after running it through a bubbler. He found some pretty nasty corrosion that took a while to get off when he took his engine apart for repairs. Even after cleaning there was some pitting that couldn't be repaired. I don't think hydrogen alone is dangerous to an engine, however the electrolyte is VERY dangerous.

[Tinkrmann]

I have made my own HHO generator, which produces a good volume of HHO on only a 2.79 amp draw. As for tearing an engine apart that has a generator hooked up to it, I haven't; however, the conventional oil that was black after 500 miles is now clean as just changed even after 5,000 miles and now the car will spin the tires just goosing the throttle at rest...
Didn't do that when bought, with 97,m000 mi and now has 123,000 mi.
I've been doing this for over 4 years now.

[Tinkrmann]

Addendum: My generator is made with 316 wire, about a total of 9 feet divided between pos and neg posts. The bubbles coming up are small and there IS probably SOME electrolyte that escapes the unit, but it is negligible, as the water level diminishes less than a half inch in a quart size mason jar in a month to five weeks of driving. Considering the flow as observed by a loop with water in the clear delivery hose, that isn't enough to worry about, especially considering the oil being so clean (it has been changed since the 5,000 miles I mentioned in the previous post).
The production of bubbles is profuse and they actually turn the electrolyte white, there are so many and they are so tiny.