I've been searching for a better way to save money on gas for some time. I've made the switch from a car I like to a car I don't like just to save some money. I've changed my driving habits to drive in my car's sweet spot (about 57mph). I've even started planning my trips in a fashion to use the least amount of gas, but with business and family and friends I'm still spending hundreds of dollars at the pump each month.
Well I was paying 0s at the pump, that is.
You see earlier this year I learned about what's called a hydrogen conversion kit, or you might have heard of it referred to as a hydrogen hybrid, or something like altering your car to burn Brown's gas, HHO, or Oxyhydrogen. Sometimes it's misleadingly referred to as running your car on water.
The idea was born out and patented by Yull Brown in 1977 where he created a system in which you run electricity through water and break apart the H2O molecule into a gas form of H2 and O (hence HHO). Ironically, when combined they are the thing you use to put out fires, Hydrogen and Oxygen are by themselves very flammable. If you are interested in the details of how this gas is created, you can look up Oxyhydrogen on the Wikipedia. The process itself is called electrolysis.
Like many new discoveries and new technologies, there are a lot of myths, misleading statements and outright lies surrounding the whole concept of adding HHO to your car to improve mileage. When I first started looking into this I spotted a lot of them right off. The one that still irks me the most is the slough of articles and ads proclaiming that you can run your car on water. While this is technically possible, it's actually less efficient than getting a purely electric car, and is not that good for your car or the environment.
However, it's not efficient due to the good ole laws of thermodynamics.
You see whenever you transfer energy from one system to another, there is some loss. When you put a pot on the stove much of the energy is lost into the air as the stove heats it as well, and even heats up the stove. When a car runs much of the energy that the gasoline produces simply comes out the tailpipe as hot exhaust and is never transferred into the action of turning the wheels. What does this mean as far as running your car on HHO? Well, if you read the Wikipedia article mentioned above it will link to another article on the efficiency of electrolysis and for those so inclined it will spell out the chemical reasons why the amount of energy used to break apart the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in H2O is greater than the amount of energy your car will get from burning the hydrogen that is released.
That's a simple fact. It's incontrovertible and indisputable.
So the obvious question I had when I learned this was how are all of these folks claiming that they are getting amazing mileage out of their cars. Is the whole thing a farce or is there some truth behind it. The real crux of it is that the electricity used to break apart the water into HHO also comes from your car. Specifically from the alternator, which is powered by your engine, which is powered by your gas. Just like a game of telephone you played as a kid, or the tape you copied from a copy that sounds pretty bad, we can all imagine that something gets lost in a process like that.
So I did more research.
One of the things I know is that the raw math of the chemical equations assumes that only two things are present: Water and Electricity. The light bulb springs to mind when considering things like this. The brightness we all expect from a 100 Watt bulb used to take a lot more than 100 Watts to create. Initial bulbs used far more energy than the ones our parents had. Eventually the incandescent bulb was well nigh perfected and a 100 Watt bulb became the norm for our living rooms and general lighting. But we all know that now you can get those nifty fluorescent curly bulbs that can produce the same brightness as the good ole 100 Watt bulb using only 7 Watts. How do they do this? They harness the power of other elements (in this case a gas that glows when power is run through it) to improve efficiency.
So I started looking into what people seem to be doing to make their cars improve in efficiency by running what would seem to be an inefficient system. As it turns out there are a lot of other things that come into play. One of them is the metals that are used in the system, also coming into play are chemicals added to the water to allow the electricity to flow through it better and waste less energy in simply heating up the water. Other things being experimented with is the frequency of the electricity and pulsing the electricity-all of which seem to effect the amount of power needed to create the HHO gas from water.
Even still, based on a perfect system the math said that it was only as good as 80-90% efficient, so even still the system shouldn't really work.
So what gives?
Of course! The obvious thing I had forgotten. You're mixing the HHO with gasoline vapor. So what happens when that occurs? I've been working with cars for some time and know a good bit about air-fuel ratios and mixture types and temperatures, and how adding things like octane improve performance so it didn't take too long to realize that one of the biggest issues with gasoline is the speed it burns at.
You see in the grand scheme of things, gas burns OK, but it doesn't burn great. If the gas molecules are too far apart they won't ignite one another and may not ignite fast enough to get the most efficiency out of the engine. That's where the HHO mixture really comes into play. You see, not only are you adding hydrogen, you're adding oxygen, which is as important to gas burning as the gas itself. Also, hydrogen burns faster, and can ignite when the molecules are further apart. What this means is that your engine becomes more efficient and power to the wheels is increased. When this happens the engine doesn't need to work as hard and you don't need to use as much gas.
I've since found many road tests, demonstration videos and even a guy who has a 80+ video series on how he managed to get the most efficiency out of his HHO system and other folks who did eco-friendly drives and got 100+ mpg out of their cars.
The most amazing part of all of this was that you can build a kit yourself to add this ability to your car. There are also premade systems out there that can be professionally installed, but they cost over 0-00. You can build a kit yourself from parts available at your local hardware store. There are a number of guides out there that give you the info to make one of these kits and install it yourself in an afternoon. As I mentioned earlier there's more to it than just running electricity through water, and the guides available give you the goods on how to do it right. Sure you can do it without a guide, in fact if you hunt around you can find basic info for free on how to make it work, but if you don't want to make a mistake and get water in your engine (will cause definite issues) you'll want to get a good guide (some are hundreds of pages long with details for different cars) and do it right.
Don't just take my word for it though. Do your research, read the Wikipedia articles mentioned above and learn how the process works. Hit YouTube and watch actual videos of the technology in use and see if this is the right thing for you to do to save yourself some money.
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