Pulling Hydrogen out of the Water [Hackaday]

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In theory, water and electric current will cause electrolysis and produce oxygen and hydrogen as the water breaks apart. In practice, doing it well can be tricky. [Relic] shows an efficient way to produce an electrolysis cell using a few plastic peanut butter jars and some hardware.

The only tricky point is that you need hardware made of steel and not zinc or other materials. Well, that and the fact that the gasses you produce are relatively dangerous.

To that end, [Relic] includes an “I don’t want to explode switch” in the system by routing tubes of gas through a second jar filled with water so that the water will block its return.

Of course, we’ve seen the same setup created with a battery, two coils of wire, and some test tubes, but this can certainly produce more hydrogen faster. Like most of these designs, you can scale them by adding more steel parts. The more surface area, the more gas you’ll produce.

We’ve seen a number of similar generators before, but each one is a little different. If you want to get really fancy, you can turn to automation.