1227 How To Make An Emergency Battery From Things Around The Home

[Music] hi so my wife is an american and so is my mother-in-law and a greater part of my family on that side and of course there's the hurricane going over long island and connecticut at the moment and it put me in mind of what would you do if the hurricane hit you and basically you hadn't prepared anything how would you be able to get those things that fema recommend just from stuff that was either lying around or easy to get hold of and in one two two six we made a hand generator using this or an egg whisk as a gearing mechanism and as it pointed out to me it does take quite a lot of hand cranking and that's very true so how would you get that power if you were in that situation of course going to be lots of people in that situation so i started thinking about making a battery from things you could find just around probably in your own home and certainly easy to get hold of if it's not in your own home so what i came up with was this now this has been running that little motor i don't know if you can see it it's right there there we go and that's been spinning away at 0.35 of a volt and 40 milliamps for about the last three hours it's just going on and on and it will continue to go on until the material in here is eaten away we're going to go through how to make this battery but this battery is an emergency primary battery that is you can make it easily from stuff lying around but you can't recharge it but it will provide you with a good solid power source for edges which you could use to do things like recharge your phone uh play a radio charger battery bank lighter light those things that fema say you should be able to do and i thought it was awesome just for those reasons now it's really simply made it uses vowel and a pencil and some activated carbon this is the stuff you find as a fish pond filter so you'll find this in your air filter your fish pond filter if it's in your cooker you'll be able to pull that grid out and there'll be activated carbon in that cooker it's the assault for insoles there's just loads of places to get this stuff so it's easy to get hold of this stuff and chances are most people have it already so those are the essential components now obviously a battery it's basically an anode in the cathode and an electrolyte the electrolyte here is this stuff brick cleaner so you can go down to this store and buy brick cleaner and it's quite cheap actually but this will also work on household vinegar which i thought was really cool and thin household bleach so just normal bleach will also make this work it works best with the brick cleaner but it'll work just fine with those other two electrolytes as well now to make this what we need to do is chop off a bit of this and basically we fold that over and bind it up with a bit of steel wire now you don't have to use wire wool any source of iron is going to do not stainless steel but nails work just as well a flat plate steel will actually work just as well now i'm going to bind this with a bit of wire which is here so to get it kind of tighter so that everything touches a little bit but equally you could bind it up with string onto a nail if you bind it onto a stainless steel nail that nail will last and the rest of it will get eaten away which is where the battery comes from now battery is basically about rusting metal they're all pretty much the same actually you take a bit of metal you rust it and you capture that energy from the rusting of the metal and that is in fact what a battery basically is so what we're going to do is rust to this iron now iron batteries are tremendously popular as a the local sort of latest fad battery to look at everything's looking at iron because it's cheap it's abundant and it's absolutely used everywhere it's a crazy amount of arm we produce actually i think it's around about a billion tons per annum or something stupid it's a huge amount of iron that we produce anyway we've made our little arm bundle and it's got a little armoire sticking out like i say you could use nails you could use sheet i've used wire but you could bind it up with string and stick a nail in there as well all of those are going to do just as well and then we need to wrap it in a bit of kitchen towel and when we've wrapped it up we need to stick it in a container now i'm going to use this little beaker here but a cup will do just as well an empty baked bean can will do just as well we stick it in that container and then we add our activated carbon so pop the activated carbon in there and leave it loose for the moment now we need some way of connecting to that side and what we're going to use is this this is a carpenter's pencil and it's got a nice flat bit of graphite in there so that we can use that and what you do is you'll see a line just where the pencil was joined stick a knife in the line and you'll be able to price that pencil apart and get the carbon out of there either the graphite out of there that pencil let out stick it in there and then give the carbon a bit of a press down so that pencil that is nice and firm then all we got to do is add the electrolyte like i say my favorite one is brick cleaner because it works really really well but vinegar or ordinary household bleach will do it if we connect that up and you put the negative to the pencil lead and the positive to the bit of steel you've got sticking out of there we are actually ready to go now you'll see that motor right there let me give you a close-up of it so as i add the electrolyte you can see the motor so there's the motor right there and there is the battery and here is my brick cleaner if i pour that brick cleaner in there motor begins to spin and that motor will continue to spin until all of that iron is eaten away and that will be hours so in a battery like this if you're getting a poor result it's because you've got poor contact and it's pretty easy just stick your finger in and give it a press so that those granules that you put in there are pressed closer together you do that you'll see the whole thing speed up so if you're having a poor result give those granules a bit of a press and you'll find everything gets so much better okay so that will run for hours a good six or seven hours easily now it it will eat away the steel but it won't eat away that so when it steel's eaten away you pop some more in there it will continue to run until all of that is exhausted so you've got a long time with this maybe a day by the time it's all done but it is 0.3 of a vault actually 0.35 so if you want more you're going to have to make more of them but they're super easy to make as you see so if you lined up about 10 of them you'd have three and a half volts that's enough to charge your phone with easily and it's really simple to make the really cheap 10 of those you saw how much i used is not very much at all it wouldn't take you long to be able to do something like that just from materials you've got lying around which i thought was awesome now for those who want to know a little bit more about what's going on then the rusting is really oxidation obviously what's in brick cleaner is hydrochloric acid so what we're doing is forming ferric chloride the formation of the ferric chloride is actually what's freeing up those electrons so we can take them out in order to do this work that we want to do now it is not rechargeable battery and it does have its drawbacks one thing that happens is that it produces quite a lot of hydrogen now that's not an issue in itself as long as you leave it outside and these aren't very big so there's not a lot of hydrogen produced it's not something you need to worry particularly about but it does produce hydrogen and it's also why i didn't fill it to the top because although it's producing hydrogen it's not like the aluminum reaction where the hydrogen polarizes the surface of the aluminium the hydrogen bubbles off more or less quite quickly and so we don't get the polarization effect that you would get with aluminium it continues to eat away at the iron and so we continue to get generation it isn't tremendously efficient but then we're in an emergency situation looking for a battery you can make around with things in the home and for that it's actually superb because it's good stable generation for a very long time to allow you to do something else like charge up lithium-ion battery bank for example charge your phone for example it will do that very very easily but as a battery in itself it has quite a few drawbacks which is why you don't actually see it much as an actual battery but as an emergency battery from readily available materials of both cheap and easy to construct fantastic it also makes a brilliant sort of science fair project obviously because there is something magical about sticking a few bits and pieces of everyday objects in there pouring in brick cleaner vinegar or household bleach and having it do something that's actually really quite a magical thing to see so i thought i would share that with you because i thought it was really interesting and perhaps overlooked now i know there's a lot of interest in the iron air battery and actually the chemistry involved here is very very similar to the iron air battery which is really about the transposition of ferric and ferrous chloride with a carbon electrode and an iron electrode it does use a naffian separator to keep those apart but it's the chemistry that's happening here is extraordinarily similar to what happens in the iron battery here of course what we're only actually doing is rusting the iron so that we can get that energy out from that rusting reaction we're not wanting to be able to reverse it because we don't want reversibility then the whole thing is actually very much simpler to deal with but an emergency measure like i said i thought it was super cool because actually it is such an easy thing to do from a whole range of materials as long as you've got a bit of bleach vinegar brick cleaner activated carbon and any old lump of iron nails flat sheet wire wool and you can stick it in a pot you're gonna get yourself an emergency battery anyway i thought i would share that with you i hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and please remember to like and subscribe

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 7,475

Rating: 4.9468436 out of 5

Keywords: battery, iron, air, how to, diy, robert, fwg

Id: bVn9PJk9VF0

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cremch]

I think 'powerful' is a bit of an overstatement.