Converting my car to a water-powered hybrid (Part 1)
Yea, I know it sounds crazy, but I think it’s going to work! You may have seen my FNBO video I made about this little project. And I am sure you have probably seen some advertisements for things like this because they have been advertising like crazy the last year or so… But anyway, a friend (who is a bit more technically inclined than I am) and I decided to take this project on to see whether or not it is legit.
The water car conversion book
The $50 book I bought was from these guys, I don’t recommend the book to many people at all because it seems to leave out some necessary details. We had to download an a few additional patents from the U.S. Patent office to fill in a few of the gaps. I also was annoyed that they made the whole process sound like it is as simple as changing your oil. This is not a simple process at all and I am assuming that most people give up before completing it.
The book also is fairly misleading because it says you can get everything you need from a hardware store. Again, not true. We were able to find lots of parts at the hardware store, but have also had to go to a specialty electronics store and we are in the process of ordering a few components online as well.
So, now that I told you everything I don’t like about it, 
I will get on to how we are progressing with the project.
Converting the car to run on HHO gas
The basic principle behind the whole thing is that you are converting regular water into Hydrogen gas which works in tandem with your regular gasoline. We have created a cell that when filled with water and it receives an electrical charge, it gives off HHO gas. This then gets added in to the fuel mixture and hopefully will yield some much higher MPG’s than I am currently getting. But we aren’t that far yet.
At this stage we have succeeded in building the cell and we also have successfully produced hydrogen with it. Just a funny side note, we both knew Hydrogen was explosive, but didn’t realize just how powerful it was. We got a quick lesson when I used a match to light a bubble that was about the size of a large grape and when it popped it sounded about like an M-80 a couple feet from my face. It was loud!
So, this is where we are right now with the project, I will continue report our successes and failures as we progress through the project.
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Comments on Converting my car to a water-powered hybrid (Part 1) »
Thanks for reporting on this! I’ve been hoping to see an article/experiment from someone not financially profiting from selling the kits.
Are you able to gather data on the performance? Can you get MPG before conversion, after conversion with HHO off, and after conversion with HHO on? I also hear that you usually need to re-tune your engine in order to get decent performance; this suggests that the re-tuning may itself be the primary cause of some results. If that’s the case for this mod, it would make sense to try to gather before/after data on the tuning as well, but that might be too expensive and annoying.
WM,
no problem, I am going to get some good data to accurately measure as much as I can about the performance…. I have been calculating my gas mileage for the last few weeks for the car and I am going to do a lot of different tests to see which yields the best performance… I will share all the data as I get it, the bummer is that in order to get the most out of these things, there are a lot of components to build… I could just throw the cell that you see in the pics in the car and I would see some benefits, but in order to really get great performance there are a few electrical components that need to be built… I will keep you updated…
Bob;
How much pressure is produced inside the tube?
Thanks;
Tip
Tippy,
we aren’t sure yet…
I’m very sceptical about these devices - and there’s plenty of info on the ‘net showing similar scepticism.
If it really was this easy to get significant fuel economy gains (people claim anywhere from 20%-200%), then car manufacturers would have embraced them long ago!
I disagree Martin. I’m a bit of a conspiricy theorist. Do you think the oil companies (that are making record profits in the billions) would stand for it if car manufactuers started making cars that run off of water? No way! uh uh…
Oil companies rule the world!
My buddy runs his car off of vegetable oil. That’s what I’m talking about.
Please keep us updated about this conversion. I am insanely interested. If it goes well I might pay you and your buddy to mod my car.
@Martin
I was pretty skeptical myself, and I am not finished so I can’t say for sure one way or another - but I do promise I will give you the truth about the whole thing. If I don’t get any better gas mileage I will tell you…
@Ryan
I am not sure if you have seen any of the stan meyer stuff, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that what you are saying is true about the oil companies…
Let the conspiracy theories continue!
Only recently has MIT claimed to be able to get to near 100% efficiency with the electrolysis of water (eg by burning the HHO you get back nearly the amount of energy you put into making it from water). The reason our cars aren’t powered by water is that it takes more energy to turn water into HHO than you get back by burning the gas.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean this water conversion kit won’t give some increase in mileage, but it depends on how efficient (or inefficient) your car is to begin with.
When you run your car the engine not only runs the wheels it also runs a number of other systems one of those is the alternator. The alternator is basically an electrical generator that recharges the car battery. I believe on some (newer) vehicles, the alternator only runs if the battery is in need of charging. Other vehicles run the alternator all the time. If that is the case then you can use that excess electricity to run your electrolysis and you will increase the efficiency of your vehicle.
Matt,
I have heard the same type of thing - that electrolysis is not very efficient - I guess like you mention, my hope is that my car hasn’t been very efficient in the first place and that this will be a nice boost… time will tell…
I think it could be a viable option for improving vehicle mileage, especially if you add in a regenerative braking system and/or some solar cells on the car roof to boost your electricty.
If there was a way to have the system recover the water vapor (produced after burning the HHO) and put it back into your reservoir that’d be a nice bonus too since you’d never have to refill your car with water. Then it’d be a closed (maintenance free) system.
@Matt
now you are talking! Maybe that will be my next weekend project after this one is complete…
“I think it could be a viable option for improving vehicle mileage, especially if you add in a regenerative braking system and/or some solar cells on the car roof to boost your electricity.”
Those would be awesome, but they wouldn’t provide anything special to the HHO thing — they work the same without it.
“If there was a way to have the system recover the water vapor (produced after burning the HHO)”
Confession: I initially thought this was silly, but actually on second thought it’s pretty cool. The reason is that when gas burns it produces H2O, so you’d be able to collect enough water to possibly replace your losses. The big problem would be cooling the exhaust enough to actually condense the water — and that’s a BIG problem. It might only work when your AC is on (and that wastes a lot of gas).
Wow, I like DIY, but I think I wait to see how this one comes out. This is hardcore!
I just subscribed to your post. What a cool project! I love it! Please keep us posted. Maybe you can write a better how to do it book!
Pretty cool experiment. Yes, you should be pretty cautious when using H2. When I worked for a fuel cell company, we had high pressure H2 cross over to the O2 side that really messed up that wall of the lab. Good thing everything was in a cage.
Where did you purchase the electrolyzer?
Also, that MIT article is a lot more hype than anything in my humble opinion. We built electrolyzers and fuel cells for unmanned missions and the main negative about electrolyzers isn’t so much the cost or the ph of the system, it was the weight of the system and the efficiency of the process.
My 2 cents,
HIB
One question… is the explosiveness a risk if you’re in an accident?
So… you burn gasoline to run the engine, to run the alternator, to make electricity, to make hydrogen to be burned…. is that right? Somehow I don’t think this will work.
Oh and alternators do not make “excess” electricity that’s just being wasted.
Regardless of the blatant disregard for the 1st law of thermodynamics, ohms law, and entropy, I wish you good luck!
@HIB
Don’t know what an electrolyzer is? Should I?
@Vhiggins
technically this would be safer than the actual Hydrogen cells, because this is hydrogen on demand - so it is a cell full of water that is converted as needed to hydrogen. The hydrogen fuel cell cars that are starting to be sold seem to have a bit more of that danger factor you mention…
Either way, yes there is some risk, I will be careful - I promise
@thecase
I think that is right - time will tell I guess… I will keep you and everyone else updated…
From a manufacturer’s standpoint, there’s more to think about than weather or not it works. They have warranty, regulatory, emissions, and longevity concerns to deal with. In addition, personal liability lawyers would have a field day with the whole concept of explosive hydrogen cylinders / cells under a vehicle’s hood.
There are many mods that would work great for you to use on your personal vehicle, but for many reasons wouldn’t work for a manufacturer to implement on production vehicles.
@gas saver
I agree and I think that is why it is so difficult to find anyone trying to mass produce these things… from what I understand about our local emissions is that it wouldn’t pass with this on, so it will have to be removed every year or two for emissions testing
How would it not pass emmissions tests? Is water vapor now a pollutant?
Matt, I agree, but supposedly here, they expect to see a certain level of “pollutants” coming out, if they don’t they think you rigged it or are trying to trick the computer and your car fails… I haven’t researched this, it is just what I hear…
hi, what is you present update.. i am very much interested to know about it….
@Mookherji and anyone else…
You can find out more about the progress of the HHO experiment here…