DIY Simple Hydrogen Generator

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Green Power Science has made a simple DIY Hydrogen Generator. The thought was that it would be run from the alternator in your car and the Hydrogen would be pumped into the engine for combustion. I am no expert but I think the energy used to create the gas would be much greater than the energy that would be produced when burning the gas. What would be interesting though is to have a large scale hydrogen generator in your garage running from solar energy and a means of using it in your car.

CAUTION – Before attempting this experiment please read comment 4 since it could be hazardous to your health if not performed with some precautions.

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52 Comments


  1. The energy needed to create the hydrogen can never be less than the energy given off by burning it. This could at best act as a sort of battery, but real-life inefficiencies would make this utterly useless. It would be far better to cut out the middle man and just run your car with an electric motor.


  2. Its true the the laws of conservation of energy and thermal dynamics indicate you are less likely to get any sort of mileage boost, but there are people who have been doing on vehicle hydrogen generating as a form of booster, sorta like Nitrous(except for the fact nitrous is an oxidizer not a fuel, where as the hydrogen is uses as a fuel supplement

    My dad has been looking for some time for plans for a 110v hydrogen/oxygen plant that is home buildable, he has the idea that while its in-efficient, it would be cool to be able to make oxyhydrogen cutting torch that does not involve serious containment bottles (because it would be designed to generate as needed and only when plugged in.

    Unfortunately the field is full of crackpots with browns gas and hho snakeoil.


  3. You don’t have to be an expert. If creating hydrogen on board the car (using the car’s engine as a power source) could get you more power than you put into it, you’d have a perpetual motion machine (because, of course, the byproduct of hydrogen condition is just the water you started with).

    Try to remember folks: There’s no such things as perpetual motion.


  5. An over unity machine( perpetuum mobile ) requires an efficienci of over 100%, impossible because of friction, the law of energy conservation,
    poor energy storage devices.
    But if we eliminate all of theese criterias, you still couldn’t get a 110% or so machine.
    We haave more chances of stopping the sun frm blowing up in 5000 000 000 years from now than creating an over unity machine.
    Watch MYTHBUSTERS, that episode with free energy.
    I love those guys.


  6. cool stuff with the electrolisis page,
    cool link.


  7. I did this when I was a kid, and not smart enough to know the hazards of using salt to increase the conductance of the water. The sodium from the salt precipitates (plating the metal) and the chlorine combines and is released as a gas. Chlorine gas is dangerous because it is a poison and heavier than air. If you are going to use salt you should do this in a well ventilated area. A better recommendation would be to use something besides salt to ionize the water.


  9. Added on to comment 4. I have not watched the video, but I’ve done experiments with hydrogen before, making some nice pops with a car battery charger, some water, and a lighter. If the video says to add salt to the mixture to make it more conductive, be careful, as the reaction WILL produce more hydrogen and oxygen due to the higher conductivity, but will also produce chlorine, which we all know, is deadly when breathed. Be sure, if using salt to increase conductivity, to always take proper precautions. (Ventilation, etc.)


  10. Yes using salt is not a good idea because just like water salt falls a part in electrolysis too and both sodium and chlorine gas are poisonous elements. And the water turns orange because of sodium



  12. I experimented with something very similar recently. Several companies are using water electrolysis to make hydrogen engines now! It’s all very exciting!


  13. Certainly, the best way to store energy would be in batteries… But this is something that a person could build and retrofit an existing gasoline burning vehicle with. The advantages are realised when you take in to account the very positive effects of burning hydrogen on the engine emissions. Particularly for anything built prior to about 1998. There is a marked decrease in fuel use, and corresponding decrease in harmful exhaust byproducts. The other advantage is that there is generally a surplus of electrical energy being generated by an automobile’s alternator, which cannot otherwise be stored for later use. The best way to get any similar effect is to reduce actual fuel use by adding in the hydrogen.


  14. Ok, whoever thinks this is an overunity device is a nutter. This can make the engine produce enough extra energy to overcome the energy lost in the production of the hydrogen without breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Why? Because all this does is make the petrol that goes into the engine anyway burn more compleatly, thus raising the effeciency of the engine slightly. More power, less fuel used, cleaner emissions, no overunity. This has been proved many times before.

    The orange/brown scum is not sodium. It’s Iron and other impurities comming out of the electrodes during the initial conditioning phase. These will clear up over time with repeated flushes of the cell.

    Yes Cl will be evolved for a time if you use NaCl as the electrolyte. But it will stop eventually. Also the Na will combine with the water to form NaOH a.k.a. caustic soda a.k.a. sodium hydroxide. This is a great electrolyte.

    Precipitating metal and plating metal is not the same thing. Sodium cannot remain in it’s mettalic state in the presence of water. It will also not precipitate either as I said above it will form NaOH which is readly absorbable in water.

    You do not use things like salt to ionise the water. You use a little thing called electricty to do that. What salt (NaCl) does is simply lower the electrical resistance of the water allowing more current to flow.

    Anyway, this cell is a rather ineffecient one. It reminds me of a Joe Cell which is just a load of pot smoking hippie crap. If you’ve ever been to Byron Bay you will know what I mean.
    The gap between the electrodes are way too big and are uneven and there is not enough of them. If anyone is going to have a crack at making a booster or any hydrogen generator, I would suggest trying to make a Smacks booster. Nice and easy and cheap.


  15. I thought I recognized that guy, I remember last year searching for DIY solar panels and saw another video of his “DIY SOLAR POWER SOLAR PANEL PV…” but the video was him just mucking about with 3 shop-bought panels bolted onto what looks to be a pre-made stand, whereas I was searching for almost fully DIY solar panels where you solder the 1/3mm thick cells together yourself and mount them in a frame (because I bought 80 2watt cells to make my own panel), and this hydrogen generator video has the same kind of vibe to it; “let’s connect a battery to two bits of metal in some water and see what happens…”
    I used to turn water into hydrogen/oxygen when I was a kid, using my 12v LEGO transformer hooked up to some big nails! had fun collecting the gas in test tubes, corking it and ignighting it when I wanted to for the POP sound.


  16. “What would be interesting though is to have a large scale hydrogen generator in your garage running from solar energy and a means of using it in your car.”

    It has been done. I think I saw it on the Discovery Channel or Science Channel, possibly on the show “Beyond Tomorrow”. A guy setup a small building with a solar panel that collected the energy needed to split the water to extract hydrogen. He then had the hydrogen stored in his backyard in about 5 or 6 tanks -likely more- (the size of a typical home propane tank) lined up nice and neatly. He filled a tank/generator in the trunk of his car and ran off of home-brew hydrogen. The guy looked like he had a good bit of money and time laying around- probably from not blowing it all on gas 😀 haha I wish I could find that and look it up in more detail. For now it sits in my memory and reruns, unless someone else knows what I’m talking about.


  17. Isn’t this kinda the plan for hydrogen cars? You don’t do the electrolysis in the car… you do it with lots of solar power at the gas station.


  18. Electrolysis isn’t the plan at all. There are more ways to produce hydrogen. Not only from renewables but also from fossil fuels. And then you won’t have to use an energy conversion with a heat based operation but a conversion based on chemical processes. This can boost efficiencies far higher, a fuel cell running on H2 can have efficiencies of 60+ percent where an internal combustion engine only manages 25-30 percent


  19. This is obviously not something capable of breaking any laws of thermodynamics, and would be snake oil if not for one piece of information: once your battery is charged, your alternator puts out more power than your onboard electronics (generally) can use and is wasted. I would say this is more like harvesting that lost power into a more useable form, rather than a claim to perpetual motion.


  20. You could also use vinegar to lower the resistance of water, and it doesn’t release Chlorine gas.


  21. mix in some detergent in the H2 part and wait, you should get a big rizing coloumn of bubbles which contain hidrogen.
    Donot light it up, it burns very fast and violent, it blows up very powerfully so light it up wi an electronic rocket igniter.


  22. Looks like a failed attempt at a Joe Cell to me.


  23. Hydrogen does not have nearly the energy potential for simple burning as other fuel sources. The more useful way to gain energy from H2 + O2 reaction is to use a fuel cell. As electrons try to pass between the two elements, they must first travel through the fuel cell which takes away some of that energy.


  24. uuum just wondering what if you attach a neon sign transformer?


  25. keith .h: waste energy.

    high voltage is really not the key to getting hydrogen, and it adds to the possibility of a spark, which is not a good thing,

    more surface area, more amperage, better electrolyte, less resistive electrodes, may all give small improvements, but upping the voltage wont!


  26. There are self generating oxy/hydrogen torches used in the jewelry manufacturing industry, required in many commercial buildings where fuel gas cylinders are otherwise prohibited.

    The chemicals used for the chlorine free electrolysis process are available separate from the machine, and using them would eliminate the chlorine gas issue, though the cost of the chemicals (they get depleted) and horsepower loss to generate more electricity (alternator has to work harder) for the electrolysis process may result in greater net operating cost per energy unit than just keeping it simple and sticking to gasoline. After all, there is heat generated and lost as part of the electrolysis process, which means energy is lost as part of the process.

    do a search on “hydroflux welder” for supplies, it is one of several “water torches” on the market.


  27. OMFG! This guy is a hack! He needs to do far more research on chemistry and physics for starters.


  28. Guys … I think you never actually used even a Browns gas generator for real. A 6 cylinder car would need 527 liters of HYDROGEN just to idle , when accelerating would need about 1500 liters. Of course it can be obtained … but you would need the back of a van for an electrolyzer to move a Civic. There is still a shitload of research to make it run instant … because BMW has already the modifications , but still hydrogen from a tank.
    WIth a hydrolizer as big as a HomeDepot bucket I barely made idle a TORO lawn mower.
    It works good as a


  29. I have heard pro’s and con’s about the Hydro booster. I can say hydrogen, when compressed (and you do have compression inside of a piston chamber) only requires 1/12 the neccessary liters just to idle. If you were using a five gallon bucket from Home Depot, and you had problems running a lawn mower (I’m assuming Briggs & Stratton), then you seriously did not put your project together correctly. Most of my friends and myself have been mowing lawns using one gallon “bucket hydrolizer” for our fuel sources. The booster idea (not like this video) will work to boost your fuel milage, but no where near the 90% this gentleman boasted.

    My two sense worth, thank you.


  30. To clear up a huge misconception on this subject that I’ve ran across on several several websites and forums, an alternator in a car has what’s called a regulator. This regulator controls the field coil in the alternator, if the field coil does not have voltage, the alternator does not produce voltage. The field coil takes the place of permanent magnets. Now, with this understanding of how an alternator works, understand this:: when the battery voltage is low, the field coil is turned ON, turning the alternator on, to charge the system, once the system is charged, the field coil is turned OFF, turning the alternator OFF, as to not OVERCHARGE the system, and to decrease the power needed to drive the engine accessories(take the alternator’s field off, the alternator spins more freely due to no magnetic field causing mechanical resistance). In effect, the addition of a HHO generator does not use “waisted power” at ALL, it’s just shortening the life of your alternator, and increasing the overall current needed to run the engine. The real question is this, Does the energy that the Hydrogen that’s produced from the cell when burnt in the engine, that increases the engine’s efficiency, increase the overall efficiency enough to equate the added inefficiency of running the alternator continuously? Something tells me it does not.


  31. It works because you get much more complete combustion. Gasoline engines are only about 29% efficient. The efficiency is much higher as combustion is improved by adding the hydrogen and oxygen gas to it.


  32. you can,t get somethimg for nothing in a closed system. you need an open system to borrow the energy from.


  33. I own a 1997 Dodge 4X4, 318 cu engine. With a hydrogen generator installed the maximum milage I have attained is 23.996 miles per gallon. There may be other factors that could increase the mpg but I have not tried them. The main problem with using a hydrogen generator is the effect the excess O2 has on the O2 sensors. It is a huge problem. I tried many thngs to mitigate this problem but when the truck idles, it stalls. Great to use when running a long distance on the highway but no use around town.

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