When I bought bolts to make my first wet cell I bought all stainless steel. That makes a lot of sense to me because those bolts (even the terminal posts) were going to be in the electrolyte.
Today while experimenting with the computer power supplies I happened to touch one of the terminal posts to the cell. It was HOT! I mean it burned my finger. Right away I start thinking it had a bad connection. Nope the connection was good. Then I put an ohm meter from the top of the bolt to the bottom and found 0.2 Ohms.
At 15 amps that 0.2 ohms was robbing my system of 45 watts and causing my cell to have less voltage than it could and should have.
It turns out that stainless steel is not a very good conductor of current. I hate to think about this, but many of my experiments over the past two months have had voltage reading taken at the terminal where this voltage drop would have been over looked. My data has been compromised and I will now have to do many of my tests over after replacing the bolts with ordinary steel. The good news is that my mmw will probably improve when I install the new bolts.
Here's a link to my YouTube video showing th heat lost at a bolt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZWMULafPQ4
Pulling my hair out!
Bob Campbell
http://www.youtube.com/user/HHO4gas
I love the smell of HHO in the morning.
Thank you everyone from the comments.If you don't mind passing this story along to anyone you'd think you'd like it I'd greatly appreciate it.
ReplyDeletestainless steel forged fittings
Non Ferrous Metals Merchant