HHO Hoax

G'day there, All my life I have had a secret passion. Grass roots subsistence lifestyles and eco friendly human habitation of our planet. Please don't confuse me with the tree huggers or the bleeding hearts and artists, I'm a realist. I was thinking about and sketching designs for solar powered cooling, water heating and recycled water bushfire mitigation systems back in my 20's and still search and live my ideas to this day.

So from time to time I find myself checking out YouTube, books, libraries, the Internet and green lifestyle magazines and searching for alternate energy, passive solar design, solar power, solar hot water, wind power, bio fuels, thermal mass, passive cooling, solar cooling, and the like.
It wasn't long before I found the HHO crowd.

So these people are basically saying, we use the alternator or the car battery to seperate hydrogen and oxygen molecules via electrolysis. We catch the gas, we stuff it into the engine and we achieve marked improvement in fuel economy. Well, to cut the fairy tale of the miracle of HHO short here is the reality. The laws of thermodynamics. You can't get more work out of a system than you put into a system. That's due to the Second law of thermodynamics These guys claim, the alternator is spinning under the hood anyways, why not grab that "free generation capacity" and use it to make HHO.

OK, pick up an alternator, make sure the wires are not hooked together. Spin it, it's freely rotating hey. Now hook those wires to a load. Spin the alternator again, Oh... It takes energy to spin that sucker hey. Or try this, run your motor in your car on a very lean fuel mixture, replace the fuel with some handy gasses instead. Hey the car burns less fuel! O wait the car just broke down and requires expensive repairs. Don't run your car on too lean a fuel / air ratio, yes you will save fuel but it will break.

Or try this, stick a big huge magnet thing in there, the perpetual magnetic field will save you gas. Umm no, lugging around all that extra weight will do the exact opposite.

There is a use for Hydrogen as a fuel gas, it is very useful in high temperature applications. And yes cars can be built to run on pure hydrogen, trouble is right now making that Hydrogen uses way too much energy. It's also a bugger to store, and it has a habit of blowing things up.

This guy is a desert dweller like myself, you'll need to excuse his accent, he grew up in an underprivileged society where guns and media hype shape a national identity that is well... different to mine. But although some of his video posts are erm... eccentric, this one bangs the free energy nail square on the head:

A while back I found a guy called hhoball who was thinking more viable thoughts, he wanted to use HHO gas to heat water. I wrote this lengthy letter to him when he asked for opinion and ideas. I'm still waiting for a reply, maybe he is working on it?

HHO on demand hot water:

G'day hhoball, I have enjoyed your video's about hho. I have been thinking about the possibilities for a while now, particularly hho in cooling applications!

Concerning your continuous flow heater, take into mind that a well designed modern appliance is rated to burn in the region of 120MJ/h at peak demand for an output of 20 litres/min. I have the feeling your low temp gain is due too far less than the required MJ/h consumption. I understand the Calorific value of hho is far higher than LPG or Natural Gas but a mega joule is a mega joule regardless. Have you mathed out your current consumption? Some quick mental sums gave me a required energy expenditure of 33-34 KW/h. (assuming 100% efficient hho production, see below.)

Also, I understand that the temperature produced by a hho flame depends on the medium the flame impinges on. Try heating water in a pot with the flame impinging on the water, you get no real gain, now try heating tungsten wire: mega gain. So here is my suggestion: Knowing a hho flame in air alone produces little usable radiant heat, and knowing there is a high potential for blowing holes in your heat exchange with direct impinging flames, how about having the flame impinge on a suitable medium say tungsten wire mesh and have the heat exchange mounted above this excellent radiant / convection / possibly conduction? heat source? You could probably get away with using a normal Rinnai Infinity or Bosch instantaneous heat exchange with little risk of creating a puddle of molten heat exchanger slag. You may have to control the temperature of your radiant mesh to forgo slag production there also, I'm thinking water cooled, there will be some of that handy nearby in this application.

There is no denying the usefulness of hho torches in high temperature applications IE cutting, brazing, etc.
But I have to ask the most pertinent question: How much energy does it take in KW/h of electricity to produce the required hho gas volume to heat water, REALLY...

Unfortunately, the first law of thermodynamics states quite clearly that the energy generated by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen through combustion can only ever be equal to the amount of energy it took to separate them. But in fact it's worse than that.

Because there all sorts of losses involved in the generation of the electricity, the delivery of it to the electrolysis cell and then the combustion process, we actually recover far less energy from burning the hydrogen than it took to create it. That's the second law of thermodynamics, we call this inherent loss entropy. Would it be wiser to consider applying those KW/h more efficiently to that water?

Hey here's an even better Idea, lets heat that water with a clean modern well designed Natural Gas or LPG burner given that these gases will be cheaper (economically AND environmentally) than the electricity once we consider that electric element heating of water is by far the most inefficient way we can heat water on demand. A properly installed and operated on demand heater will not carbon monoxide poison it's proud owner unless they mess with it or fail to have it correctly serviced at an appropriate interval by a licenced gasfitter.

I personally feel a lot safer around efficient modern gas appliances particularly exterior mounted ones (which probably don't suit your climate, granted,) than I do around electricity. Fact: products of complete combustion of Natural Gas and LPG do NOT contain CO. Products of incomplete combustion of course do. Perhaps using hho as an adjunct duel fuel to ensure complete combustion is a worthwhile exercise?

I'm not trying to debunk you or rain on your parade, I am simply suggesting it is the high temperature slag heap applications which best suit this wonderful clean heat energy source particularly given the cost of production and the alternatives available to modern industry. Maybe It's worth considering that this particular domestic appliance wheel can't be reinvented utilising hho?

Replacing my Oxy Acetylene kit with a hho torch is certainly cost effective and viable, build a production unit cheaper than the existing Taiwan, China or Korea versions already being sold and I'll write you a cheque ;-) Acetylene is nasty, dirty, dangerous stuff no two ways about it.

In all seriousness hhoball keep up the innovative work but scrap the domestic appliances, the Japanese are all over them already... There is nothing wrong with your hho vision except for your target consumer group. Industrial pollution, energy expenditure and greenhouse gas production far exceeds domestic last time I checked. The first law of Thermodynamics ruins all the fun hey.....

Kind regards,
Hakamob (You tube username)
Mike.

Well, he never did reply to my letter. I hope he is doing wonderful things with HHO. Because of the con artists and scammers who are all over this gas and permanent magnets, both of these potentially useful systems are walking around with a grumpy monkey on their backs. And the monkey has a name: Entropy.