No, GT, I didn’t forget–I’m just in a whole 'nother time zone! Well, that and being on the Left Coast and all…
So anyway, perhaps some of you have noticed I’ve been referring somewhat cryptically to a project I’ve been working on and I flatter myself anyway that it’s been noticed so I decided to lay it out a bit here to see what y’all think of it.
A genius tinkerer friend of mine has been working on an on-demand automotive electrolytic hydrogen hybrid system for a while now. That’s not so unusual, because with gas zooming up to four bucks a gallon here in the US and double that in some places abroad pretty much everybody, their brother, the waitress at the corner cafe and probably your mom is also trying to figure something out that will force our big fat American cars to get something which remotely approaches decent mileage. The difference is that he’s come up with something reliable, durable and marketable–that substantially improves gas mileage, emissions and horsepower of pretty much any vehicle you put it in.
Now I’m sure some of you have seen Dubya standing up in front of the shiny hydrogen filling station, bewilderedly plugging the shiny hydrogen filling hose into the shiny hydrogen fuel cell prototype vehicle. As nice as it might appear at first blush, this is a totally retarded scenario for several reasons. First off, one of the problems with using electrolysis to separate out hydrogen from water is that it takes electricity to make it happen, so making hydrogen on a large scale often takes just as much energy to produce a tankload as the hydrogen gives up when burned, and depending on the source of the electricity used it can be pretty heavy on the carbon footprint. Secondly, the logistical problems involved in moving pressurized, liquid hydrogen around are a total nightmare–gasoline burns at something like 300 M/sec whereas hydrogen burns at something like 3000 M/sec, which is why it’s a little scary to be trucking around or storing in tanks. Thirdly, in those spiffy ads they’re putting the hydrogen (still pressurized) into fuel cells that are contained inside tiny cars that regularly challenge semi trucks for right of way and often lose–this is such a bad idea to have roaming around free on the highways I can’t begin to expound on it. Fourthly, in order to run pure hydrogen a car has to have an engine built especially for that fuel because regular engines can’t handle the corrosive properties associated with the byproduct of hydrogen combustion, which is water. Engines don’t like to be full of water. To say the least. Fifthly, this whole scenario is predicated on continuing a failed business model that relies on exclusivity and monopoly to exist and quite frankly I say “fuck dat.”
The better solution is the hydrogen hybrid concept, and it’s easier than you’d think. We’ve developed a neat little generator that uses distilled water and vinegar for the electrolytic solution to support the generation of HHO (Brown’s gas.) The system uses parasitic power that the car already produces as it runs, power that is generated by the alternator and while the car is operating that power is used to run the radio, or the DVD player, or whatever other electrical systems are being operated. The HHO generating system is capped at thirty amps, but it generally settles out to drawing 15-20 amps under normal operation. Basically, when you start your car electricity is diverted to the generator, which busily produces hydrogen and oxygen in the acid solution, which is then introduced into the air intake process of the engine. Our generator is currently producing .5 liter/min of gas on average, but if we use a 24 V system such as is used in semi trucks the output goes up to 1.5 L/min–using a generator unit that’s smaller than a 2 liter bottle of pop, that weighs about three pounds.
What does this mean to me, I hear you thinking… Well, what it means is that we put one of these suckers into an 8 cylinder, 5 L, all wheel drive Ford Explorer and it went from averaging 14 mpg in city driving to 20. A Dodge Dakota pickup went from 17 to 23 mpg. We just installed one in a 2.7L V6 Chrysler and I’m dying to find out how much that one benefits. We’re quite positive we can guarantee at least a 20% gain in fuel economy in any passenger vehicle. We’ve taken these and other vehicles through our local emissions checks and they’re running cleaner than they were the day they were made, because in addition to adding volatile fuel to the mixture in the cylinders (hydrogen,) we’re also adding more oxygen as well, which results in a more complete combustion event–did you know that most of you are puking about a third or more of the gas you buy out the tailpipe? Sad but true. Power is up on these cars as well, so those improved mpg numbers are in spite of being driven like they were stolen–the extra horsepower kind of invites leadfooting. This is just from our testing prototype; we’re working to improve the system and get a higher volume of gas production from it, as well as working on a larger generator for semi trucks–which get five mpg on a good day. So to recap, it’s clean, it’s green, it’s safe, it’s a no brainer.
And here’s the tricky part–we want to keep the price of a kit down to the five hundred dollar mark. We want this system to be affordable for pretty much anyone who owns a car, especially those of us who use our trucks for work and need larger vehicles because there’s nothing more pitiful than someone who has a vehicle they paid fifty grand for that they can’t afford to drive. The system works on any gas, diesel, propane or CNG vehicle as an add on. It doesn’t mess with any existing emissions equipment. It improves gas mileage. It improves emissions. It improves horsepower. We’re also finding out, serendipitously, that it improves oil longevity in diesel trucks–we put a unit into an '89 Dodge Cummins Turbodiesel with about 300K miles on it and 900 miles after the last oil change the dipstick is pulling up oil that’s still a clear honey color. Perhaps some of you own older diesels and are thinking of calling me a damned liar right now–but I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Similar systems have been marketed that started at a grand and went up, but so far none has worked as consistently or as reliably as ours.
We’ve been approached by some fairly major marketers and hope to have these suckers on the shelves by this summer. We intend to keep our manufacturing here in the PNW–we don’t want this to go over to China for cheap manufacture, we want it to stay here and benefit our community. We happen to think it’s better to give people a little measure of control over their lives and expenditures, and what better place to start than the family car? We’re working with a company that manufactures synthetic oil to find the right grade of oil that will allow us to put generators in to supply larger and larger percentages of hydrogen as fuel without having to reengineer existing automotive engines–we really want to figure out how to make a car run JUST on the on-demand generators with no fuel tank. Eventually we want to look into the feasibility of on demand HHO house units run by combinations of small wind turbines and solar panels that charge a battery pack to fuel the electrolytic reaction because it’s just sick that people are dying in winter because they can’t pay the fuel bill.
So maybe it’s clearer why I’m kinda bubbling around a bit–this is seriously exhilarating but pretty damned scary, too. We could be sitting on something that will fundamentally force a paradigm shift away from our reliance on corporations and countries to tell us how much we’re gonna spend on fuel and getting the reins back into the hands of regular people. America used to be full of people who could do for themselves, who didn’t like to rely on others to tell them what to do or how to do it–I’d like to see a little more of that self reliance and control coming back into our lives because I think we need it now more than ever. We need to feel like we have a say in our own destinies.
Changing the world–one little piece at a time. Wish me luck!
In the immortal words of Stephen Hyde: “There is no gas shortage man! It’s all fake. The oil companies control everything! Like there’s this guy who invented this car that runs on water man! It’s got fiber glass air cooled engine and it runs on water!”
