Water and first charges

So, how about the water we used then?

Well, initially my dad had saved up a good amount of rain from a thunderstorm. So we hooked this all up, fed a battery charger to the cell and got an amperage reading....0... oh dear :(

After much deliberating we decided to put 2 chargers in series, and whay, we were off the mark, an amazing 150 millamps ! (about 10% of our target).

I'm not going to go into great detail about what other idiotic things we tried, needless to save that after a lot of deliberating and pencil maths, we decided we need to feed the cell about 140 volts AC to get our 1-1.5 amps.

To achieve this, we decided we would have to feed off the mains. No whilst my dad is quite adept when it comes to handling things that can kill you, I'm rather more blasé. So, after a bit of reading and help from a friend in America, I realised I needed a bridge rectifier (to convert AC to DC) and to permentantly put our multimeter in series.

So I popped off down to Maplin and bought what I needed, rigged it all up, and (yes I know UK voltage is roughly 240vac) let her rip.... holy jesus christ, FIIIIIZZZZZ, this thing went mental....I er... think we were probably giving it too much juice! (judging by the 6 amp reading!)

So we turned it all off, had a think and realised that we needed "something" to provide around 100vac. (A bridge rectifier, as I learned, not only converts to DC but ads roughly 40% to the voltage).

For the past few weeks, we've been running off this set up, getting about 1.6 volts and not much to speak about. We appeared to have Stage II type bubble formations, and a lot of bubbles hanging about, but as far as I was concered we had too many issues, the main one I believed being the water!