Solar Electrical Experiments

5 random experiments with solar electric energy, ranging from charging smartphones and making hydrogen powered bottle rockets, to sparking plasma arcs and even starting a fire.

Solar panels provided by Verengo Solar:
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Penny Battery:
Gravity Puzzle:
Making Butter:
Stick Fire:

Music By:

Scott & Brendo (“Kitten Air” – Instrumental)

Project Inspired By:

Comments on a previous video ( ) suggesting I try the gas generation with renewable energy.

WARNING:

These experiments and results are portrayals of my own attempts and experiences, and are accurate to the best of my knowledge. Your results may vary depending on your location, experience, and modifications to project ideas. There are risks associated with some of these projects that require adult supervision, and possibly others that I'm not aware of. Use of this video content is at your own risk.

Project History & More Info:

Verengo Solar ( ) sent me some solar panels so I could get my feet wet with using energy from the sun. I tried a bunch of experiments, which you'll see in the project video. One of my favorites was hooking up my hydrogen generator, from a previous project, and generating this "earth friendly" fuel with renewable energy.

I've always wanted to hook my hydrogen generator to solar panels and see what happened, so that was the first order of business 🙂

I expected that gas production would be low, but was surprised to even get around 1 liter every 5 minutes. Imagine if you ran the generator all day. You could collect copious amounts of the fuel and it wouldn't cost a penny. Perhaps 100 liters for 8 hours of sunlight? That blows my mind .. and my ear drums.

The fuel is made by electrically splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen gasses (2H20 = 2H2 + O2)

This gas is perfectly balanced for a powerful reaction, and when ignited, turns back into water. There are no by-products that are harmful to the environment. The process can be repeated over and over, and the gas is very powerful.

Rather than using a charge controller to charge a battery bank, I wanted to see if I could hook the panels directly to a cheap inverter to power devices on the fly. It seemed work just fine for charging my phone, but I did have to hook the inverter to a car battery to get it to power anything more substantial, like the battery charger for my cordless drill.

It really surprised me to see the juicy electrical arcs between the terminals. I wasn’t expecting to see a sustained plasma arc just from 2 panels in parallel. I’m still not exactly sure how it did that with such low voltage, but it was really cool to witness.

Overall, I’m a lot more interested in solar power now that I’ve been able to play with it a bit. I can see the value in it, and now that my feet are wet, I’m a lot less apprehensive about getting deeper into it in future projects.

35 thoughts on “Solar Electrical Experiments”

  1. Grant Thompson - "The King of Random"

    Good morning everyone! What part of the world are you all watching from?
    I apologize to my friends in the UK .. this probably isn’t something
    you’ll be able to try! Give me a like if I’m right about that??! :D

    1. the cheese channel

      did u know that the sun relises 200 septilion watts of electricity every
      second?
      200 septilion = 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

  7. steven stallings

    zombies aren’t dumb (just slow) and they’ll smash your solar panels (lol)
    anyway last zombie dies and we know who HE was don’t we SS & JC (hehe)

    2. DFX2KX

      I was always under the impression that zombies (in the movie sense of it)
      where a biological impossibility. And generally those things go up high
      anyway.

  8. Scroll's Adventures

    I would love to win one of these panels. I could do some really neat stuff
    with that.

    I’ve got a suggestion for a project you might like. A hydrogen cutting
    torch. I’ve tried making one a few times with limited success, and no
    explosions so far. I feel like it could be something right up your ally.

    2. DFX2KX

      in a pure H2+O2 reaction, just water is released. in practice, there’s tiny
      amounts of methane in the atmosphere that gets converted to CO2 from the
      heat, as well as an abysmally small amount of O3 (which immediately decays)

  11. Duff Smith

    I’d like to see you separate out that hydrogen and oxygen, maybe compress
    them into storage tanks, and melt some metal with that. And then how have
    you not gotten on the supercap array bandwagon? You could combine a
    low-volt, high-amp carbon rod cattle prod thing to your foundry heating
    method and lay waste to a crucible of rusty nails.

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