3 Battery Generating System

[Mario]

Hi Turion and all,

I have a few questions to see if a few things can be more or less "standardized" to get to a working system quicker, with less blind trial error.

For a 24V primary 3batt setup, have any of you measured what voltage you had across batt 3 while "in the zone"?

How many amps were you drawing from the primary and what size were your batts? Just trying to establish what a correct amp draw could be for a given primary size (C20,C5,...), based on observations from people who had it working.

Is there a particular voltage that the batts usually are at when the system seems not to draw anything from them? I mean did you get this with freshly charged batts also or do they need to discharge for a while until they reach say 12.2 or so volts?

I guess I haven't found a good bad batt yet, but with an older one I had completely discharged I did a test setup. Primary batts are two 9Ah motorcycle batts in series, motor is a johnson but don't know the specs only that it draws around 1.5 -2 Amps. I've also tried the diodes across battery 3 but I guess I have to parallel several of them (UF 5408) as they get very hot!

thanks for all your efforts guys!

regards,
Mario

[Turion]

Mario,
I can tell you from experience that if you have a battery that has more than a couple volts in it at rest, you will be frustrated beyond belief trying to get into the zone. That is why the very first line of my directions on how to build this thing in post number one stated:

When you flip the switch the very first time, the motor SHOULD NOT START immediately. (If it does, you do not have a battery that will work in the third position so DON'T WASTE your time. Go out and find another battery.)

It wasn't because I was being a jerk, it was because I KNEW how frustrating it can be to try and get into the zone. If the motor started on its own, the battery holds too much initial voltage at rest for it to work in the setup. I haven't found a way around that yet, which I know doesn't help you at all. If you've read through the thread you will see examples of people putting batteries in the third position that they thought were bad, and the system brings them back to life, or a battery with "0" volts in it suddenly has 12 volts in a matter of a few seconds. That's the problem. If your battery is capable of holding 5 or 6 volts at rest, and is chargeable (even if it doesn't hold a charge, and even if you drain it) the instant you complete the circuit, that battery will JUMP past the point where it is capable of going into the zone in seconds. So you only have seconds to balance it and get it into the zone, and it will be miracle if that happens. It has gone to a place where it is gaining charge so fast that you are trying to hit a "moving target" balancing with it. I don't know if it helps at all, but I really think we have moved beyond that in our research. The use of two diodes across battery three to short it out negates the voltage in it, BUT, if it has TOO MUCH voltage, "boom" go the diodes as happened to me when I put three "bad" batteries in parallel. So having the right bad battery is still pretty important. You might MAKE one as a couple people here have done and get it to work that way. I have not tried that, so I can't say for sure. I have lost track of who has gotten into the zone and who hasn't and what battery they were using in the third position. Maybe someone else can jump in here and answer that for you.

As to the data you asked for, I didn't record that information. I probably should have, but I was concentrating on the process and not on the results, so I didn't. Sorry about that. If I get a chance, I will try and run my small motor with the small batteries, get into the zone, and get you that info, but right now I am working with the large motor and BIG batteries to try and come up with a system that does real work, and the amp draw and voltage draw of the motor is going to be way different, which is going to affect things I'm afraid. Maybe some of the other guys who are there NOW with smaller motors can check that info for you. Help guys?

Regardless, I think very FEW of you paid attention to Matt's post where he talked about tapping the bad battery with a resister (post #623) and the RESULTS of that. I would reread that if I were you. I have read it several times. I not only read it, I acted on it. I know Matt well enough to know this...he doesn't post things here just for fun, and he doesn't post stuff here for other people to try because he wants to know what will happen and isn't going to bother to do it himself. If Matt posts something here, it is because he has tried it himself and gotten RESULTS, that he thinks are important enough to share. But I also know he is not here to say "Please, please, follow me, for I have all the answers." He will post something and then spend the time and money to explore it and see where it can take him, and if you do not get your butt in gear, you will NEVER keep up with him, because he is "Gone baby gone" on down the road of exploration, and you WILL be left in the dust! It's like yo have this friend that said, "Hey, I have this idea for a house." and you drive by the vacant lot two days later and the house is sitting there. Just my view, not to be confused with any actual reality.

Dave

[Mario]

Dave thanks,

I know Matt is a trustworthy guy, he's shared lots of good info. I'll keep fiddling around in the hope that we can narrow down things to get to some sort of MO to get there...

regards,
Mario

[Turion]

Mario,
I did leave one part out of my last response to you, and that is, when your bad battery starts gaining voltage like that, it doesn't take long before it gets past the place where you can ever get it into the zone. The zone is a place where your battery still has very little charge, and you have balanced the load on the battery with the amp draw or voltage or WHATEVER is going to it so that it does NOT go up in charge. I'm not even sure WHAT it is you are balancing WITH to tell you the truth. It happened to me by accident the first time, and now I know the "zone" exists, so I try to get into it. When you get to this state, batteries one and two do not discharge, and there is still enough potential difference to keep the magic happening. You wait too long, and you can still balance the two, but the potential difference is not great enough for the magic to happen. So you have a LOT of things working against you being successful without the "good" dead battery. That's the best I can explain it. It is a really critical piece.

Dave

[Zooty]

Lead acid battery question

I just got given 9 new 14ah lead acid batteries that have never had acid in them. Apparently they are a few years old, some left over stock that never got sold so they have been sitting for a while. Upon inspection, the plates look like they have something on them like some kind of oxidation. Will it be ok to use them? I don't want to spend the time and money if they are not going to be any good.

[Matthew Jones]

looking for any advice...
recovery of 1 and 2 was below where they started and about the same as if I run the load directly off the batteries w/o the good bad battery.
Thanks,
Patrick

Take the the bulbs off once the motor starts to run and see if it maintains speed. Thats the point you can start to load balance and try to get the batteries to settle in at one voltage with the additional bulb.

Follow me?

The other thing you can try is to pulse the bulb and see if you get the spring effect out of the batteries.

Matt

[Matthew Jones]

I just got given 9 new 14ah lead acid batteries that have never had acid in them. Apparently they are a few years old, some left over stock that never got sold so they have been sitting for a while. Upon inspection, the plates look like they have something on them like some kind of oxidation. Will it be ok to use them? I don't want to spend the time and money if they are not going to be any good.

They are just dry cells. They put the lead material right on the plates prior to packaging.

Just make sure to put a good charger on them after you add the acid.
They should be OK

Matt

[Turion]

minoly,

Matt's right. Your setup looks good. BUT you will continue to see losses on batteries one and two if the load is not balanced, and you're going to need a load that is consistent to balance against. Get a "U" strap at the hardware store that you can screw down to a piece of wood to hold your motor in place. Photo of mine attached. I slid the gear far enough off the end of the shaft that I could engage the shaft of the second motor with it.) Then attach something to the shaft. A blade that does nothing but pick up air resistance might be enough IF the lights you add to balance it out are small enough. If you can find a little pulley of some kind that will fit on there, use a rubber band around a sewing spool for a load. I have done things similar. The tube inside of a pen that holds the ink might fit on the shaft to increase its diameter, then use a metal sewing bobbin as the pulley. OR get a mess of washers with small center holes that will fit on your shaft, glue a bunch together. Then find some bigger washers that have a large enough center hole that the outside of the small washers will fit in them and slide a stack of those over the outside. For that little motor, you don't have to have much weight to have a load, but it has to be consistent, or you will never balance against it. All those washers I mentioned is probably overkill! If I were the kinda guy who advocated destroying currency, I'd tell you to center drill a bunch of pennies, glue them together, and stick them on the shaft, but I'm not, so I won't.

Dave

[Neight]

Hi Turion and all,

I have a few questions to see if a few things can be more or less "standardized" to get to a working system quicker, with less blind trial error.

For a 24V primary 3batt setup, have any of you measured what voltage you had across batt 3 while "in the zone"?

How many amps were you drawing from the primary and what size were your batts? Just trying to establish what a correct amp draw could be for a given primary size (C20,C5,...), based on observations from people who had it working.

Is there a particular voltage that the batts usually are at when the system seems not to draw anything from them? I mean did you get this with freshly charged batts also or do they need to discharge for a while until they reach say 12.2 or so volts?

I guess I haven't found a good bad batt yet, but with an older one I had completely discharged I did a test setup. Primary batts are two 9Ah motorcycle batts in series, motor is a johnson but don't know the specs only that it draws around 1.5 -2 Amps. I've also tried the diodes across battery 3 but I guess I have to parallel several of them (UF 5408) as they get very hot!

thanks for all your efforts guys!

regards,
Mario

Hello Mario
I ran a long test the other night, and had several meters on my system.
found something interesting, which I really didn't expect actually...
first some basic data
what I have found working with smaller motors and batteries is, the voltage you see on bat3 needs to read low, even if you are pulling higher voltage loads out of it. Lets say that your bad battery shows a standing voltage of 1 volt without being on the system. Hook up everything like normal, and the bad bat voltage might jump up over 24V on the meter, and the motor doesn't spin. Over time you see the voltage fall to about 12-15V and the motor kicks on, slowly at first.
Now when you add loads, I find that loading the bad battery until it shows only 1-2V on a meter seems to allow this system to run the best, or at least allow for the largest load on the motor and still get full recovery. I am starting to wonder if you add too much load on bat3, if it doesn't eventually just by-pass the bad bat completely. If I put so much load on the bad battery that the meter reads 0V, I lose ground in the good batteries during recovery.

Now for the interesting bit. For the first time, I used an amp meter on the good battery positive and motor. I don't have a good amp meter, and the one I was using only goes up to 250mA before you kill the fuse. I was actually not expecting this to work at all, because I know the motor I use draws well over that at top speed (probably comparable to what you are using 1A or over) When I hooked up the motor, before it would start, it was drawing about 50mA to start. As the bad battery voltage did it's slow drop, the mA reading slowly climbed, and what I was expecting to see was the amps spike and kill my meter when the motor started up. Instead, even when I eventually had the motor driving at full speed, with a load on the motor and a 1Ω 10W resistor across bat3, I was still only drawing about 200mA out of bats 1 and 2. This is lower than the C20 of my batteries (7Ah SLAs) I also had a meter across both good batteries to watch their combined voltage (which wound up being a mistake) The voltage reading on both good batteries never dropped, at all, and actually went up while the bad battery voltage was dropping. I let this run for 4 hours, and was really happy that it ran that long. However, when I stopped the run, and tested both good batteries individually, they were both down below 12V when I tested them in series, they still showed over 24.4V, which is what it read when I started the run, but separately, they were both under 12V...
not sure what to make of that.
I didn't get full recovery on this run, and I am not really sure why, as I have done this same run before without all those meters and got full recovery. I am wondering if the long run didn't start fixing my bad battery, and that is where the energy went, not really sure.
Just to test the amp reading I got, I hooked up the same amp meter and just the two good bats and motor (as you normally would use the motor) and as soon as the motor came on, the meter fuse blew out and the motor died. So normally the motor draws well over 250mA, which I knew, but for some reason, on the 3BGS, it never drew more than 200mA to run the loaded motor with a 1Ω 10W resistor on bat3.
So this is something to look into, the current to drive the motor had to come from somewhere, but it wasn't coming out of the positive of the good batteries, that is for sure. I need to pick up some new fuses, and I have a better meter I can use for amps, it will read over 250mA, but this one is digital.

my good batteries did recover up to 12.29, starting from 12.42 each, so they didn't lose much charge, but it is a loss on this run.
when I get some time off this weekend, I will get some new fuses, and do some more runs with the amp meter at various places in the system and see if I can't find where the current comes from to drive the motor at full speed. Perhaps this will tell us more on where to go next with all of this.

[ewizard]

Reading the last couple posts a couple thoughts came to mind. It is just a thought - not asking anyone to try it but since Minoly has some empty batteries it would be an easy test. The purpose would be to make a good 'BAD' battery. I'd first try using the batteries with NO acid or any liquid in them. Sort of a lead capacitor deal and I know from past research that some think there is something special about lead and if you look at the Periodic table it's right between some other very interesting elements.

But even more interesting might be to just add water into one of the batteries. Of course if the sulfur crystals are part of the magic we seek then neither of these ideas will get us much. So it's just a thought and I'll guarantee either one will produce a bad battery but not necessarily a good 'bad' battery.

If one wanted to take this even a bit further I'd suggest adding just a very very weak solution of sulfuric acid (battery acid).

I apologize that I don't have any suggestions which I have already tried. I think we all do the best we can and right now that's the best I can do is to offer an idea. I do plan to try again using the two reversed diodes with this setup although my current predicament is finding a truly good 'bad' battery and since that is one of the hardest parts of this concept I offer the above ideas as possible solutions.

[Matthew Jones]

Reading the last couple posts a couple thoughts came to mind. It is just a thought - not asking anyone to try it but since Minoly has some empty batteries it would be an easy test. The purpose would be to make a good 'BAD' battery. I'd first try using the batteries with NO acid or any liquid in them. Sort of a lead capacitor deal and I know from past research that some think there is something special about lead and if you look at the Periodic table it's right between some other very interesting elements.

But even more interesting might be to just add water into one of the batteries. Of course if the sulfur crystals are part of the magic we seek then neither of these ideas will get us much. So it's just a thought and I'll guarantee either one will produce a bad battery but not necessarily a good 'bad' battery.

If one wanted to take this even a bit further I'd suggest adding just a very very weak solution of sulfuric acid (battery acid).

I apologize that I don't have any suggestions which I have already tried. I think we all do the best we can and right now that's the best I can do is to offer an idea. I do plan to try again using the two reversed diodes with this setup although my current predicament is finding a truly good 'bad' battery and since that is one of the hardest parts of this concept I offer the above ideas as possible solutions.

These are good ideas, so let me give the outcome a dry battery. The motor will not run and if does it will only run until the fluid on the plates boils off. [EDIT] I also need to say if you try this make sure your caps are off the battery and watch for electrical flashes. You do not want the gas to ignite.

Water just becomes a diluted acid as the sulphation on the plates dissolves back into it as the incoming current melts it. and in my case the battery tried to fix itself.

Maybe just lead and water with mild acid like lemon or vingager...

I have not tried high content of acid with poor plate structure. I am looking for a really old set of weathered plates that come from a cracked case or something along those lines. But no luck yet.


@All if your serious about understanding why and how the battery works look to invest in this book:
Battery Builder's Guide by Phillip Hurley

He got all the info you'll ever need to understand the lead acid battery.

Cheers
Matt

[ReggieGM3]

Thank you Matt

Matt,
Thanks for that battery eBook link,

Ron

[ewizard]

There is also the Battery Bible. I've only skimmed it and don't have any way to know how good the info is but it's 472 pages in a PDF and it has been redone from a lot of info taken from the 1920's and 30's when there was a lot less disinfo being spread. I'm not sure where I got this but I think Bedini recommended it. Might be some tidbits in it too. I'm going to wait before I post it as an attachment or link as I'm not even sure if it's okay to do so or if it has good value here. Anyone familiar with it please post. I'll upload it here or elsewhere if it's okay.

I had one other thought I'm going to mention here mostly as a reminder to myself once I give this a try again. I'm thinking that putting a transformer across Bat3 like a MOT in reverse (high voltage side across the battery) might catch some spikes there (I'd try this both with and without the reversed diodes) and step them down to lower voltage and higher current to be fed back to battery 1 and 2. I'm sure Matt or others have thought of this so maybe it's a nutty idea or just a bad one. But unless I hear otherwise I'll try it.

[clueless]

Curious about batteries

I'm in a little lull as I'm gathering what I need to replicate this 3BGS and something has been nagging at the back of my mind. That term is electrolytes, mainly referring to sulpric acid. Someone here used alum as an electrolyte and it seemed to work pretty well.
Our bodies also contains electrolytes and does the same thing, store and transfer electrical charge.
The body's electrolytes consists of water, sodium, potassium, chloride. Chloride is part of hydrochloric acid which interesting enough is obtained from sodium and sulfuric acid (battery acid). Also included are magnesium,phosphorous, bicarbonate, and calcium.
Alum also contains potassium.
So I got to wonderin what would happen if you replicated the electrolytic chemistry of the human body and used it in LA battery?
I know the PH level is very important in human body and I assume it is in the battery too. Wonder what would happen if you drilled two holes in a battery and used a pump to circulate the battery fluids to a holding tank and back through the battery. One thing I'm sure that will result is that the electrolytic fluids will carry a charge. If that holding tank was a glass tank (aquarium tank) would you not have a giant capacitor?
I don't know just thought it was interesting and something I'll probably try with a dead battery.
My guess is to mix the minerals to get the desired PH level.
Anybody have any thoughts about using this as the 3rd bad battery? Or is it too screwy to work?
As I say I have some downtime and this thing has been nagging me for sometime.

[Mario]

Hi Neight,

thank you for all the details, it would be interesting to compare your motor speed on the 3b system and normal on the primary batteries while comparing amps also. From what you describe the speed was about the same though and amp draw very different.

Putting meters on the system sure is way to better understand what's going on, altough (like Bedini always said) they can mess up things in systems like this, maybe this is the reason why your batts didn't fully recover after this run. Have you re-run it without the meters on?

I won't be able to test anything before next tuesday...

regards,
Mario