Well, I retract my statements about not having the white buildup on the plates.  After taking the assembly apart in order to rebuild it with things closer together, I noticed that all of the negative plates do in fact have a white coating on them.  I do not however retract the statement that I see no noticable effect of having the film or not having it.  Amperage is no better or worse and production of gas has not changed as a result of its formation.

Now, onto the good stuff.  I’ve added 4 more plates to the design and closed the gap to about 3mm.  There are 11 plates together and the amperages went up 2 times what it was on the previous test.  So adding 4 plates doubled amperage.  But the question is:  Did it change the results?  Well, not by much.  After reviewing the video from last night which I put together a comparison for you below, I determined that tonights test was better.  However, I changed both the gaps and the number of plates.  I guess I should not have made the change to both at the same time and tomorrow I think I’ll remove the 4 plates so that I have the same surface area and see what it does for the production.

At this point my opinion is that the plates being closer together actually prevents some of the production and I expect to see less production even without the 4 plates in the mix.  One note however is that assemblying the plates is more of a problem than you would imagine.  Trying to get the threads consistent and even and therefore have a perfectly spaced assembly is quite tricky.  At least with me working alone, and as you will see from the video, the first attempt failed.

I’m trying to come up with a little different design that will help me to keep things more defined and structured but at this point its just not happening.

One test I did tonight that was very confusing is that I sealed the container and left the device running for over an hour.  The amperages went up a bit to around 1.6amps and the device got warm to the touch but not hot.  The device has a tub coming out the top and into a bucket of water.  The hopes were that at some point I’d start to see bubbles coming from the tube.  You can see from the video that something is happening but not sure what.  Well, after over an hour, nothing.  Not the first bubble, no pressure at all.  I know the device seals as I’ve done this test with KOH numerous times and it bubbles out pretty rapidly, albeit at 30amps.  I didn’t expect the results to be close to the other, but I honestly did expect something after that period of time.

Here is the video clip of assembling the latest unit.

The first test with 3mm gap and 11 plates

Compare last night to tonight