preying on the ignorant

Fuel prices are going up. The cost of a barrel of raw oil has more than doubled, and is working on tripling, since last year. Food prices have gone up accordingly, and other products seem to be following suit. Basically, this whole fuel price problem is turning into a thorn in the side of every American, no matter how rich or poor he or she might be.
So being able to run your car with water alone would seem to be a God-send, right? Just think, being able to pour basic tap water into your car, and have it run for miles and miles and miles, and then you can just pull up to any hose, faucet, or sink in America and fill her back up again. And just look at how low the price is… I mean, what could go wrong? It all seems too good to be true…
Yeah, well…
That is because it IS too good to be true.
See, back in college, due to the graduation requirements of my degree, I had to take thermodynamics. Beastly class. Hated every minute of it. But it did manage to teach me something about a little thing called “entropy“, and, by correlation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, otherwise referred to as “Time’s Arrow”, or “The Mother of All Murphy’s Laws.” Simply put, the Second Law boils down to, “Entropy always wins,” “Chaos always increases,” or “In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same.”
So what does all this mean? Say, for example, you use a battery to power a DC motor. That DC motor spins a generator that is being used to charge another battery. Assume both batteries are your standard Mark 1 Mod 0 AA batteries – 1.5V batteries with, let us say, 1000 milliamp-hours (for the sake of simplicity, just say they have 1000 ‘units’) of energy storage possible. Battery 1, powering the motor, is completely full, and Battery B, being charged by the generator, is completely empty. What will happen?
Well, in a nice-and-shiny perfect world, Battery 1 will dump its power into the motor, which will spin the generator up, which will charge Battery B, and all 1000 units of energy will shift from Battery 1 to Battery B without any problem at all. Sadly, this is not a perfect world. By any stretch of the imagination. Some energy is lost to overcoming friction, no matter how well lubricated the moving parts of the system may be. Some energy is lost to heat – after all, electricity moving through wires tends to warm things. Some energy is lost to sound, since the definition of sound is “mechanical vibrations [like a motor or generator spinning around] transmitted by an elastic medium [like air, or whatever the two are mounted to]“. Some energy is just lost. But, the fact of the matter is, Battery B will only inherit a fraction of the energy that was stored in Battery 1 – how much is dependent upon how good the system is, but that fraction will never come anywhere close to 1/1.
So what does this have to do with running your car off water alone? Well, pretty much, everything. See, the system that webpage is proposing is one where you use your car’s battery to electrolyze water, splitting it into its elemental hydrogen and oxygen molecules, otherwise (and rarely) known as “Brown’s Gas“, HHO, and oxyhydrogen. Then, still according to that webage, the car would turn around and immediately burn that “Brown’s Gas” in its internal combustion engine (either with or without the addition of normal gasoline – the webpage is not particularly clear on that point). And, so, your car could run on (or with the addition of) water, right?
WRONG.
The best-case scenario that could result from such a situation would be that you drained your car battery dry in the matter of hours, if not minutes, trying to electrolyze water. The worst case scenario is that you manage to blow yourself up, considering just how explosive pure hydrogen and pure oxygen are, especially when mixed together (take, for example, the fuels used for the Space Shuttle). In essence, if you tried to run your car like this webpage proposed, you would be running it exclusively off its battery, and even a complete backbirth can see how that would not work at all… especially once you mix in a notoriously inefficient heat engine (otherwise known as your car’s engine) that loses copious amounts of energy to heat, sound, and friction with every stroke. Just remember, entropy always wins, or at least comes out even, no matter how perfect the system may or may not seem. And, trust me, even a deep-cell car battery will be insufficient to power your entire vehicle in standard cars (hybrids are another story entirely).
Simply put, this “run your car on water” website is a scam, pure and simple. It preys on the ignorant and uneducated, it is despicable, and it is a shameful way to try and collect a few hundred dollars from a few thousand unaware folks, and it should be denounced as such at every possible opportunity. Of course, if I were a lesser man, I might not feel too bad, at all, for all of the greenies that would fall prey to such a pathetic scam as this, but even that momentary entertainment does not make up for the horrible nature of this scam, especially given the “environmental” craze gripping America these days.
Conveniently enough, all of the fake weblogs that support this “technology” also do not allow comments… remind anyone of anyone else who cannot stand to have the truth exposed?
Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, 123beta, Right Truth, DragonLady’s World, Stuck On Stupid, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, Democrat=Socialist, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Pet’s Garden Blog, third world county, Allie is Wired, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, CORSARI D’ITALIA, , and Stageleft, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.