Another win for the idiots.

[ME_Andy]

Originally Posted by P-hack

HHO is maligned because it is pickle jars ...

Let's remember, Crazy Jerry's 200+ mpg build started out with a moonshine jug. You have to start somewhere and we don't all have the resources of a national lab to work with.

There are FAR more worthless things than HHO discussed on this site every day. At least we know that HHO does work in some circumstances. Give the guy a break.

-coming from a PhD student at a national lab

[P-hack]

Originally Posted by ME_Andy

There are FAR more worthless things than HHO discussed on this site every day.

I think that is the problem, for something to be worthwhile, there needs to be a balance between the effort put into it, and the results. There is simply no way to figure out the perhaps billions of man hours that have gone in to hho (indeed undergrads still persue it?!?), and with the instrumentation needed there is little probability that joe mason jar is going to stumble into a small gain.

In terms of effort/reward, HHO is well below worthless. And I don't see anything RLN doing changing any of it, even if it is actual signal, it is in a sea of %99.99999999999999999999999 noise (and so far all we got from him is more noise).

[Madact]

Originally Posted by P-hack

That being said, I did watch the video (that is how I know the compression is lossy and other limitations of the model!) and I didn't see where they "proved" HOOH.

Never said they did - I posted that video because (a) it has some cool stuff in it, and (b) it shows the kind of complexity that's going on in a combustion process, exposing the sillyness of the "it can't work because <simplistic high school chemistry equation>" argument which always seems to be the first knee jerk slap-down when HHO is mentioned. Incidentally, the simulations in the video (which are not HHO related) may be lossy, but that "lossyness" allows billions of times more accuracy than a "non-lossy" simulation would.

As for my personal opinion on HHO - I think the "miracle marketers" and mason jar crowd have thoroughly trashed any possibility of assessing the question on the basis of "previous evidence". How many times would home experimenters have to fail to build a solar panel using alfoil, paper mache and a sharpie before you concluded that solar power was bunk and not worth investigating?

Bear in mind also that this stuff started out a long time ago, on generally old, small engines. Changes in compression ratios, timing etc. may mean a positive result may not even be applicable to modern car engines. And as RLN points out, ozone may be implicated and HHO itself may be a red herring.

To actually investigate this, one would need, at a minimum, an experimental engine on a dyno, with adjustable compression ratio and timing. These engines exist, for octane testing and similar - getting hands on one may be a bit hard for most people of course, but that's life... Show no change in efficiency over a wide range of operating points, and no change in the operating envelope of the engine for a few different levels of HHO and ozone, and then we have a good solid negative result. If anyone has or knows of such test results (or some decent subsets which have been systematically tested), it would be great to copy it, post it, and sticky it. I'd really like to see this, HHO discussions tend to consist of claims of success, anecdotes of failure and opinions about what is or isn't possible, some hard data would be real nice.

There may be a completely negative result - fine. At least there'd be some decent evidence (negative results are great). There may be a positive result but at operating points that a modern car engine can't use - which would put it to rest as a car mod but may open up other interesting possibilities. Or there may be a positive result we can use - I ain't holding my breath, but that would be cool. Whichever way it goes, actual answers will be had from systematic investigation, not a historical survey of sketchy reports accepted or rejected on the basis of whether you agree with their results (that goes for both sides ).

In the meantime, ten thousand negative results from ten thousand ad hoc mason jars built from plans sold by ten thousand snake oil salesmen in ten thousand ford cortinas doesn't actually prove a great deal, except to show how repetition can be quite convincing even in the absence of decent evidence.

[RedDevil]

We can discuss till the cows come home, or just watch how others do the hard work for us...
Searching for oxyhydrogen dyno tests I found this thread on CR4.
Lots of interesting info from both HHO enthousiasts and sceptics.
Anyone who wants to discuss HHO would do well to read a thread like that first.
The concise way the OP (Blink) puts things in perspective is refreshing.

[niky]

The problem is, this isn't exactly rocket science. Well... yes, combustion is sort of complicated... but we all pretty much understand that various substances can be used to improve the operation of a gasoline- or diesel-fed engine... hydrogen, alcohol, propane, acetone...

Of course, in only one of those examples are people adamant that they can generate the combustion enhancer on-board while still coming up with positive results!

-

Even the eternally poor Somender Singh paid for dyno testing... (which, in the one test he got to do, actually showed positive results... albeit on a very, very archaic Briggs&Stratton engine... and he never got to do ABA testing on the same motor)... so what are the HHO guys doing fiddling around with on-road tests?

-

A relative lived a few blocks away from Daniel Dingle, one of the oft-cited Water Car proponents on the internet, back in the 90's.

And every time his "water powered car" drove by, the blue-ish exhaust fumes didn't smell anything like water.

[Madact]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

We can discuss till the cows come home, or just watch how others do the hard work for us...
Searching for oxyhydrogen dyno tests I found this thread on CR4.
Lots of interesting info from both HHO enthousiasts and sceptics.
Anyone who wants to discuss HHO would do well to read a thread like that first.
The concise way the OP (Blink) puts things in perspective is refreshing.

Nice find, his list of common HHO lies is quite good too CR4 - Thread: The Unlucky 13 HHO Lies .

Most of the thread is discussion of scammers and philosophising though :-/ plus a small dash of inconclusive data from on-road testing with scooters (raw data being supplied by a HHO promoter as well, so more than a grain of salt advisable there). Also references / links to couple of reasonably well documented cases of HHO devices not working, increasing emissions etc. - more support for the position that just bolting some HHO device to your car is unlikely to be useful (that point I think there's enough evidence for - the anecdotal horror stories far outweigh the anecdotal success claims, unless you're reading the seller's material, and "my engine got trashed in the process" is a lot easier to evaluate without raw data than anecdotal performance gains), but not much help in investigating the concept.

One thing that came up there that might be interesting was references to research using hydrogen enrichment as a way of getting extreme lean burn. Wasn't clear how much H2 was required though (could be a lot), and obviously not applicable to any car with an ECU.

[oil pan 4]

This guy owns hho believers like a boss.
(from the CR4 link)

"A while ago, in a post in one of our too-frequent over-unity threads, I wrote about having a lot of respect for science, scientists, engineers, and academic mentors. The post rambled, like most of mine (actually, more than most), but it struck a chord with a lot of readers, garnering a surprisingly large number of GAs. So I know that there are a lot of people here who share my views, as you'd expect in an engineering and science forum.

It drives me up a wall when I search for "hydrogen" and most of what comes up on the web is pseudo-science, and a very large portion is just plain fraudulent -- one HHO booster scam after another. We now have frequent visitors at CR4 promoting the use of HHO (Brown's gas, oxyhydrogen, Hydroxy, magic, Joe cell) injection to boost fuel efficiency. 15 years ago, an internet search on "hydrogen and engine" would give you plenty of interesting hits about real uses of hydrogen in engines. Now, pseudo-science and anti-science are gaining ground against rational thought. (Ironically, the first HHO booster was patented in 1918, and looks just like those of today -- although some of the loonier promoters of today have added more obfuscation: molecular resonance, pulse width modulation, AC electrolysis, etc. (None of these has the potential for improving efficiency to 100%, whereas just breaking even on an energy balance would require over 500% efficiency -- so it is all just distraction.)

There is a $1,000,000 prize offered to anyone who can devise an HHO device that actually works as the frauds claim. Of course, that prize remains unclaimed. There is a far bigger prize, however, available for the developer of any device which can be shown by the EPA to actually work. A device that can improve the mileage of a car by 50% (Dennis Lee's "guarantee") is worth billions to the auto industry. Toyota spent a billion dollars just on coming up with an expensive, complicated scheme for improving the mileage of a small car to make the Prius. Imagine how much they would pay for a device that, instead of increasing the price of the car by $4000, increases it by $20. What an unbelievable advantage Ford would have if they could offer a $16,000 Focus which would beat the $23,000 Prius on fuel efficiency.

The same guy who offers the $1,000,000 prize put together a good video about these devices. This is perhaps a good place to steer people who seem incapable of reading the relevant studies, or opening a chemistry of physics book.

Elsewhere on this site I've written loads of posts about HHO, some going into considerable detail re the thermodynamics and combustion science involved. Generally, there is no way of knowing if some of the people arguing (on CR4) that HHO boosters work are scammers or only deluded, ignorant of the issues involved, insane, or incapable of designing a valid test. (This last is not a good excuse, because the EPA has been doing tests of such devices for years, and they can do a valid test for you -- or if you read their reports, you can see what is required.) An alternative is that the claimant has uncovered a real way to overturn physics and combustion science -- in which case, he or she should be running to the patent office, rather than trying to convince people at CR4.

So far, I have not seen any argument presented on CR4 that stands up to even light scrutiny. The more common arguments presented are these, the unlucky 13, which I came up with in an early response to some HHO promoter.

1. 15% (or 20% or 30%) of the fuel goes past the exhaust valve unburned: Flat Lie.

The percentage is never more than 1% either side of perfect, and is typically closer than that. Catalytic converters are damaged by values outside these limits.

2. HHO improves combustion: Misconception. The 1977 NASA study scammers routinely refer to (but never actually read) shows that injection amounts must be at least an order of magnitude higher (than HHO units produce) to have enough effect on combustion speed to have any significant effect on energy efficiency. Even this only applies when the H2 is delivered for free thermodynamically. The situation is actually much worse with electrolysis units, which consume engine power.

3. HHO simply adds additional fuel to the engine, which you get for free from the water: you are just "releasing the energy of the water". Flat Lie. This is the classic perpetual motion scheme, and was the standard HHO promotion lie for years. Water is not a fuel, which should be incredibly obvious to anyone who has put out a camp fire. Making H2 from water requires more energy than you can get from burning the fuel. Always, and by any method. (The fundamental chemistry of water dictates this. Claiming otherwise is much like saying that every time you put salt on your food you risk chlorine poisoning. This principal, re H2O, applies even if you use the highest quality electrolysis equipment, and burn the hydrogen in a calorimeter -- which measures its entire heat value. In an engine, the situation is much worse, because you only get 25% the energy converted to mechanical output.) The alternator load, and the fuel used to power it, goes up with the electrical load.

4. There is excess electricity being generated all the time by the alternator. Flat Lie. The greater the draw on the alternator, the more HP required, and the more fuel consumed. This should be obvious to anyone who has seen generators at Home Depot: big ones which (consume a lot of fuel) produce more electricity than small ones. It is also obvious to anyone who has read how a car alternator works, or who has worked on one.

5. I've developed a method for splitting water that is twice, five times or 50 times (yes there really is such a claim!) as efficient as "brute force" electrolysis. Flat Lie. A reasonably efficient HHO unit is 50% efficient. 100% efficiency is not possible, nor is any efficiency over 100%.

6. But my method "jiggles" the molecule apart with pulses of x frequency (or ac) at some frequency. I use "resonance." Flat Lie. This suggests that (in the inventors corner of the world) the laws of thermodynamics do not apply. It matters not whether you use tweezers or rocks, or high voltage or low, the laws of thermodynamics apply: even assuming 99% efficiency of the electrolysis process, the net loss is still large: for each ounce of fuel you consume to produce HHO, you get back 1/5 oz of energy in HHO (because, at best, the engine and alternator making the HHO is only 20% efficient.)

7. But I'm getting a 50% or 100% improvement despite the fact that you stupid science types think it does not work. Profound misconception, bad test method, mental instability, placebo effect, Flat Lie? Imagine yourself an inventor with a billion dollar device but sitting around making videos on YouTube, or spending your time trying to convince CR4 members, most of whom apply science every day, that science is bogus. Plausible?

8. You stinky meany heads would have kept the Wright Brothers from flying. Profound misconception. The Wright Brothers were classic scientists, and relied heavily on aerodynamics texts by Chanute and others, and on the experience of a very long line of aviation pioneers.

9. Stanley Meyer was convicted of fraud because of the Big Oil conspiracy against him. Profound Misconception. Stanley was convicted because he was a fraud who claimed that you could run a car on water, and bilked investors.

10. I'm not proposing any kind of perpetual motion machine. Profound Misconception. For the amount of HHO generated to even creep up anywhere near close to the point that its effect would be measurable (and not a net loss), the process must operate at multiples of over-unity (in which case you have a perpetual motion machine -- just plug the out put into the input and it runs forever.) In a typical engine of today, the electrolysis process would have to operate at 500% efficiency, just to get to the break even point. That is the physics of perpetual motion.

11. Well, if these things operate at a net loss, then I'd see my mileage going down, but I don't. Slight Misconception. These units draw about the same current as headlights (100 watts). The effect of 100 watts is very hard to measure on engine of 150,000 watts. (Obviously the potential benefit would be unmeasurable as well.)

12. HHO is monatomic, with completely different properties than H2. Flat Lie or profound ignorance. HHO is similar to oxyacetylene -- if you crack open both valves on an oxyacetylene torch when you light it, you get a bang. Ditto for lighting an HHO torch. However, when you put HHO into the intake airstream in the incredibly tiny amounts produced by an HHO "booster" the two gases separate, and all that is left as an energy difference is the tiny additional amount of H2, surrounded by and intermixed with an incredibly large amount of air (into which the O2 has mixed) with a small amount of gasoline vapor. At the instant that HHO comes out of the common duct, all you have is a tiny amount of hydrogen. Wackos claim that ultra high flame front speeds will prevail, thinking apparently that HHO remains in one place (about the size of a rain drop in the relatively huge volume of a cylinder) but it does not. It simply mixes with everything else. If it did not, it would be impossible to make the other silly claim -- that it has a measurable effect on combustion -- because only one in 500 times would that little chunk of separate HHO be anywhere near to the spark plug, to "explode" and improve combustion.

13. The HHO units makes the ECU "think" the engine is running lean, so the ECU increases the fuel flow. Therefore, you must tamper with your emission system. Flat Lie. These differences are not measurable (just as you'd expect because of the tiny amount of H2 injected) as verified by perhaps the best recent test of HHO devices, that done by Popular Mechanics. The Popular Mechanics test is particularly good, because it is easily understandable, but also because it was performed by a body that is beyond independent -- they gain ad revenue from mileage improvement devices, so it is clearly in their best interest to say that these things work, rather than that they don't work. If you poke around HHO websites, you'll find many "reasons" why HHO can only work if you buy additional stuff: solvents, magnets, fuel heaters, etc. Ironically, some HHO sites which said that their unit worked just fine a year ago, now say that you must buy additional stuff to make them work. ("We were lying then, but now we are telling the truth.") Suckers keep coming, though.

So... I've written about all I can about these units in zillions of posts here. I plan to generally ignore the HHO threads other than the really egregious ones. Perhaps others who are inclined to take up the slack, can use this post as a sort of summary for those people who stumble into CR4 with apparently genuine questions about whether these things work or not. Warning: the "apparently genuine questions" are hard to weed out from the "hard core scams". We had a guy recently who started with a few questions, then a wild claim of doubled fuel efficiency, then an admission that he is in the business, then a list of papers which he apparently hoped nobody would read which show (to anyone with a little science background) that these devices cannot work as claimed."


If you are an hho believer, well it sucks to be you.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by UFO

I agree P-hack. Time to put up.

I reserve the right to set my own work schedules.

And there is no "win or lose" in what I am proposing. Simply data, adjustment, more data and adjustment, etc. I have a good idea what is going on and it will greatly disappoint the HHO supporters and most likely bore most Ecomodders.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

This guy owns hho believers like a boss.
(from the CR4 link)

"A while ago, in a post in one of our too-frequent over-unity threads, I wrote about having a lot of respect for science, scientists, engineers, and academic mentors. The post rambled, like most of mine (actually, more than most), but it struck a chord with a lot of readers, garnering a surprisingly large number of GAs. So I know that there are a lot of people here who share my views, as you'd expect in an engineering and science forum.

It drives me up a wall when I search for "hydrogen" and most of what comes up on the web is pseudo-science, and a very large portion is just plain fraudulent -- one HHO booster scam after another. We now have frequent visitors at CR4 promoting the use of HHO (Brown's gas, oxyhydrogen, Hydroxy, magic, Joe cell) injection to boost fuel efficiency. 15 years ago, an internet search on "hydrogen and engine" would give you plenty of interesting hits about real uses of hydrogen in engines. Now, pseudo-science and anti-science are gaining ground against rational thought. (Ironically, the first HHO booster was patented in 1918, and looks just like those of today -- although some of the loonier promoters of today have added more obfuscation: molecular resonance, pulse width modulation, AC electrolysis, etc. (None of these has the potential for improving efficiency to 100%, whereas just breaking even on an energy balance would require over 500% efficiency -- so it is all just distraction.)

There is a $1,000,000 prize offered to anyone who can devise an HHO device that actually works as the frauds claim. Of course, that prize remains unclaimed. There is a far bigger prize, however, available for the developer of any device which can be shown by the EPA to actually work. A device that can improve the mileage of a car by 50% (Dennis Lee's "guarantee") is worth billions to the auto industry. Toyota spent a billion dollars just on coming up with an expensive, complicated scheme for improving the mileage of a small car to make the Prius. Imagine how much they would pay for a device that, instead of increasing the price of the car by $4000, increases it by $20. What an unbelievable advantage Ford would have if they could offer a $16,000 Focus which would beat the $23,000 Prius on fuel efficiency.

The same guy who offers the $1,000,000 prize put together a good video about these devices. This is perhaps a good place to steer people who seem incapable of reading the relevant studies, or opening a chemistry of physics book.

Elsewhere on this site I've written loads of posts about HHO, some going into considerable detail re the thermodynamics and combustion science involved. Generally, there is no way of knowing if some of the people arguing (on CR4) that HHO boosters work are scammers or only deluded, ignorant of the issues involved, insane, or incapable of designing a valid test. (This last is not a good excuse, because the EPA has been doing tests of such devices for years, and they can do a valid test for you -- or if you read their reports, you can see what is required.) An alternative is that the claimant has uncovered a real way to overturn physics and combustion science -- in which case, he or she should be running to the patent office, rather than trying to convince people at CR4.

So far, I have not seen any argument presented on CR4 that stands up to even light scrutiny. The more common arguments presented are these, the unlucky 13, which I came up with in an early response to some HHO promoter.

1. 15% (or 20% or 30%) of the fuel goes past the exhaust valve unburned: Flat Lie.

The percentage is never more than 1% either side of perfect, and is typically closer than that. Catalytic converters are damaged by values outside these limits.

2. HHO improves combustion: Misconception. The 1977 NASA study scammers routinely refer to (but never actually read) shows that injection amounts must be at least an order of magnitude higher (than HHO units produce) to have enough effect on combustion speed to have any significant effect on energy efficiency. Even this only applies when the H2 is delivered for free thermodynamically. The situation is actually much worse with electrolysis units, which consume engine power.

3. HHO simply adds additional fuel to the engine, which you get for free from the water: you are just "releasing the energy of the water". Flat Lie. This is the classic perpetual motion scheme, and was the standard HHO promotion lie for years. Water is not a fuel, which should be incredibly obvious to anyone who has put out a camp fire. Making H2 from water requires more energy than you can get from burning the fuel. Always, and by any method. (The fundamental chemistry of water dictates this. Claiming otherwise is much like saying that every time you put salt on your food you risk chlorine poisoning. This principal, re H2O, applies even if you use the highest quality electrolysis equipment, and burn the hydrogen in a calorimeter -- which measures its entire heat value. In an engine, the situation is much worse, because you only get 25% the energy converted to mechanical output.) The alternator load, and the fuel used to power it, goes up with the electrical load.

4. There is excess electricity being generated all the time by the alternator. Flat Lie. The greater the draw on the alternator, the more HP required, and the more fuel consumed. This should be obvious to anyone who has seen generators at Home Depot: big ones which (consume a lot of fuel) produce more electricity than small ones. It is also obvious to anyone who has read how a car alternator works, or who has worked on one.

5. I've developed a method for splitting water that is twice, five times or 50 times (yes there really is such a claim!) as efficient as "brute force" electrolysis. Flat Lie. A reasonably efficient HHO unit is 50% efficient. 100% efficiency is not possible, nor is any efficiency over 100%.

6. But my method "jiggles" the molecule apart with pulses of x frequency (or ac) at some frequency. I use "resonance." Flat Lie. This suggests that (in the inventors corner of the world) the laws of thermodynamics do not apply. It matters not whether you use tweezers or rocks, or high voltage or low, the laws of thermodynamics apply: even assuming 99% efficiency of the electrolysis process, the net loss is still large: for each ounce of fuel you consume to produce HHO, you get back 1/5 oz of energy in HHO (because, at best, the engine and alternator making the HHO is only 20% efficient.)

7. But I'm getting a 50% or 100% improvement despite the fact that you stupid science types think it does not work. Profound misconception, bad test method, mental instability, placebo effect, Flat Lie? Imagine yourself an inventor with a billion dollar device but sitting around making videos on YouTube, or spending your time trying to convince CR4 members, most of whom apply science every day, that science is bogus. Plausible?

8. You stinky meany heads would have kept the Wright Brothers from flying. Profound misconception. The Wright Brothers were classic scientists, and relied heavily on aerodynamics texts by Chanute and others, and on the experience of a very long line of aviation pioneers.

9. Stanley Meyer was convicted of fraud because of the Big Oil conspiracy against him. Profound Misconception. Stanley was convicted because he was a fraud who claimed that you could run a car on water, and bilked investors.

10. I'm not proposing any kind of perpetual motion machine. Profound Misconception. For the amount of HHO generated to even creep up anywhere near close to the point that its effect would be measurable (and not a net loss), the process must operate at multiples of over-unity (in which case you have a perpetual motion machine -- just plug the out put into the input and it runs forever.) In a typical engine of today, the electrolysis process would have to operate at 500% efficiency, just to get to the break even point. That is the physics of perpetual motion.

11. Well, if these things operate at a net loss, then I'd see my mileage going down, but I don't. Slight Misconception. These units draw about the same current as headlights (100 watts). The effect of 100 watts is very hard to measure on engine of 150,000 watts. (Obviously the potential benefit would be unmeasurable as well.)

12. HHO is monatomic, with completely different properties than H2. Flat Lie or profound ignorance. HHO is similar to oxyacetylene -- if you crack open both valves on an oxyacetylene torch when you light it, you get a bang. Ditto for lighting an HHO torch. However, when you put HHO into the intake airstream in the incredibly tiny amounts produced by an HHO "booster" the two gases separate, and all that is left as an energy difference is the tiny additional amount of H2, surrounded by and intermixed with an incredibly large amount of air (into which the O2 has mixed) with a small amount of gasoline vapor. At the instant that HHO comes out of the common duct, all you have is a tiny amount of hydrogen. Wackos claim that ultra high flame front speeds will prevail, thinking apparently that HHO remains in one place (about the size of a rain drop in the relatively huge volume of a cylinder) but it does not. It simply mixes with everything else. If it did not, it would be impossible to make the other silly claim -- that it has a measurable effect on combustion -- because only one in 500 times would that little chunk of separate HHO be anywhere near to the spark plug, to "explode" and improve combustion.

13. The HHO units makes the ECU "think" the engine is running lean, so the ECU increases the fuel flow. Therefore, you must tamper with your emission system. Flat Lie. These differences are not measurable (just as you'd expect because of the tiny amount of H2 injected) as verified by perhaps the best recent test of HHO devices, that done by Popular Mechanics. The Popular Mechanics test is particularly good, because it is easily understandable, but also because it was performed by a body that is beyond independent -- they gain ad revenue from mileage improvement devices, so it is clearly in their best interest to say that these things work, rather than that they don't work. If you poke around HHO websites, you'll find many "reasons" why HHO can only work if you buy additional stuff: solvents, magnets, fuel heaters, etc. Ironically, some HHO sites which said that their unit worked just fine a year ago, now say that you must buy additional stuff to make them work. ("We were lying then, but now we are telling the truth.") Suckers keep coming, though.

So... I've written about all I can about these units in zillions of posts here. I plan to generally ignore the HHO threads other than the really egregious ones. Perhaps others who are inclined to take up the slack, can use this post as a sort of summary for those people who stumble into CR4 with apparently genuine questions about whether these things work or not. Warning: the "apparently genuine questions" are hard to weed out from the "hard core scams". We had a guy recently who started with a few questions, then a wild claim of doubled fuel efficiency, then an admission that he is in the business, then a list of papers which he apparently hoped nobody would read which show (to anyone with a little science background) that these devices cannot work as claimed."


If you are an hho believer, well it sucks to be you.

NONE of the points brought up are remotely close to what I have been proposing as a plausible case study for HHO. The closest one would be the NASA paper which is ancient and limited in the sense only one variable was manipulated - much like the lab test I and others had performed. Also, some of the instrumentation available today was not available then. You have to be careful in the use of older studies and how it can apply to current studies.

The "Million Dollar prize" was as much a scam as the HHO scammers themselves. I contacted the organization about the prize and asked for exclusions to their requirements of "manufacturability and EPA approval" as those requirements alone would cost more than their million dollar prize and will not affect the question of "does it work"? By law, a person or organization that offers a prize must have the liquid assets to back that prize. The Million Dollar Prize had no such backing and they withdrew their prize offer years ago.

I have spoken with people on Youtube that had put up offers of a few thousand dollars as a Prize to prove that HHO works in any manner. The tests would be conducted by them in such manner that they would not be able to detect more than gross changes. I asked for exemptions to their testing and offered to trailer a test engine to their location with requisite instruments. They have banned me from further posting and dialog.

Scammer types abound on both sides of this debate.

I just happen to stand in the middle with the honest desire to see what is happening. Most of you on this forum cannot separate the scammer hype and emotionally attack anything HHO. You keep trotting out the same age old arguments. The thing you seem to overlook is, I agree with you. But your emotional responses are reflected in posts such as Oilpan4's. I agree with every point made by the guy who would "own me like a boss". But, I disagree that the story ends with his discussion.

Engineers and scientists have specialties just like medicine. Just because someone has a degree does not make him a specialist.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by P-hack

I think that is the problem, for something to be worthwhile, there needs to be a balance between the effort put into it, and the results. There is simply no way to figure out the perhaps billions of man hours that have gone in to hho (indeed undergrads still persue it?!?), and with the instrumentation needed there is little probability that joe mason jar is going to stumble into a small gain.

In terms of effort/reward, HHO is well below worthless. And I don't see anything RLN doing changing any of it, even if it is actual signal, it is in a sea of %99.99999999999999999999999 noise (and so far all we got from him is more noise).

I have done enough basic research that has little to no value other than it is raw date for someone in the future to extend their work. My "noise" happens to have garnered interest through PMs and emails from people that actually can understand thermochemistry and chemical kinetics and many are supportive of the plausibility of some result if the right research path is taken.

And understand, the path I took fooling with HHO sometime ago, lead me down a research path that gave me an understanding for other devices that work far better and do have market value. I am revisiting HHO out of curiosity and not because I need any financial gain from it.