How to: Create Helium?

[Jaguarjoe]

If you can't get lightly salted water just pee in a cup:

**broken link removed**

I always wondered what the doctors and hospitals did with all that urine.

Oh, BTW- the next time your wife tries to tell you that your drinking too much beer, just tell her that you're doing your part to solve the energy crisis

 

[Sceadwian]

By the way, if you use salted water for Hydrogen electrolysis keep in mind that you don't get pure Oxygen on the Anode side, there's a reaction that produces Chlorine gas as well. I don't know if there are any purely catalytic electrolytes that you can use, but worth looking into if you're trying to create any large quantity.

 

[crutschow]

If you Google "home made hydrogen generator" you'll find may ideas.

 

[tcmtech]

One easy way of making hydrogen is using distilled water with sodium hydroxide and some good clean stainless steel as the electrodes.

You can get pure sodium hydroxide as Red Devil drain cleaner at most any store. Just read the back label for the ingredients to find the one with 100% NaOH (Sodium Hydroxide). The stainless steel can be a set of bolts or strips of metal cut out of a stainless steel pot or other kitchen or cooking related item.

All thats needed after that is a good automotive battery charger for the DC power source and a match to find which electrode is the hydrogen one!

The more surface area of the electrodes and the greater the concentration of NaOH in the water the greater the production rate so if you set it up right you can use the whole stainless steel pot as one electrode and have the other inside a collection tube picking up the hydrogen directly.

 

[Sceadwian]

100% Sodium Hydroxide? Didn't know you could get that in a hardware store, let alone legally dump it down the drain =P Will have to remember that.
If I'm not mistaken another good choice for electrode material is graphite it's highly insoluble, just don't try to use mechanical pencil lead, most modern varieties use a polymer graphite blend that makes it totally unusable as an electrode but keeps them from breaking as easily.

Another good anode material is graphite. If you're using stainless here's an idea, use a mesh bag to hold a large quantity of stainless steel threaded screws/nuts/bolts as small as you can find and use a single rod down the center as the electrical contact. This is how the anodes of most plating operations are constructed and it allows for extremely high surface area.

 

[tcmtech]

There are loads of supposedly illegal or controlled materials, chemicals, and substances that are available to anyone as common off the shelf items if you know their alternative names or what they are used for or in.