When I heard that someone was trying to sell stuff that allows a car to burn water instead of gas, I said: "Oh yeah. My granny could fly too." Mind you, Save fuel - burn water is a pretty neat slogan.
But then I found the site where this was being promoted, and saw a video of a welding torch that was apparently powered by this 'water'. You could see that the flame left some water on the plate it was cutting. Impressive, but was it sleight of hand? Now it turns out that what you burn is not water, but something derived from it.
You need the hydrogen and oxygen in water
Well, people have been trying to make fuel from water for decades, so there must be something in it. There is: water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, all bound up together. You can burn hydrogen, and you generally need oxygen to burn anything. So you can see that the notion of burning the hydrogen in water with the oxygen in it makes sense.
The outfit that is promoting this concept does not suggest you fill up your gas tank with water and just drive off - not even after putting this little kit in your car. Instead, they recommend that you use this fuel as well as gasoline, to reduce your gasoline consumption by 25-50 per cent. That is a big improvement - it also means you can go quite a lot further between filling up, which is quite important for people living well away from the cities.
HHO or Brown's gas
The key to this system is a gas called HHO or Brown's gas, which consists of hydrogen and oxygen in the same proportions as in water. Eureka! You have to 'just' convert the water in a small container to HHO, feed it to the engine and you have your water-powered car. In practice, that HHO is delivered in parallel to the gasoline. This is bhow you save gas - burn water.
You need a fairly small bottle which also has an electrolyzer in it beneath the hood, and this is powered from the car battery. Apparently, very little power is required to electrolyze the water and produce HHO. This has to be plumbed in, and you need various pipes and things to complete the installation.
People say they use less fuel
Does it work? Well, quite a number of people have written in claiming big improvements in gas mileage, such as:
"I wanted to report that my friend, an 85 year old mechanic, installed a Hydrogen-On-Demand system on my car and it went from 28 mpg on the highway to 47!"
"My friend Don C. tried out the charged water system in his 1993 Pontiac Grand AM. Went from 28 MPG to 41.6 MPG."
"I drive a Jag XJ6 and my average miles per gallon has been 16-18 miles. Now that the device is installed I am experiencing 19-24 miles per gallon fuller at least. This is a substantial fuel savings for me."
Whether these engines are really burning HHO or using the water to improve combustion, I don't know, but even an improvement in gas mileage of 16 to 19 mpg is about 20 per cent, and there is no other way I know that you can get that sort of improvement.
