It does not generate electricity…
My Kombucha (Experiment #2) is getting to the point of being ready. It’s day seven now and it’s really developing well. In the pictures, the mother mushroom is the small one that’s verticle in the jar (the one that’s the circle). The one from my last batch is the wider, bent one above the mother, and the third one (my new baby) is the one that is swelling from the CO2 pressure underneath. Their seems to be a heartier population of the yeast in this batch as compared with last and the bactierium seemed to populate a lot quicker also. Perhaps they like incubating in the Oolong base better. You can also see the new mushroom on top being lifted about .5″ off of the surface of the brew also from the pressure of the CO2. Small micro-bubbles are constantly being released and an observable “head” has formed between the surface of the brew and the Kombucha on top.
The Mother:
No, it is not mysteriously generating electricity such as a lemon will when the acids oxidize a piece of zinc that contacts it (thanks for the comment though). But, on a similar note, I have been researching wind turbines for a few reasons lately because of a few different events that coincidentally forced the subject upon me all at the same time. I’m going to attempt to build a wind turbine (hopefully on the scale of a few hundred watts, about enough for a desktop computer). I’m in the process of researching all I need to build my dynamo using Neodymium magnets aligned on two rotors with one rotor attached to a drive shaft (which is attached to the windmill fins and gets spun by the wind) and a stator with twelve copper wire coils around the circle which the magnets pass over. This is how the electricity is created. The magnets are aligned so that the poles alternate as the rotor spins and as the poles keep shifting while they pass over the coils, electricity is produced.
I’ll post the results of my attemps at that when I actually get around to doing it.
okay, i’m not that cool, but i did research how to make an led light up with four lemons, four nails, and some wire!!!
or
6 pennies, 6 nickles, a solution of salted water dambed paper towels and some wire.
ah, it’s not a wind terbin (whatever that is) but i thought it would be neat to make a roof top environment with a few thousand dozen lemons (gratitude of a near by lemon treeeeeee) and led a nights fun of roofing about!!!
also, \\
oh! yweah …. i didn’t know those were mushrooms you were spawning, how’d you learn about that? realistically, i thought it was crazt tea you were brewing …
Response to comment 1:
I wasn’t saying the lemon thing isn’t awesome. Actually, I had similar thoughts of connecting up strings of lemons to create a lot of power. They create about .7-.9 volts a piece but unfortunately it’s something on the order of 150 nanoamps of power, not very much! But, with 1,000,000 lemons, that’s 150 amps of power! Not too shabby. (For reference, a toaster is draws about 5 amps of power)
Response to comment 2:
Sorry, using the word “mushroom” was misleading. That’s just what they are called because of what they look like. It’s really just a “hunk” of specific bacteria and yeast that ferment in a solution of tea and sugar over a period of a couple of weeks. See wikipedia.
Build a windmill: http://www.otherpower.com/bartmil.html
Hah! That’s one of the pages I was looking at.