World's Largest Lemon Battery- Lemon powered Supercar - YouTube

I was challenged to create electricity to support this beast

It's Volkswagens carbon-fiber dual engine

Faster than a Formula one electric supercar

For the upcoming infamous 12 and 1/2 mile Pikes Peak race to the top of a really high mountain in Colorado

And they gave me no further instructions on how they wanted it done

So I thought how cool to be to charge it up using one of those science fair lemon batteries

And since I'm pretty sure using only one lemon isn't going to cut it

My plan is to build the Guinness world record

World's largest lemon battery and when it comes to making ridiculous things no one is better at that than fellow YouTube engineer

William P. Osman. The first video I saw of yours was when you bio hacked your dog. How did that work?

Not well

we tried to dangle a hot dog in front of a dog's face on a

Mechanical backpack and then you can steer the hot dog

To try to get the dog to change directions and what he ended up doing was sitting down and eating him

So we've estimated this should take about three days for us to build and yet I've only allotted

Two minutes for this in the video. So you know what that means you plan on your videos

We didn't want our battery setup to just be a mangled mess of wires

So William had the brilliant idea to waterjet out a bunch of copper and zinc strips, which we can then assemble into racks

Who are the first half of the racks to be in parallel and that was in series with the second half of the racks

Which were also all in parallel and then at that point all we had to do was impale some lemons

Speaking of which in addition to harvesting from my own backyard

I visited some local farms and got their class two lemons

Which means they couldn't be sold in stores because they were either overripe miss shapen or too small

and when one finds oneself in possession of

1232 lemons, turns out you can't not do this

So here we have the world's largest

Lemon battery and now is the moment of truth to see just how much power this could actually make for us

But in order to understand the results, let's first review how a lemon can even make power in the first place

The trick is picking the right metals to stick into the lemon in this case

Zinc really wants to get rid of electrons and then copper really wants to collect them

But they can't do that unless they're connected by some kind of electrolyte and that's the lemon juice

once that happens an electrochemical reaction occurs the bass and the electrons can now move and moving electrons is the very definition of

Electricity it's sort of like how the water up high in the full cup naturally wants to flow to the empty cup lower down

But it can't do that until you connect the two with the straw which allows the water to flow

So in this case, obviously the higher cup is the zinc

The lower cup is the copper and the straw is the lemon and so then the flowing water

represents our electricity or power and so with that we were measuring just under five volts and the short-circuit current is

Not great, Mark. Basically, our lemon battery is awful. Yeah like it's impressive

No, the fact that it works as well as it does is cool. But as well as it works is not

Well, does that make any sense? It makes no sense whatever you just said

And to quantify the suckiness better you can listen to a motor running off our 1,200 lemons

Versus a single double-a battery

So what was looking good for the car

But we weren't about to let three days of work go down the drain

So because the battery produces so little power we use a tiny tiny

High gear ratio motor fifteen hundred to one to charge up our potential energy

Which is more lemon so it should take about 15 minutes to lift this bag and then we can release that all at once

to activate our lemon juicing mechanism, basically

Like all of these guys are working together to like drain the lifeblood from one of their brethren. Maybe this is too dark

Okay, William moment of truth. I am so excited. Give me some of that. Cheers. Cheers

Wow refreshing

organic not worth

10 hours amazing 12 hours totally worth it

This is the most expensive glass of lemonade you will ever have. Yes, that actually is a fact. It's a win in my book

I'm gonna finish this. I'm not

So we let the lemons trickle charge for a couple days

And after that the total power we harvested for the Volkswagen

Racing team was the equivalent of a single double-a battery and I should mention that since the race team is busy getting the car ready

For the race in Colorado. They have sent me this monstrous 48 kilowatt hour battery that can drive itself

So the plan is I will add any power we generate here in

California to this battery and then get this to them in time for the race in, Colorado

So the measly lemon power is now inside, but clearly I need to think of a plan B

Luckily I had an idea

Which is to take some pulleys and a skateboard wheel and a brushless motor then some custom machined aluminum plates and a steel

Cable to make a zipline with regenerative braking to charge a drill battery

And it seems to actually be working. All I needed now was a party with some family friends and their kids

This is how much energy is in the battery. We need to get it from empty all the way up to the full

That's where I need you guys because what happens is as you go down on this zipline

It charges the battery

The worst part about a zipline is when you have to go down and then drag it back up the hill

But I've got a little remote control here watch this

Is that cool? You guys want to ride that? you ready?

Mechanical advantage of the sloped Hill disguises it well

But the amount of energy they are adding to our zipline system here by running up the hill just one time is the same energy

used for the world record dead lift

And to provide power to their leg muscles

we repurposed our lemon battery lemons into fresh lemonade and

Everyone had to take a drink before running up the hill because as they say when life gives you 1200 lemons make lemonade

Then force kids to drink it to power your regenerative zipline

So the zipline was awesome

And we ended up charging up one of these portable drill batteries plus a little more. Now for those of you keeping track at home

Here's how I'm doing so far

the limits have enough power to move the

supercar about this far on a soccer field and then with the lemonade and the kids muscles in the zipline it can now travel an

additional two soccer fields

The problem is the race is 200 soccer fields long, which means if we were to try and charge the car

We'd be 198 soccer fields short. So clearly that kind of power will not be breaking any records

So I've got to come up with a plan C and to do that

I'm gonna harness the power of the Sun and in hindsight

I probably should have started here because if you think about it all the energy sources we use are actually

solar powered. Oil and coal and natural gas

It's just old decayed plants and swamps that originally got their power from the Sun using their leaves and photosynthesis

Even things like wind turbines are really solar powered because the wind blows when the Sun heats up the atmosphere

unevenly in the case of

hydroelectric dams the water got to the lake on the high side because of rain from the clouds and clouds a result of water that

Has been evaporated by you guessed it, the Sun. As humans

We are even solar power because we get our energy from plants or animals that ate plants

Which again get their power from the Sun

so if I was looking for some energy to fill up a battery instead of indirectly and

Inefficiently going through a bunch of different energy sources and losing a bunch at every step along the way

it makes way more sense to just go directly to the source

And so with that in mind I busted out the power tools and put twenty-four 100 watt solar panels over our garage

But there was a problem with this. When NASA sent the solar power twin Rovers to Mars in 2004

It didn't take long until the solar panels were

Totally covered in dust which effectively crippled the rover because they couldn't get as much energy from the Sun and this was a huge issue

But then we got lucky and a mini tornado came by and cleaned them off restoring the power

It turns out these mini tornadoes are actually pretty common on Mars which is why she is still driving around today

Nearly more than 14 years later. This is also in part why on the next Rover we sent to Mars

We just killed the issue altogether and slapped a nuclear reactor on the back and while California isn't Mars

It does get pretty dusty here. So to ensure that wouldn't happen to me

I invited over some really smart future engineers scientists and creators

and after explaining the problem and

demonstrating how severely it limits the power output from the panel's I challenged them to come up with and build a solution

And because our brains use up 20% of all the energy our body produces. I made them drink more lemonade to ensure

I got an optimal solution and so after pitching each other their ideas, they settled on one and got to work

Personally I thought it was brilliant and it worked extremely well and after they left I hooked it up to my lawn sprinkler system

So they go off for a few minutes once a week now and so after a few days of being bombarded by photons from space

We finally had the battery all charged up to full capacity

So in the end I learned a lot and we actually pulled it off

And now if you'll excuse me, I have an urgent delivery deadline to meet in Colorado

i like lemonade

Okay, you like it Eliza? Okay