Electrolyser Project Page 2

Here are just a few pics of my pvc housing for the plates. Nothing special or exciting here. I did, however, drill along the line of the printing on the side of the pvc tube. This is because it can be difficult to drill straigh on centre down a tube, and it's a perfectly straight line already made for me. Doing this cut a bunch of time off the drilling, and now I know the plates a perfectly square in there. You never know when you may want to jam the maximum amount of plates in there.

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This here is just a temporary cap. I definitely do not plan on using this long-term, as I'm not even thinking about cementing this thing on there, and it's too much of a hassle to seal it without doing that. I just used this, as I wanted to get this capped for testing. I drilled a 5/8" hole in the top with a forstner bit (worked quite well) and threaded a 1/2" pipe fitting in there. I plan on using one of those caps that screw on, which I used for my very first electrolyser. For now, I'm just testing, and I seal it with a bit of plastic wrap around the top, and press the lid on tight. It actually does very good, no leaks that I can tell.

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Now, this was the part I came across and was not quite sure what to do.  Chris hadn't given any suggestions as to how he was going to seal this thing yet.  :-)  I wasn't able to get any of those grommets Chris had used in his previous electrolysers and wasn't positive how they would work on a curved surface either.

So, what to do....improvise!!

I needed some sort of rubber washer, so I took a 5/16" rubber house, cut some strips and used them as an o-ring type setup.  At first this is all I did, and it worked okay, but leaked slowly.  I found that the leak was not coming from the rubber (they were doing their job).  The leak was actually coming out the thread between the nut and the bolt.  So I took it apart again, and taped the threads real thick with teflon tape thread tape.  This way, the rubber sealed the container and the tape sealed the threads and it worked quite well.

What I do, is I screw the bolt into the nut on the end of the threaded rod (inside the unit) and tighten it all the way.  I then tighten the outside nut in order to actually seal off the unit from leaking.  So far this has worked very very well for me.  I had absolutely no leaks and the liquid has been sitting in the for many days.

I can say, however, when you plug the gas production (to build up some pressure), it does start to leak a bit.  So I will have to make up another design of some sort very soon if I need any pressure at all.