How To Light Up A Light Bulb With A Potato? - [] - Foodie Fitness - Food and Fitness

How To Light Up A Light Bulb With A Potato
Did you know you could power a light bulb with a potato? The chemical reactions that take place between two dissimilar metals and the juices in the potato create a small amount of voltage that can power a very small electrical device, Follow the instructions below to make a potato-powered light bulb. Materials:

A large potato
Two pennies
Two zinc-plated nails
Three pieces of copper wire
A very small light bulb or LED light

What you need to do:

Cut the potato in half, then cut a small slit into each half, large enough to slide a penny inside.
Wrap some copper wire around each penny a few times. Use a different piece of wire for each penny.
Stick the pennies in the slits you cut into the potato halves.
Wrap some of the third copper wire around one of the zinc-plated nails and stick the nail into one of the potato halves.
Take the wire connected to the penny in the half of potato with the nail and wrap some of it around the second nail. Stick that second nail into the other potato half.
When you connect the two loose ends of the copper wires to the light bulb or LED it will light up,

Be careful when handling the wires, because there is a small electric charge running through the wires. Hydrogen gas may also be a byproduct of the chemical reactions in the potato, so don’t perform the experiment near open flames or strong sources of heat, Originally Published: Jun 2, 2011

Can a potato light a light bulb?

Question How can a potato be used to light a lightbulb? Asked by: Justin Dopiriak Answer Yes, a potato(e) can be used to power a lamp. Usually a penny & a galvanized nail are used for this ‘battery’. Copper & zinc are REQUIRED for this process, but not a penny & a nail per se. A potato works well, but a tomato, lemon or other citrus fruit can be substituted. The zinc and the copper are the anode and cathode terminals of your potato battery. Using ordinary hook-up electrical wire, you can use the potato to create a voltaic cell, which will power a VERY small bulb. A light emitting diode (LED) will work fine. A side note here about voltage & current. This process will produce less than 1.5 volts DC (AA/AAA battery). However, producing 1.5 volts does not necessarily produce enough current to make the lamp actually power up to full use. Voltage is only the POTENTIAL to do work. (See Ohms law: V = I x R) This kind of battery generally produces only a few milliamps. Even multiple potatoes may not generate enough amperage. Most assuredly, it will NOT power a household light, but a small flashlight lamp will GLOW. Cut the potato in half. Wrap the end of a piece of wire around a galvanized nail and wrap the end of a second piece of wire around a penny. Stick the copper side into one piece of potato and the nail into the other. The zinc and copper electrodes should not touch each other. If a wire is connected between the Zinc nail and the copper penny, electrons will flow. However, direct contact of the two electrodes will only produce heat. Electric current is the movement of electrons from one atom to another in a conductor. Inserting the two common metal electrodes into the potato causes a chemical reaction to occur resulting in current. The potato does not participate directly in the reaction. It is there rather as an electrolyte to facilitate the transport of the zinc and copper ions in the solution, while keeping the copper and zinc electrodes apart. The potato contains phosphoric acid (H 3 PO 4 ), which facilitates the electro-chemical reaction of zinc with copper. Zinc is an active metal, which reacts readily with acid to liberate electrons. The acid’s active ingredient is positively charged hydrogen, so a transfer of electrons takes place between the zinc and the acid. The zinc (Zn0) is oxidized (Zn ++ ) and the acid (H + ) is reduced to hydrogen gas (H 2 ), which you can see bubbling out around the electrodes. The reaction at the penny electrode depletes the electrons from the copper and attaches them to the hydrogen ions in the phosphoric acid. Oxidation: Zn -> Zn ++ + 2e – (Zinc looses 2 electrons) Reduction: 2H + + 2e – -> H 2 (Hydrogen ions gain electrons) Net Reaction: Zn + 2H + -> Zn ++ + H 2 (Hydrogen gas and ‘power’) Answered by: Lee Ellen Benjamin, M.A., Technical Theatre, San Fancisco State University

How long can you power a lightbulb with a potato?

Mashed, boiled, baked or fried? You probably have a preference for your potatoes. Haim Rabinowitch, however, likes his spuds “hacked”. For the past few years, researcher Rabinowitch and colleagues have been pushing the idea of “potato power” to deliver energy to people cut off from electricity grids.

Hook up a spud to a couple of cheap metal plates, wires and LED bulbs, they argue, and it could provide lighting to remote towns and villages around the world.
They’ve also discovered a simple but ingenious trick to make potatoes particularly good at producing energy.
A single potato can power enough LED lamps for a room for 40 days,” claims Rabinowitch, who is based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The idea may seem absurd, yet it is rooted in sound science. Still, Rabinowitch and his team have discovered that actually launching potato power in the real world is much more complex than it first appears. While Rabinowitch and team have found a way to make potatoes produce more power than usual, the basic principles are taught in high school science classes, to demonstrate how batteries work.

To make a battery from organic material, all you need is two metals – an anode, which is the negative electrode, such as zinc, and a cathode, the positively charged electrode, such as copper.
The acid inside the potato forms a chemical reaction with the zinc and copper, and when the electrons flow from one material to another, energy is released.

This was discovered by Luigi Galvani in 1780 when he connected two metals to the legs of a frog, causing its muscles to twitch. But you can put many materials between these two electrodes to get the same effect. Alexander Volta, around the time of Galvani, used saltwater-soaked paper.

Others have made “earth batteries” using two metal plates and a pile of dirt, or a bucket of water. Super spuds Potatoes are often the preferred vegetable of choice for teaching high school science students these principles. Yet to the surprise of Rabinowitch, no one had scientifically studied spuds as an energy source.

So in 2010, he decided to give it a try, along with PhD student Alex Goldberg, and Boris Rubinsky of the University of California, Berkeley. “We looked at 20 different types of potatoes,” explains Goldberg, “and we looked at their internal resistance, which allows us to understand how much energy was lost by heat.” They found that by simply boiling the potatoes for eight minutes, it broke down the organic tissues inside the potatoes, reducing resistance and allowing for freer movement of electrons– thus producing more energy.

How many potatoes do you need to light a light bulb?

Potato Battery Instructions – Carefully make two slits in each potato with a knife ( ask an adult to help ). Place a copper coin and either a silver coin or a galvanised nail into each potato. Attach the potatoes to each other using wires and crocodile clips. Potato Circuit with a voltmeter to show the current LED lighting up as part of a potato battery circuit How To Light Up A Light Bulb With A Potato

Can you get power from a potato?

How To Light Up A Light Bulb With A Potato Credit Mogens Jacobsen As one of the most ubiquitous crops in the world, the potato is poised to feed the entire world, Along the way, scientists discovered that the popular staple of many people’s diets may also have potential to help power it as well.

A couple years ago, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem released their finding that a potato boiled for eight minutes can make for a battery that produces ten times the power of a raw one. Using small units comprised of a quarter-slice of potato sandwiched between a copper cathode and a zinc anode that’s connected by a wire, agricultural science professor Haim Rabinowitch and his team wanted to prove that a system that can be used to provide rooms with LED-powered lighting for as long as 40 days.

At around one-tenth the cost of a typical AA battery, a potato could supply power for cell phone and other personal electronics in poor, underdeveloped and remote regions without access to a power grid. To be clear, the potato is not, in and of itself, an energy source.

What the potato does is simply help conduct electricity by acting as what’s called a salt-bridge between the the two metals, allowing the electron current to move freely across the wire to create electricity.
Numerous fruits rich in electrolytes like bananas and strawberries can also form this chemical reaction.

They’re basically nature’s version of battery acid. “Potatoes were chosen because of their availability all over including the tropics and sub-tropics,” Rabinowitch told the Science and Development Network, They are the world’s fourth most abundant food crop.” But besides being rich in phosphoric acid, spuds are ideal in that they’re composed of sturdy starch tissue, can be stored for months and won’t attract insects the way, say strawberries, would.

Additionally, boiling the potato breaks down the resistance inherent in the dense flesh so that electrons can flow more freely, which significantly bumps up the overall electrical output. Cutting the potato up into four or five pieces, they researchers found, made it even more efficient. The potato battery kit, which includes two metal electrodes and alligator clips, is easy to assemble and, some parts, such as the zinc cathode, can be inexpensively replaced.

The finished device Rabinowitch came up with is designed so that a new boiled potato slice can be inserted in between the electrodes after the potato runs out of juice. Alligator clips that transport the current carrying wires are attached to the electrodes and the negative and positive input points of the light bulb.

Why wont my potato lights work?

Troubleshooting Tips – If the LED clock, light or small light bulbs do not work, check the setup of the potato battery. Perhaps the ends are not all connected from negative to positive, or perhaps there is not enough potato voltage. Check the voltage of the potato using a multimeter or voltmeter.

Another possibility is having enough voltage, but not enough current to light the bulb, which is why it is recommended to use only very low-volt LED clocks or bulbs.
Also, try using more potatoes (i.e., 5 potato halves) to strengthen conductivity.
Try different LED colors (for example, the blue LED may work better than the red).

Lemons and oranges also work well for this activity. They work best if you first roll them on a table top, which breaks down the cells inside so more juice flows through the fruit (current). Some people have more conduction success using copper strips instead of copper pennies (can also wrap the pennies in copper ribbon).

How long will a potato battery last?

But if you use a big, solid piece of zinc, your battery could go for a really long time! A potato battery will last until the potato goes bad. It usually lasts up to 2-5 days.

Which potato generates the most electricity?

Analysing data: potato battery with 3 types of potatoes – My daughter completed an experiment using three types of potatoes and found that a purple sweet potato produced the most voltage. We thought that because the nutritional data we found indicated that the sweet potato contained more amounts of copper and zinc in them, it would therefore augment the chemical reaction, but are having a hard time finding anything to support this.or does this have nothing to do with it? Help! mpchurch Former Expert Posts: 14 Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:54 am Occupation: Mechanical Engineer – Spacecraft Thermal Analysis Project Question: N/A Project Due Date: N/A Project Status: Not applicable

How can we make electricity from potato at home?

A potato battery is an electrochemical cell that is easy to make. It is an electrochemical battery that converts the chemical energy between the two metal probes or electrodes to electrical energy by immediate transfer of electrons. The potato battery explanation can be given by the presence of starch juices in potatoes along with the electrodes, which help the potato to act as a battery.

The metals used here are zinc and copper, which react with each other to produce chemical energy.
The potato does not produce electricity; instead, it acts as an electrolyte or a buffer.
Hence it forces the electrons to travel through the potato by separating zinc and copper and forms a complete circuit.

By using only two potatoes, a small amount of potato energy or electrical energy is generated. By increasing the number of potatoes, the output power can be increased. Even if the two metals were touching each other without the potato, the transfer of electrons would occur, but no electricity will be produced as the circuit remains incomplete.

Why LED Cannot be lit with one potato?

Potato Battery –

11 December 2014 By: Omar Raafat Physics – DIY

Share Potatoes are great and tasty; there are hot potatoes, French fried potatoes, baked potatoes and scalloped potatoes. On the other hand, we can use it to make batteries to solve the blackouts problem, instead of living in darkness. It is very simple to make, and it does not need expensive materials.

Materials – One large potato – Two coins – Two zinc-plated nails – Three pieces of copper wire – One very small light bulb, or LED light.
Procedures 1.
Cut the potato in half, then cut a small slit into each half, large enough to slide a coin inside.2.
Wrap some copper wire around each coin a few times.

Use a different piece of wire for each coin.3. Stick the coins in the slits you cut into the potato halves.4. Wrap some of the third copper wire around one of the zinc-plated nails, then stick the nail into one of the potato halves.5. Take the wire connected to the coin in the half of potato with the nail and wrap some of it around the second nail.

Stick that second nail into the other potato half.6. When you connect the two loose ends of the copper wires to the light bulb or LED it will light up. How Does It Work? Potato batteries use the acids in the potato to start a reaction with two electrodes made of different metals that cause electrons to flow from one to the other through the potato, producing power.

How to Light Bulb Using Potato? | POTATO vs BULB Experiment

The potato acts as a salt bridge, connecting the anode to the cathode. The potato is not a source of electricity by itself. Potato batteries require two different metal electrodes with different electrical qualities to work. The most common materials are zinc and copper. How To Light Up A Light Bulb With A Potato Some scientists have actually researched potatoes as a practical form of power. While many different plants can serve as batteries, potatoes are especially durable due to their high starch content. They do not rot easily nor attract pests to the same degree as fruits and other alternatives.

Is a lemon or potato battery better?

Follow-Up #1: correction – Q: That answer is not correct. A potato delivers a higher power (more Watts) than a lemon in both parallel and series circuits. I just did an in depth project in my Biological Engineering class at the University of Arkansas on biological batteries and I tested both lemons and potatoes.

The potato always produced more power than the lemon.
This means the potato is a better battery than the lemon.
Wes Carr (age 19) A: It sounds like your experiments show that the previous answer was not right.
The reasoning in the old answer was very sloppy.
Several parts of the description of the role of electrical charges didn’t even quite make sense.

The factors which play a role in producing power include the acidity (which plays a role in the chemical reactions at the electrodes), the presence of various other ions (acidity just involves H + ions), and the permeability of the cell walls, which can block currents.

That’s not intended to be a complete list. As a result, it’s unlikely that some simple theory will predict well which complicated material (lemon, potato,,) will produce the most power. Whether your answer (more power from the potato) is correct in general or just for particular types of potatoes, etc.

is another question. Anyway, thanks for the correction. I’ve left the exchange in to inspire other critics. Mike W. Lee H (published on 10/22/2007)

Can boiled potatoes power a light bulb?

It’s a classic children’s science experiment: insert a nail and a penny into a potato and use the slight bit of voltage produced to power a small clock or some other low-power gadget. Those of us of a certain age may remember MacGyver pulling off a similar trick. So we tested it, and no, it’s not true. Summary:

The science behind using a potato or other produce as a battery is as old as batteries themselves. The potato doesn’t actually produce any electricity. Rather, it’s the metals inserted into the potato slowly dissolving and releasing electrons. A single potato battery only produces about half a volt. It would take several potatoes connected together to power even a single LED, much less an entire light bulb. The power output of a potato battery can increase as it rots, but boiling a potato provides only a momentary boost. Check out the beginner’s guide to off-grid power so you’re not fumbling with potatoes when the lights are out.

Why can a potato power a light bulb?

Understanding a Potato Battery – It is likely most kids will find it difficult to believe that a simple potato can make electricity to power a light bulb. However, the explanation is relatively simple. A potato contains sugar, water and acid. Certain types of metals – particularly copper and zinc – react with the potato when they are inserted inside.

The metals effectively become electrodes, one positive and the other negative, and electrons flow between the metals inside the potato, making a small electric current. You can tap into the electricity by connecting wires from the electrodes to a light bulb to form a circuit. The electrons flow from the positive electrode to the light bulb and back to the negative electrode.

The electrical current passing through the light bulb is enough to make it illuminate.

What vegetables can power a light bulb?

Grade Level: 6th – 9th; Type: Physical Science To see if an LED light can be powered by vegetables and/or fruits. The purpose of this experiment is to determine whether there is enough energy stored in a fruit or a vegetable to power an LED light. This experiment can be taken further to determine how long a fruit or vegetable can power an LED for.

How is energy stored in a fruit or vegetable?
How to we measure this type of energy?
How do we usually use the energy stored in plants?
Where do plants get their energy from?
How much energy is stored in a typical potato?
How much energy is stored in the other fruits or vegetables you are using?

With the help of a few household items, a potato can be used to power a light bulb. All living organisms contain energy and it may be possible to tap into and use some of that energy in our everyday lives. Given that our main source of energy, fossil fuel, is in limited supply, it is important for scientists to explore the use of alternative energy sources.

LED light bulb
Assorted fresh fruits and vegetables (i.e. carrot, apple, pear, squash, lemon)
1 potato
1 shiny penny
1 galvanized steel nail
2 eight inch lengths of copper wire
A knife

The materials needed for this experiment can be found at the grocery store and at the hardware store.

Begin by constructing a potato light. We already know that potatoes can be used to power LED lights, and setting up a working light in a potato will help you determine whether you are constructing the vegetable powered light correctly.
Make an incision in one side of the potato just large enough for the penny to fit inside.
Wrap one end of a piece of copper wire around the penny.
Wrap one end of another piece of copper wire around the nail.
Insert the penny into the slit you created for it, with the loose end of wire hanging out.
Insert the nail into the other side of the potato with the loose end of wire hanging out.
Do not allow the penny and nail to touch.
Wrap the copper wire coming off the penny to the longer leg of the LED.
Wrap the copper wire coming off the nail to the short leg of the LED.
Observe the results.
Repeat steps 2-10 with other vegetables or fruits.

Terms/Concepts: Green energy; Fossil fuel; Alternative energy; Potential energy; Filament; LED light References: Disclaimer and Safety Precautions Education.com provides the Science Fair Project Ideas for informational purposes only.

How many volts does a potato produce?

Potato Power Voila—electricity. Each raw potato produces about.5 volts of energy—which isn’t much. In recent studies, though, actual scientists (not science teachers) have discovered that by simply boiling the potatoes, the tubers can produce about 10 times as much energy!

What vegetables can power a light bulb?

How is energy stored in a fruit or vegetable?
How to we measure this type of energy?
How do we usually use the energy stored in plants?
Where do plants get their energy from?
How much energy is stored in a typical potato?
How much energy is stored in the other fruits or vegetables you are using?

LED light bulb
Assorted fresh fruits and vegetables (i.e. carrot, apple, pear, squash, lemon)
1 potato
1 shiny penny
1 galvanized steel nail
2 eight inch lengths of copper wire
A knife

The materials needed for this experiment can be found at the grocery store and at the hardware store.

Begin by constructing a potato light. We already know that potatoes can be used to power LED lights, and setting up a working light in a potato will help you determine whether you are constructing the vegetable powered light correctly.
Make an incision in one side of the potato just large enough for the penny to fit inside.
Wrap one end of a piece of copper wire around the penny.
Wrap one end of another piece of copper wire around the nail.
Insert the penny into the slit you created for it, with the loose end of wire hanging out.
Insert the nail into the other side of the potato with the loose end of wire hanging out.
Do not allow the penny and nail to touch.
Wrap the copper wire coming off the penny to the longer leg of the LED.
Wrap the copper wire coming off the nail to the short leg of the LED.
Observe the results.
Repeat steps 2-10 with other vegetables or fruits.

Can boiled potatoes power a light bulb?

How many watts does a potato produce?

Quick calculator shows a potato produces 0.0012 watts.