What voltage can you get from a potato

Potatoes are juicy, which is part of the reason they can be made into batteries. Take a knife and put a slit in the potato and slip the penny into the slit. Push as much of the penny into the slit as possible, you want just a little bit sticking out of the potato. Push the nail most of the way into the potato, at this point I cut the nails in half, so that they weren't so tall. Do not let the electrodes touch, keeping them about 1 inch apart.

Turn on the Multimeter and put it at the lowest voltage reading. Use the red line to touch the penny in the potato and the black line to touch the nail.

You can read how much voltage you have available in this potato battery. It reads. So I created 3 more batteries from 3 more potato halves. Then I used the alligator clips connected to wires and wired first 2 potatoes together,. Let's take a minute and look at the LED light. It has one long leg and one shorter leg. I wired all four batteries together in series, and found what the total voltage is of the 4 batteries was 2. Finally I wired six batteries in series and it had a 4.

Question 1 year ago on Introduction. How many boiled potatos would it take to grow a potato plant? Question 3 years ago on Introduction. I created a potato battery in series with my daughter it read 4. I tried it multiple times and can't get it to light. We put it on her circuit board with a battery and it works and then we try our potato battery series and it doesn't work.

Any ideas? Answer 1 year ago. I think the light was too much for the amperage the potatos could provide. That is a bit aggressive to try to get from potatoes. I suspect you were getting around 2 milliamps per potato. So you might have had maybe total under pretty good conditions well short of what you might need for that source to light up even if the voltage was there You would need to try it with one of those tiny led lights.

They have a forward amperage around. Tip 3 years ago on Step Tip 3 years ago on Step 5. You can also use the covering of AA battery for zinc if unable to get galvanized nails. It's the layer under steel cover. It powered a small sound system. With the help of the Red 76 crew I installed the battery and sound system in the back of a U-Haul truck and drove it around town inviting people to enter the truck and take a listen.

Batteries work by allowing electrons to pass from one electrode to another. In this case the potato provides phosphoric acid, which enables a chemical reaction causing electrons flow from copper to zinc. All you have to do is add a pair of electrodes. If you choose electrodes made of the right materials, one of them the cathode will produce free electrons, and the other the anode will attract them.

This creates a charge difference, and when you connect the electrodes with a conducting wire, current will flow. Don't worry. The current from a potato battery won't be enough to hurt you. If you touch the bare wire with your finger, you may feel a mild tingling. You can increase the voltage by wiring together several of these potato batteries, and ultimately you can generate enough to light an LED, which will stay lit until the potato juice gets used up.

That could take almost a day. You'll probably find everything you need to make a potato battery around the house. If not, you can find what you need at any hardware store.

Potatoes are usually cleaned before they come to the store, but they often have residual dirt. Scrub this off with water and dry off the potato with a towel. This removes the possibility of impurities interfering with your potato science project.

If you have a large potato, you might consider cutting it in half. Half a potato works as well as a whole one, and you can set it flat on the table so it doesn't roll around. Push the zinc nail into the potato near one end. It should penetrate about halfway into the core. Insert the copper electrode to the same depth as close to the opposite end of the potato as possible. If you've cut your potato in half, place the electrode and nail on opposite sides of the upright half.

The two electrodes should not be touching each other. In fact, the greater the distance between the electrodes, the better the battery will work. If you use a penny as your copper electrode, you may have to make a small cut in the potato skin with a knife to create a slot for it. Set the meter to read volts in the 2-volt range. Connect the positive red lead to the copper electrode, which is the anode, and the negative black lead to the zinc electrode, which is the cathode.

You'll note a positive reading of about 0. If you disconnect the leads from the meter and connect them to an LED, it probably won't light. An LED needs at least 1. However, remember that you can increase voltage by connecting batteries in series.