Wiring panel: Making a Joule Thief Charger Circuit with Steven Chiverton

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Making a Joule Thief Charger Circuit with Steven Chiverton

Continued from the previous article

Here is the joule thief used to test my button cells out after I successfully recharged them.

Heres my battery charger joule thief all installed into a circuit box.

Below is the front view, notice the 12 volts green light at the front panel that is modified to house a neon globe inside it.

While looking through my electronics parts draws I found another 7 or 8 more button batteries and some had charge still on them and some I recharged successfully and 2 couldn’t be charged anyhow a few small ones took a little zapping to get them to take a charge so maybe if they are got some sulphate in them if not then why did it take so long to get them to except a charge.?

Yesterday I found another button battery cell and after a few seconds charging it started to get warm so I stopped it before it got to hot otherwise it would explode

Now I have 24 button cell batteries.

Below is a picture of the bright white with pink flash of a photo flash capacitor neon circuit test

The outputs of my battery charger joule thief run to the 330 volts photo flash capacitor, and across its leads I placed a neon bulb, loosely so every so long you hear a spark jump but cant see it unless the neon leg is getting pulled in by the high voltage attraction then a short time after that the flash occurs, so if the neon is rated at 90 volts then the cap charge may be the same till it charges up more I filmed this then put it onto my pc and then I had to slow it down so much to capture the super fast flash then pause it then take a picture of it to load back onto my pc.

Heres what it looks like when it aint flashing

ive soldered one of the neon legs to one of the high voltage 330 volts photo flash capacitor legs and the other neon leg I had it just nearly touching the other capacitor terminal but I didn’t get the arc and flash after it like I got before .

next test was running one of my jumper leads to a folded peace of aluminum foil and back to the hv capacitor and the other lead I ran to the other hv cap leg to a pencil and when the neon at the 330 volts 2200uf photo flash cap come on I gently touched the lead pencil tip to the foil edge where its folded and I got flashes etc and tiny holes melted through it and when I tried to unfold the foil it was stuck like it was spot welded , and there sure was this horrible smell made by spot welding aluminum foil.

Next experiment was running the leads from the capacitor to 2x 316 grade stainless steel bolts in a jar of tap water to create any electrolysis effects and I got very fine misty vapours come up to the top of the water and no bubbles and even when the bolts slipped together I was still getting it and even when they are apart to, and the further apart the bolts are the lower the frequency of sound is emitted from the battery charger joule thief and the closer the bolt electrodes are the higher the frequency of the sound the circuit emits gets ,

My watch battery I charged before has stopped I guess the charge didn’t last long enough, I charged it on the 24^th may 2010 and it lasted till today at 8past 8 , either in the morning or last night , so it lasted a week only im gona try re charging it again . Also today at the shops I went to the place they do watches and shoes and there was thousands of button cells inside this Perspex box even large ones next to it , but no one was there to answer my questions about them .

Ive recharged my watch battery again today but I was charging it the wrong way around so I got it right after that now my watch is running again so ill see how long its lasts for this time.

Today is June the 1^st 2010 so lets see if it lasts a week, also if it lasts longer then it may be the reverse charging that contributed to the extra running time before I charged it right

I scored a packet of free button cell batteries including large lithium cells and a few small 12 volts pencil batteries for free from 2 places in Armadale that also replace watch batteries, they have thousands of them and I counted what they gave me in total I had 85 batteries mostly button cells and ive successfully recharged them all except some lithium large button cells so also my 25 batteries I had it makes 110 batteries in total including the few large lithium cells that couldn’t be charged or revived at all some of the batteries still had power in them to .

Half the button cell batteries couldn’t maintain there charge and went flat overnight

So I recharged them again so ill soon check to see if they hold there charge this time also I dismantled a lithium battery it has a thin white membrane that reacts with water and foams up and also a thicker black membrane with what looks like very thin silver wire looking cross patterns on its sides and when I dismantled that battery it sure stunk inside it to

Today Tuesday June 8^th 2010 I decided to use my 4 rechargeable batteries from my camera to power my radiant joule thief battery charger, to restore my 12 volts 7.2 amps an hour 20 hour sla battery, and so after an hour or so I used a pair of tweezers to short out the battery terminal and I got some sparks where I didn’t before that, so I left the joule thief battery charger running all day today and now when I plug in the battery charger the red charging led light doesn’t go to green after a short charge that’s trickle charge, when green its still on red so im looking forward to how it goes when fully charged then in the green when its charged so if I get plenty sparks when I short the battery terminals then I can say the battery has been revived .

My 12 volts sla battery appears to still have a tiny bit of sulphate on its plates as its voltage dropped 0.7 volts over night so when the battery is low and needs topping up ill put it back on the joule thief circuit.