H2O Injection

The amount of water entering the engine is adjusted with the needle valve by watching the rate at which bubbles enter the jar. I set it initially at one bubble per second at idle. The other end is a lawn irrigation 90° fitting inserted into a hole in the PCV hose going to the manifold. This is how it draws a vacuum to suck water from the jar.

The first surprise was all the black crap it blew out the exhaust. I had thought it was pretty clean after running hydrogen. This (and white smoke) stopped in a few minutes.

I drove to the store 5 miles away, stopped and opened the hood. NO bubbles. So far I have had to open the valve twice. I suspect the plastic needle changes with temperature. It this persists, it will be replaced with a brass valve with stainless needle.

According to the National Weather Service, the relative humidity is 3% !

The car runs smoothly and has enough power the spin the rear wheels. At 45 miles an hour the vacuum gage reads 15-16 inches. It may take a while for me to get all these things optimized, but so far I am very pleased.

A word of caution if you would like to try this yourself... The jar must be well sealed in order to use the number of bubbles as an indicator of how much water is being injected.

April 18, 08
I am making a new jar that is glass with a metal lid and replacing the plastic needle valve with a brass one. Not much to it really. The new one will connect to the venturi vacuum port on the carburetor instead of the PCV port. Why? While the PCV connection seemed to work just fine, I feel the vacuum port will allow for better mixing.

April 19, 08
The brass needle valve was a big improvement over the plastic aquarium model. Upon starting the engine there was no black soot ejected from the tail pipe as there was the first time. Maybe that means it got cleaned out.

I checked the bubble rate after 5 miles. No change. Checked again after another 5 miles. No flow. This won't do. For the 18 mile trip the water level dropped about 3/4".

Oh, yes... the new jar is glass that 24 ounces of yucky cheese dip came in. It has a metal lid and sort of a rubber seal. I attached two 90° barbed irrigation fittings with J-B Weld from both sides.

Back at the shop I tried an irrigation drip system flow metering emitter on a hunch. It is rated at 1 gallon per hour. Somewhere around here I have some that are 1/2 gallon per hour. Even that sounds like a lot, but in the jar the bubbles are coming at about twice what I am going for with the 1 gallon emitter, so the 1/2 gallon one should be about what I want.

This is what Irrigation Tutorials says about this type:

"Diaphragm" emitters all use some type of flexible diaphragm to reduce the flow and pressure. There are many ways used to do this. The bottom line is they all use some type of flexible part that moves to restrict the water flow. As with anything that moves, they will wear out eventually (which may be a very long time!) which is the downside. The advantage is that they tend to be much more accurate in controlling the flow and pressure than the previous types.

If you intend to try this device, be aware that the pointed barb should go toward the supply jar.
This looks like a much better idea than an orifice or a needle valve. Next will be to try various injection mixtures that other people have used successfully. http://www.waterinjection.info/ Windshield washer fluid seems popular.

It is funny that I started the HHO generator and the water vapor injector projects with first class hardware, then ended up replacing most of it with lawn irrigation parts that were MUCH cheaper and easier to work with.

I bought a bag of 25 emitters rated at 1/2 GPH. I thought maybe I should start the engine then plug them in. Then thought "Naw, it will be ok.". Every one of them is defective (made by Raindrip). No diaphragms. The engine sucked in about a pint of water before I could shut it off. Does not seem to have done any damage, but very scary nonetheless. I used a 1 GPH emitter that seems slower than the rest. Time for some serious mileage checking.

I have found these offered in flow rates of 2, 1, and 1/2 GPH, plus 4, and 2 (.6GPH) Liters/minute. I dissected one of these and found the diaphragm is much thicker than I expected and has sort of a zig-zag maze on both sides of the disc. Clever design.

Water jar 2

I added denatured alcohol to make a 40% mixture. When I started the engine I found a fresh batch of carbon soot on the concrete behind the car. Guess the alcohol helps clean it even more than just plain water.

April 22, 08
A new set of jets were made by soldering the holes then re-drilling to a diameter calculated to have 20% less area than the original jets. This is NOT recommended by Holley, because you are not real sure what the exact flow is. For instance, a #65 jet has a flow rate of 65 CC/min. I am fairly confident though, since I have been doing this since the 1960's. Do it at your own risk! When I think I have the size I want I can order a broached set that has been flowed.