Last Saturday...I spent SIX HOURS on the back lawn. I put FOURTEEN bags of grass clippings to the curb; I had to, that week was "yard waste pickup" in Delta.

Our tax dollars at work. Delta Corp. used to pick up once a month, in season. Now it's every two weeks.

I assumed that as I had only left the lawn to grow for two weeks, that a normal mowing would take three hours and produce seven bags of clippings.

I guess I left it longer than I thought; I finished in 90 mins, and the clippings were only one-and-a-half bags. It was (comparatively) easy.

All I have to do now to enjoy this level of ease in mowing the back is continue to do so EVERY SINGLE WEEK. As the weather is somewhat variable here in the lower drainland, this means I have to mow the lawn sometime between Wednesday and Saturday of a given week...as soon as it is clear and dry enough to do so. I'll be watching the skies.

Marv Walling. What a guy.

He has me doing some web research for him, subject: Hydrogen Power.

Marv has the idear to build a Large Scale Electrolysis Cell...and use the output to feed a homebuilt gas-powered generator. Object: to start selling power back to BC Hydro. Hmmm. Good luck with that.

There is a LOT of mahooha on the subjects of free energy and hydrogen power on the 'net. Finding the Real Deal thru all the noise has been something of a chore. Of course, I first had to overcome my own skepticism.

Current Scientific opinion will tell you that hydrogen is NOT a viable fuel. "It's an energy storage medium...not an actual source of energy." In short, there is NO WAY you could produce enough energy burning hydrogen to offset the energy cost in producing the hydrogen in the first place. Michael Faraday's experiments on electrolysis began in 1834. There have been some improvements in the field of electrochemistry since that time. The scientific community has, at present, no interest in re-opening the subject of water electrolysis.

So...it's been up to the tinkerers.

Currently, the bright stars on the hydrogen powered horizon have been the Booster Cell; a small-scale electrolysis cell that can be installed on an average car and produce enough disassociated hydrogen and oxygen gas (from distilled water) to reduce the engine's fuel consumption somewhat. Claims of 20% to 25% increase in fuel economy have been made. Then there is the late Stan Meyer, who claimed to have invented a very special type of inline electrolyser that delivered hydrogen and oxygen gasses at the cylinder port; to that point, what had flowed into his "injectors" was water. Stan Meyer suffered an untimely death, and it is reported that his workshop was burglarised shortly afterward and all notes, plans, and prototypes were taken. There have been a few others since Stan to claim to have come up with a similar gadget, or even to have duplicated his work. I can make neither head nor tails of any of their documentation, or even their claims.

The third bright star I found was Bob Boyce. Bob Boyce built a Large Scale Electrolysis Cell because logic told him that if a small cell could provide a supplement to the fuel feed of a gasoline-powered engine, then a larger cell could actually fuel the car. It's not really that easy, of course, and the finished product (took several years of tinkering to perfect it) is a pretty sophisticated piece of engineering. There are also a few caveats: an ordinary gasoline-powered internal combustion engine is NOT designed to burn hydrogen...not for long, at any rate. The combustion temperature and the nature of the detonation effects of hydrogen are different enough from the expected gasoline vapor/air mix that any un-modified engine will quickly break down.

But it's do-able...and Marv says he already has an engine that's been modified to run on propane gas. It would need some further modification for running on hydrogen...but not nearly as much as a gasoline-powered engine.

Hmmmm. He might be able to pull this off. I hope I'm there to see it.

Finally, I offer a couple of departure points, if you feel like taking a look yourself:

www.waterpoweredcar.com - has some good links, and some not so good ones. Has some info on Stan Meyer's "water fueled" dune buggy.

http://pesn.com/2007/01/08/9500445_Bob_Boyce_Electrolyzer_Plans/

A page from the Pure Energy Systems Network. Not as wacko as other "free energy" sites, and they have a 43-page .pdf document on the theory and practical set-up of Bob Boyce's Large Scale Electrolyzer.