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DIY Potato Lamp Project

Have you ever thought of cutting down your electricity bill by lighting your room with potato power? In July 2010 Israeli researchers began looking for a way to provide inexpensive power to developing countries using potatoes after they found that a boiled potato can give off up to 10 times more electricity than a raw potato, determining that a single potato could provide the energy of half an AA battery at a much cheaper cost. You can make an extra-powerful potato lamp of your own with this new method.

Things You'll Need

10 Potatoes
Knife
20 Galvanized zinc or steel screws
20 Strips copper electrical wire
Digital or analog multimeter
31 Battery leads
12-Volt LED light

Instructions

- 1
  Boil 10 potatoes for about 10 minutes. Cut the potatoes in half.
- 2
  Stick a zinc or steel screw through one end of a potato half. Stick a strip of copper wire through the other end. Make sure the zinc and copper don't touch.
- 3
  Hook up the red anode wire of a multimeter to the copper wire and the black cathode wire of a multimeter to the zinc or steel screw to measure the electrical current. You should see that the potato has created about 0.75 a volt of energy. Some potatoes may create more or less energy.
- 4
  Repeat Steps 2 and 3 to create 20 half-potato batteries. This should create about 15 volts of energy.
- 5
  Separate potatoes into 10 pairs and use your battery leads to connect the copper anodes of one pair of potatoes together and the zinc cathodes of the same pair of potatoes together. Do this until all potato pairs are connected.
- 6
  Link all batteries together by connecting the anode of one potato to the cathode of the next, the anode of that battery to the cathode of the next and so on, snaking your way through until all batteries are connected.
- 7
  Connect the cathode of the first potato in line and anode of the last potato in line to the multimeter to read your new electrical current. It should be about 15 volts.
- 8
  Connect the cathode of your linked potato battery to the shorter leg of the 12-volt LED light, which indicates the anode, and the anode of your linked potato battery to the longer leg of the LED light, which indicates the cathode. The light should be bright enough to light up your room like a lamp.

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