EER Joule Thief using an earth battery to start a joule thief.

[jeanna]

This is a new place for posting about getting your EER to fire up a joule thief.

I have not yet been able to do this even with a germanium transistor, but I sure do want to.

jeanna

[jeanna]

@ Jeanna

Ok,  1x EER  =  .7 - .9 vdc  at ~4 mA
      2 x EER in parallel  = .7  -.9 vdc  at ~7 ma
I will now try to do what you said...

I think 7mA is a better start for any joule thief.
It is really fabulous that you are starting the oscillations and getting the spikes high enough with 4mA.

These are the special isolated tubes you made are they not?

Does it work to put them in series?
I always get a very weak response when I am using a joule thief and the battery is down below 1 volt.
This is when I am using the secondary, of course.
So, I am definitely not discouraged.
I am amazed.
You are doing great!

jeanna

[jeanna]

I have just started building joule thiefs.  I get totally lost in the joule thief thread every time I start reading it.  Is there a joule thief that you would recommend for me to use with my earth battery?  I have the 5 for 1 toroid from electronics goldmine.  Right now I'm pretty happy just lighting a single bright LED. If I could get lots of them lit then my earth battery might have some practical usefulness right now.  I have over 30 milliamps to play with so I should be able to do it.  Any advice you might have would be greatly appreciated.  If I get it working I will post videos of it here on overunity.  Maybe we should start a thread for earth battery specific joule thiefs.

Thanks

Lasersaber,
You have so many mA for the primary Joule thief you will have ZEEROO problem getting it to light many many more.

I have not found a good tuning for the 5/$1.
I got my best results using 6T6T, but I think others found a better arrangement.

Maybe someone else can help with that?

Meantime, did you see my tuning suggestions I just gave to freepow?
I will bring them here in a sec.
First of all, are you using a secondary on the joule thief toroid?

Please start there, and let me know what happens.
Others are surely able to add to this.

thank you,

jeanna

edit
I said the following to freepow to help get the toroid tuned better for the low volts extra low mA from the EER:

Take the primary down as far as 2T,8T,
If the light goes out or gets dimmer anywhere on the way to 2T stop and add the last turn back.
then start to reduce the 8T and watch the brightness.

The amps draw is related to the initial transistor switching, but if it is too little the volts off the secondary will be too low.

(I am coming to this realization:)
The amps are not being drawn by the leds off the secondary, but they need to have a high spike.
That high spike is derived from the initial amps draw that makes the first JT oscillations.
So, the higher the spike you can get for the least joule thief input the brighter the leds will shine.

The leds are drawing the frequency down, and when that gets too low, the lights will be too dim.

As the volts go up, the frequency goes down, and with an EER you have high frequency.

[freepow]

Ok Jeanna, I am going to draw a diagram of my very basic Joule thief for my EER...
I've built better one's than this, but it was just a basic one for my EER
Hope this helps you...

The tubes are as follows... 1x EER =  3/4 inch copper pipe at 19 3/4 inch long and a thin 1/4 inch galv-steel rod 19 3/4 inch long, both in ground,  the copper and steel is only about 2-3 inches apart.

The other EER is the same, but about a foot from my 1st EER.

In series they kind of cancel each other out so the volts stay the same, but in parallel I get nearlly double mA's.

[jeanna]

Yes, freepow, this sounds exactly right.
When I did the probes in the ground and connected them for amps, my volts always went down at the same time.

Anyway, you are doing this exactly right, so see what you can get from 2x or if you want to see the very best tuning possible for your toroid, continue to do the steps I outlined.
And stay with the 1x EER until it is very highly tuned.
The extra amps of 2x EER should not throw off the tuning, but if you perfect it now, you can get better results later...IMO anyway.
I just copied those suggestions here to make things easier.

I think this is really exciting.

jeanna