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

[Curious_Celt]

Welcome to the forums.

EER is a term we coined a while back that means: Earth Energy Receiver.  We all felt like this better described what we were doing as opposed to Earth Battery as most of our designs were not batteries at all.

I hope this helps.

Bill

Thanks Pirate88179, for the explanation.

The only reference I could find on the Net was for "Envelope Elimination and Restoration" (a signal processing technique invented by L.R. Kahn around 1952) and I was pretty damn sure it wasn't that!

I take it the humble Earth Battery has moved on a good bit since I learned about them in my Engineering History course many moons ago.

My brother has asked me to investigate a workable back-up system for his off-grid power system, and I am considering an Earth Battery (sorry, EER) as probably his most likely bet. He lives in a pair of converted steel containers in the middle of a field in the home counties of England, and has a couple of acres of ground he can play with. I live in the wilds of Northern Scotland, so I can only advise him. As you guys are well ahead of the game, can you tell me if it would be worth his while to sink an array of electrodes into the ground, to make a "battery" (i.e, to boost the voltage and current by linking electrode pairs together in series/ parallel mode), and if so, do things like water table, geology, etc make a difference? I am no longer able to do these experiments myself due to ill-health, plus I do not have the garden area to run such a large scale experiment.

Any advice would be appreciated. Any results my brother records will of course be passed on to you all.

[Pirate88179]

Thanks Pirate88179, for the explanation.

The only reference I could find on the Net was for "Envelope Elimination and Restoration" (a signal processing technique invented by L.R. Kahn around 1952) and I was pretty damn sure it wasn't that!

I take it the humble Earth Battery has moved on a good bit since I learned about them in my Engineering History course many moons ago.

My brother has asked me to investigate a workable back-up system for his off-grid power system, and I am considering an Earth Battery (sorry, EER) as probably his most likely bet. He lives in a pair of converted steel containers in the middle of a field in the home counties of England, and has a couple of acres of ground he can play with. I live in the wilds of Northern Scotland, so I can only advise him. As you guys are well ahead of the game, can you tell me if it would be worth his while to sink an array of electrodes into the ground, to make a "battery" (i.e, to boost the voltage and current by linking electrode pairs together in series/ parallel mode), and if so, do things like water table, geology, etc make a difference? I am no longer able to do these experiments myself due to ill-health, plus I do not have the garden area to run such a large scale experiment.

Any advice would be appreciated. Any results my brother records will of course be passed on to you all.

I hate to say this but his best bang for the buck would be solar, in my opinion.  EER's using electrodes can not be hooked up in series as they all share the same electrolyte...the earth.  I tried that in the early days with no luck.  There is not much power available with my set-up unless you use a large boostcap like I did to catch the large spikes I show on my scope shots in my video.  Then you can use a joule thief circuit to run lots of stuff, but, the EER will not do this continuously as it will not keep up with the load.

I hope this helps,

Bill