Electrolysis questions

[munlander1]

So I was playing around with electrolysis and it was creating a brown substance that was settling down at the bottom of the cup. 

I was using 2 paper clips, one 9v battery, 1 plastic drinking cup, somewhat filterized fridge water, baking soda, and ionized sodium. 

So for my first attempt I used the ionized sodium as an electrolyte and got this brown substance. I also observed small, green, algae like patches floating in the water. I observed these only forming on the anode. It also was turning white for the portion that was in the water.I then dumped it out.

i refilled the cup and used baking soda as my electrolyte. The brown stuff formed but the green stuff did not. The parts of the paper clip that were submerged in the water turned white. I dumped this one out too.

So what is the brown and green stuff? Is it harmful (I would just like to add I DID NOT drink any of this )?  And how can I avoid this stuff forming?

 

Edited January 19, 2017 by munlander1

[p1t1o]

Heyho, just a note - you are describing electrolysis, electrophoresis is where you use a potential difference to draw substances through a medium, usually a gel, to separate them by molecular weight, similar to chromatography. (Electrolysis usually occurs during electrophoresis as you are putting a voltage through a carrier solution)

You're thread drew my eye because I was once a student LabTech whose main job was running electrophoresis experiments. I earned the nickname "The Gel King" because I could run 4 machines at once

The "gunk" you get with electrolysis I think are agglomerations of various insoluble oxides, probably from the electrodes, but also possibly from interactions with various ions in the water depending on how "hard" it is.

Obviously never drink anything...hopefully you just typed that to head off paranoid readers!...good practice is not to eat or drink anything anywhere near your experiments, get a white coat,a box of rubber gloves and some goggles. Its not just to look the part, even with innocuous chemicals and reactions, this is the minimum PPE for almost any chemistry.

In any case, the gunk is probably not that toxic, maybe irritant at most so you dont want it on your skin or in your eyes (plus none of this discussion is *proof* that it is safe), you may be changing the pH of the solution as well. Basically in chemistry *always* avoid contact with your reagents/reaction. And if for some reason you do decide to scale this up significantly, production of gases like chlorine or hydrogen could become a concern, so if you do, do it outside. You should definitely do it in a ventilated area in any case.

To get cleaner electrolytic reactions, you need to use laboratory-grade reagents, ultra-pure water (Kitchen filter will not help much. Try distilled water if you can make or preferably buy any) and electrodes made of something like carbon (graphite) or platinum. Pencil lead could work if you can get workably large pieces or you might be able to get graphite electrodes from a radioshack equivalent.

 

Edited January 11, 2017 by p1t1o

[munlander1]

Thanks, sorry about the title. I did do electrophoresis some time ago for a class project so I think that's why I messed them up.

13 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Obviously never drink anything...hopefully you just typed that to head off paranoid readers!

Yeah, I added that part in just to make sure no one would freak out. Though I would bet that there are people out there that would have drank it.

13 hours ago, p1t1o said:

The "gunk" you get with electrolysis I think are agglomerations of various insoluble oxides, probably from the electrodes, but also possibly from interactions with various ions in the water depending on how "hard" it is.

Is there a cheap way to test what it is?

13 hours ago, p1t1o said:

To get cleaner electrolytic reactions, you need to use laboratory-grade reagents, ultra-pure water (Kitchen filter will not help much. Try distilled water if you can make or preferably buy any) and electrodes made of something like carbon (graphite) or platinum. Pencil lead could work if you can get workably large pieces or you might be able to get graphite electrodes from a radioshack equivalent.

 

Could I salvage old batteries? What size and type should I use? Could I just cut up a pencil and use that? Is there any way to separate and collect/ store the gasses?  Thank you! 

[HalcyonSon]

What are you trying to do?  What's the end goal?  Do you simply want small amounts of Hydrogen and Oxygen?  Are you trying to measure the difference in conductivity of various solutions?

[munlander1]

15 minutes ago, HalcyonSon said:

What are you trying to do?  What's the end goal?  Do you simply want small amounts of Hydrogen and Oxygen?  Are you trying to measure the difference in conductivity of various solutions?

I just want some hydrogen and oxygen to play around with(burn). I would also like to attempt to make a small rocket engine. Putting said engine on a model rocket is for another thread though.

Edited January 11, 2017 by munlander1

[Vanamonde]

Actual science involved: moved to Science. 

[p1t1o]

12 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Is there a cheap way to test what it is?

Hmmm, Im not really sure, characterising unknown substances is non-trivial, its a classic problem in chemistry. In order to identify some properties of the material, you'd have to make some pretty accurate measurements. The easiest way to characterise it is to deduce it from your starting materials, the brown stuff is most likely iron oxide from the paperclips, green is most likely copper oxide, but without knowing the exact makeup of the paperclips and the impurities in your reagents (including the water) those are rough guesses.

The biggest problem is that you likely have many substances mixed together, which makes things a lot harder.

If you are getting an impression that "wet" chemistry can involve guesswork and a lot of unknowns, you'd be correct!

12 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Could I salvage old batteries? What size and type should I use? Could I just cut up a pencil and use that? Is there any way to separate and collect/ store the gasses?  Thank you! 

Salvage old batteries? Do you mean for an electrode? 

Probably not a great first port of call, cutting batteries apart is a bit nasty and depending on the type, can have some substances in you'd rather not touch. But if you're careful it should be fine.

You can actually use the graphite from a pencil, if you can extract large enough pieces without breaking. Have a look around online, there should be some places where you can get some decent electrodes, even small pieces of platinum foil shouldnt be very expensive.

Easiest way to collect the gases is to place an upturned lightweight container over hte electrode, submerge it first so there is no air gap and the gases will bubble in and collect. How you go from there to "storage" and usage is anyones guess without specialised plumbing, but you should be able to collect a beaker of hydrogen and make it go "pop" (hydrogen is lighter than air so you can carefully remove the upturned container and retain the gas).

By the way, if you want hydrogen and oxygen, you shouldnt be adding any electrolytes to the water (well you can, to speed up the reaction, but the ones you need are not household matrials, google will fill you in). If there is NaCl in there you will get chlorine instead of oxygen (a danger in itself, you're probably best of *not* collecting it). Hydrogen will burn in chlorine and you will get Hydrogen Chloride vapour which *IS* hazardous. It will dissolve in the moisture in your eyes very readily and form a localised concentration of hydrochloric acid.

The hydrogen pop test can be safely done as long as you dont have a huge amount of hydrogen, just ignite it in air. If you start to modify this in any way - by using larger than a fistful of H2, or by confining the gas in any way, or introducing any other reagents, the safety issues start to get serious and unpredictable. 

I wouldnt recommend trying to mix it with any produced oxygen (or chlorine) as it could be quite an energetic reaction.

12 hours ago, munlander1 said:

I just want some hydrogen and oxygen to play around with(burn). I would also like to attempt to make a small rocket engine. Putting said engine on a model rocket is for another thread though.

Its quite a big a HUGE step from electrolysing water to building and fuelling a rocket engine, Im not sure what resources you have, but I'd start with reliably making a beaker of hydrogen go "pop" first.

(Now that I think about it, igniting an upturned beaker of H2 is probably a great example of the simplest rocket engine possible!)

If you want to attempt to make a rocket engine, you are probably best off acquiring the gases from a supplier, rather than making it in-situ. Without the equipment required to pressurise it, it wont be of much use, and it will be hard to make enough of the stuff. Im not sure how great a rocket you can make with gaseous fuel because you will be going from gas to gas, the volume change will be relatively modest. But if you happen to have the equipment, it might be interesting to find out.

You might be able to acquire cylinders of things like hydrogen and oxygen, not sure if there are restrictions. But if you do end up messing about with pressurised, flammable gases the safety factors go up exponentially and would be where I would start to advise you NOT to proceed without expert guidance present.

Note - the only difference between a rocket engine and a bomb is the name, this should give you an idea of the magnitude of the safety concerns. If you are thinking "He's being conservative because he's giving advice in a public forum, I'll risk this or that" then STOP because you are not ready

***

Dont forget your personal protective equipment (PPE) - goggles, gloves and a labcoat are the minimum.

You can get away without the gloves and coat while you are just playing with water and hydrogen but definitely get some goggles!

If you are looking to buy anything, this is a pretty good place to start:

https://www.fishersci.com/us/en/home.html

https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/kimberly-clark-jackson-saftey-v50-otg-spectacles-3/p-4591640#?keyword=goggles

https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/safety-choice-economy-chemical-resistant-goggles/19181502#?keyword=safety+goggles

https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/student-electrolysis-kit/s43482#?keyword=electrolysis

https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/fisherbrand-powder-free-nitrile-exam-gloves-24/p-2826798#?keyword=nitrile+gloves

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 12, 2017 by p1t1o
something about electrolytes for H2/O2 prod.

[HalcyonSon]

Everything @p1t1o said is spot on.

If you keep dicking around the way you're going, you're in for a world of hurt.  You can get some nasty (DANGEROUS, HARMFUL, POISONOUS, EXPLOSIVE) stuff by zapping random mixtures of chemicals.

If all you want is small amounts of H2 and O2, all you need is very basic stuff from the grocery store: distilled water (about $1 / gallon) and replacement mechanical pencil lead (about $5 for a dozen) and some cheap tupperware (about $3).  

Edited January 12, 2017 by HalcyonSon

[munlander1]

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

the brown stuff is most likely iron oxide from the paperclips, green is most likely copper oxide

Would there be an easy way to separate these into a pureish form? I would just like to do it for fun though.

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Salvage old batteries? Do you mean for an electrode? 

Yes, I was looking at alkaline batteries because the eletrolyte is a powder. Are there any big things to look out for there? 

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

but I'd start with reliably making a beaker of hydrogen go "pop" first.

I would like to start with small stuff like that first. I assume this should be done outside. How far should I stand away from it and what safety equipment would I need ( googles, water, etc.)?

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

If you are thinking "He's being conservative because he's giving advice in a public forum, I'll risk this or that" then STOP because you are not ready

I regard your comments with the upmost  sincerity. If you said I'm doing what I wanted to do, I would blow myself up I would not even attempt. You really seem like you know what your doing here, though I do realize, in the end my safety is my responsibility.

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

You can get away without the gloves and coat while you are just playing with water and hydrogen but definitely get some goggles

Would sun glasses or googles for power tools work?

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

advise you NOT to proceed without expert guidance present.

Who would you define as an expert?

15 hours ago, p1t1o said:

If you are looking to buy anything, this is a pretty good place to start:

Thanks for the links. I checked them out, they have some pretty nice stuff there.

7 hours ago, HalcyonSon said:

If you keep dicking around the way you're going, you're in for a world of hurt.

Noted.

 

i just got done butchering 2 pencils for one 1in eltrode. I dip them in the water and run something like copper wires to the battery, correct?

Are there benefits to battery eltrodes over pencil lead?

[p1t1o]

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Would there be an easy way to separate these into a pureish form? I would just like to do it for fun though.

Easy? With household equipment? No, not really. Fancy building a centrifuge? I'm sure it could be done, but it'd be much easier in a fully equipped laboratory.

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Yes, I was looking at alkaline batteries because the eletrolyte is a powder. Are there any big things to look out for there? 

Yeah, dont cut open any batteries, not worth it. Mainly just because of the mess and you can get a better electrode elsewhere.

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

I would like to start with small stuff like that first. I assume this should be done outside. How far should I stand away from it and what safety equipment would I need ( googles, water, etc.)?

With small amounts (say, a mugfull, a beakerfull, a volume about the size of your fist.) you can just hold the container and light it with a flame, its pretty safe. It IS fire though, so the obvious precautions - do it away from piles of dry sticks and pools of petrol, dont hold it against your face when you light it, don't wear clothes made of plastic, dont fill up an entire room with gas etc. Would be a good idea to wear your goggle - get used to wearing them whatever you are doing, no matter what. Even a grain of table salt in your eye isn't very pleasant. If you are going to be experimenting regularly, get a hold of gloves and a coat too.

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

I regard your comments with the upmost  sincerity. If you said I'm doing what I wanted to do, I would blow myself up I would not even attempt. You really seem like you know what your doing here, though I do realize, in the end my safety is my responsibility.

Full disclosure, Im a chemist but work behind a desk in regulatory so its been a long time since I actually *did* any chemistry, but its fun to exercise those muscles!

Safety is always your responsibility, yes, and there is also the issue of the safety of others. There is quite a lot of science that one can do at home, especially if you acquire a few pieces of equipment and find a place to get decent reagents. But there are also a lot of things that can go wrong and even very experienced people have had disasters at home. This is why safety is taken so seriously in industry - sometimes to the point of being absurd (I have had to fill out an incident report for a papercut before) but its a question of "no exceptions" because that is the only way you can minimise the chances of an accident.

There are old chemists, and there are bold chemists. But there are few old, bold chemists.

 

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Would sun glasses or googles for power tools work?

Dont rely on sunglasses. Fun Fact though: I I always get Oakley sunglasses, mainly because they are dang good sunglasses, but also because they are tested to the same standards as safety goggles. But still dont use them as obviously sunglasses will compromise your vision slightly.

"Goggles for power tools"- Im guessing these are basically safety goggles. In any event, there are a couple of suitable examples in the Fisher links I posted above.

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Who would you define as an expert?

Someone who is currently doing it for a living. If it is definitely rocketry that you are interested in, a good place to start would be to see if there are any local amateur rocketry clubs.

7 hours ago, munlander1 said:

i just got done butchering 2 pencils for one 1in eltrode. I dip them in the water and run something like copper wires to the battery, correct?

Are there benefits to battery eltrodes over pencil lead?

Yeah, there should be no metal in contact with the solution, just the electrodes.

Nah, I doubt you'll get anything better from a battery. Best bet of course is to buy electrodes specifically made for the purpose.

***

PS: If you get to the stage (which I expect should take a while) where you are thinking of rocket fuels and rocket engines, its probably best to start with solid rockets. Pressurised gases require specialised plumbing, and dont make the best rocket fuels. Solids will be a little more stable to handle and wont require as much equipment, nor risk failure under pressure etc. After that comes liquid fuelled rocketry which is a whole other kettle of fish.

That is just to point you in the right direction - obviously you know that *any* work involving rocketry requires that expert supervision we mentioned, its is advanced work that requires experience. And it is the sort of field where even experienced people occasionally blow themselves up. But there is plenty of things you can investigate on your way there, there is no rush.

To be honest, handling fuels and building engines is quite far ahead of you at this stage. But just by asking the questions you are on the path

Edited January 13, 2017 by p1t1o

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

8 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Who would you define as an expert?

Someone who is currently doing it for a living.

and is still alive and has a (more or less) full set of fingers.

Upd: and eyes.

Edited January 13, 2017 by kerbiloid

[munlander1]

11 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Fancy building a centrifuge?

How easy or difficult is it?

11 hours ago, p1t1o said:

It IS fire though

Would having a fire extinguisher be going overboard?

 

11 hours ago, p1t1o said:

"Goggles for power tools"- Im guessing these are basically safety goggles.

Yep

11 hours ago, p1t1o said:

good place to start would be to see if there are any local amateur rocketry clubs.

Not any within a good 3-4 hours. At least not any nar clubs.

 

11 hours ago, p1t1o said:

To be honest, handling fuels and building engines is quite far ahead of you at this stage.

Yeah, I have always imaged a non-solid model rocket before. I think it would be really cool to have a working one. 

12 hours ago, p1t1o said:

But there is plenty of things you can investigate on your way there, there is no rush.

Are there simple things that I could create with similar problems to rocket engines but not as large as a risk factor? Would a hydrogen bomb be easy? Is it just a capped rocket engine?

How many 9v's snapped together would be a safety concern?

Does breathing in hydrogen have any health effects besides not being able to breath due to a low presence of oxygen? 

[radonek]

28 minutes ago, munlander1 said:

Does breathing in hydrogen have any health effects besides not being able to breath due to a low presence of oxygen? 

Hydrogen can be used in breathing mix in lieu of nitrogen, so I guess it's safe. As much as highly explosive gas can be considered "safe" that is…

[munlander1]

1 hour ago, radonek said:

Hydrogen can be used in breathing mix in lieu of nitrogen, so I guess it's safe. As much as highly explosive gas can be considered "safe" that is…

Thank you!

[monophonic]

9 hours ago, radonek said:

Hydrogen can be used in breathing mix in lieu of nitrogen, so I guess it's safe. As much as highly explosive gas can be considered "safe" that is…

Wrong. Helium is used in deep sea diving breathing mixes. Hydrogen would steadily combine with the oxygen until you were basically suffocating on water vapour. That's assuming the mix wouldn't just go boom before then, which would be a small miracle in itself.

I'll tell you a little anecdote to illustrate how seriously dangerous hydrogen is even when handled correctly. During my time in the army we were repeatedly stressed how important it is to be ready to fight at all times. When digging anti-tank mines into the frozen ground you better have your rifle on you. When carrying fuzed 155mm shells to the gun your rifle must never be beyond your hands reach. But when filling weather balloons with hydrogen you must leave your rifle and everything else metallic at least 30 feet away! Working with hydrogen was the only time we weren't punished for leaving our weapons too far from us. That's how serious the army was worried about hydrogen.

[Steel]

1 hour ago, monophonic said:

Hydrogen would steadily combine with the oxygen until you were basically suffocating on water vapour. That's assuming the mix wouldn't just go boom before then, which would be a small miracle in itself.

Not quite, you'd probably need a spark to get the whole thing going before you get water.

[radonek]

2 hours ago, monophonic said:

Wrong. Helium is used in deep sea diving breathing mixes. Hydrogen would steadily combine with the oxygen until you were basically suffocating on water vapour. That's assuming the mix wouldn't just go boom before then, which would be a small miracle in itself.

I've got a surprise for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox_(breathing_gas) I don't know if it was ever used outside of few attempts at record breaking dives, but it is definitely a viable breathing mix. It's not even THAT dangerous, since large part of those dives are outside of explosive mixture ratio. It's only trying to bring you to deadly exothermic heaven part time :-)

11 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Thank you!

Oh boy. You should know that I am not a chemist, nor a doctor. Just a guy who happened to read a book about deep diving  twenty years ago.

[monophonic]

3 hours ago, radonek said:

I've got a surprise for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox_(breathing_gas) I don't know if it was ever used outside of few attempts at record breaking dives, but it is definitely a viable breathing mix. It's not even THAT dangerous, since large part of those dives are outside of explosive mixture ratio. It's only trying to bring you to deadly exothermic heaven part time :-)

It doesn't surprise me at all. People will test all kinds of things that don't turn out to be smart ideas. Even for COMEX the only rationale seems to have been to produce the gases at sea floor with plentiful electricity from a nuclear reactor. I guess they would have kept the pressure high enough to keep the mixture below explosive ratio at all times. But the nuclear plan fizzled in the end. Nothing I can find indicates that hydrogen mixes are in use as of today. Although I did find an article that suggests its effects are not really conductive to doing serious work.

http://johnclarkeonline.com/2011/11/15/diving-with-hydrogen-–-it’s-a-gas/

Of course I did forget about the need to reduce oxygen to compensate for extreme pressure. I have no idea how fast the H2 will consume the O2 at those ratios, but eventually it will. The mixture is not inert even if it is incapable of sustaining a steady reaction rate.

[munlander1]

5 hours ago, radonek said:

Oh boy. You should know that I am not a chemist, nor a doctor. Just a guy who happened to read a book about deep diving  twenty years ago.

I asked if hydrogen was lethal besides not being to get any oxygen, you answered and backed up your answer.

You were also correct

[p1t1o]

On 1/13/2017 at 9:28 PM, munlander1 said:

How easy or difficult is it?

Hehe,I admire your enthusiasm, but in order to seperate a mixture of - lets just say copper oxide and iron oxide - so that you can physically seperate and characterise them, you need a lot of force, because they are very similar and you want to seperate them well. Laboratory centrifuges - even the desktop ones - are heavily built (to contain any flying parts in case of failure) and precision instruments (to be perfectly balanced in order to not fly apart), so whilst Im sure its not impossible to build one at home, it'd be pretty difficult. Also blah blah safety blah blah

A centrifuge is not the only solution to the problem of separating well mixed, similar substances, however Im having a hard time thinking of anything effective that you can do at home. Even if you could separate them well enough, characterising an unknown powder is a whole other challenge.

It can be done though, one example is "high performance liquid chromatography" (HPLC), which usually includes an IR spectrophotometer and if linked with a mass spectrometer, this can be a very powerful tool for characterising mixtures.

 

On 1/13/2017 at 9:28 PM, munlander1 said:

Would having a fire extinguisher be going overboard?

Overboard? No. You dont have to have the fire brigade on standby before you can light off a handful of Hydrogen, but if you are going to be regularly working with flammables with an eye to learning about rocket science, a little handheld powder extinguisher would not be out of place if you plan on doing more than a couple of little fireballs.

There's no such thing as overboard in safety, you won't ever hear a rocket scientist saying "Ooh no, thats too much safety!".

On 1/13/2017 at 9:28 PM, munlander1 said:

Not any within a good 3-4 hours. At least not any nar clubs.

It still might be worthwhile getting in touch with them, they might have a lot of relevant advise.

On 1/13/2017 at 9:28 PM, munlander1 said:

Are there simple things that I could create with similar problems to rocket engines but not as large as a risk factor? Would a hydrogen bomb be easy? Is it just a capped rocket engine?

lol "hydrogen bomb"!

I think I will probably draw the line at explaining even the simplest, smallest bomb to someone online!

But suffice to say hydrogen is a flammable gas that can explode in the presence of a certain ratio of oxygen.

My advice would be not to attempt to build anything that goes bang. The risk is too great.

On 1/13/2017 at 9:28 PM, munlander1 said:

How many 9v's snapped together would be a safety concern?

Not sure really. I put my finger in a 240V socket once and got a hell of a shock. Obviously if you are going to string a thousand together you are playing with some serious volts and a chunk of stored energy, but stringing 3or4 together isn't going to raise singe many eyebrows. Though I think the risk of fire from a short circuit seems higher than giving yourself a shock.

If you need a lot of volts for something, there are better, safer, ways.

On 1/13/2017 at 9:28 PM, munlander1 said:

Does breathing in hydrogen have any health effects besides not being able to breath due to a low presence of oxygen? 

As others have said, it wont poison you but it is a flammable gas.

You should never, ever get into a situation where you are wondering if the concentration of the gas you are working with in the air is toxic or not.

If you are experimenting with electrolysis and electrolytes, other more toxic gases can be formed. 

Small electrolysis experiments can be done indoors with the windows open, I dont know what experiments you might move towards but use some common sense - eg: if there is any risk (judged from the quantity of your reagents) of producing enough (of any) gas to fill (or even partially fill) a room, you either need to do it in a fume hood or entirely outside.

Edited January 17, 2017 by p1t1o

[munlander1]

18 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Hehe,I admire your enthusiasm

Thank you

18 hours ago, p1t1o said:

it'd be pretty difficult. Also blah blah safety blah blah

 

So no centrifuge for me then. (Just summing everything up there not just the safety part)

18 hours ago, p1t1o said:

"Ooh no, thats too much safety!".

I could make a joke here, but i will refrain from it.

18 hours ago, p1t1o said:

If you need a lot of volts for something, there are better, safer, ways.

Like?

Is there a cheep-ish way to be able to collect the gases? Kind of like an iv sort of thing? A glorified ballon if you would like.

Edited January 17, 2017 by munlander1

[steve_v]

On 14/01/2017 at 10:28 AM, munlander1 said:

How many 9v's snapped together would be a safety concern?

So long as you stay under about 60v you can't give yourself a shock, though you may get a tingle if your hands are wet.
As for fire risk, I assuime you're talking about carbon-zinc or alkaline 9v batteries - in which case the internal resistance should limit current enough to prevent anything catastrophic (although you could probably still start a fire if you tried).
So yeah, don't series any more than 6 or so, try not to short them, and you'll be fine.

Edited January 17, 2017 by steve_v

[p1t1o]

4 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Like?

A variable power supply would be your best bet, if you have a few pennies to spend. 

Note that if you are using electrolytes (as opposed to pure water), then the voltage you are using can affect what turns up at the electrodes.

4 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Is there a cheep-ish way to be able to collect the gases? Kind of like an iv sort of thing? A glorified ballon if you would like.

First off, remember the connection between how much gas you are likely to produce and how much ventilation you require.

Im not aware of any easy, off-the-shelf methods of collecting gas. In a small electrolytic setup you would just capture the gas with an inverted container of some kind. I suppose if you were good with your hands, like you say, it wouldn't be impossible to improvise a bag or somesuch - seems as good an idea as any - tricky because everything is at atmospheric pressure, but possible. 

The idea makes me a little nervous if Im honest, airtight workings are tricky and excluding all air from the system will be difficult in an improvised setup. Manipulating a large bag of hydrogen-mixed-with-how-much-air with a string of 9V batteries sparking in the background...

Obviously it goes without saying, the more gas you are dealing with the greater the consequences of a mistake and the easier it is to make one. Its up to you to perform the mental risk assessment for each activity.

[radonek]

…and be mindful of consequences.

[munlander1]

2 hours ago, radonek said:

…and be mindful of consequences.

So what are the risks of what I am doing? What safety procautions do I need to take?