Potato Battery project HELP!!!

[Ca2024]

Hello All! My daughter is working on a science experiment and decided to power a Ferris wheel with potato battery. We have a DC motor that powers a fan from a kit that makes batteries with potatoes or fruits. The motor turns on with one aaa battery but it will not turn with out potato made battery. The voltage of the battery is less than 3 Volts. I have gotten on a series potatoes Batteries a total of 12V but still does not work. Any suggestion are greatly appreciated! Thanks

[calixte]

Hello!

Without knowing what kit you used all I can do is guess. First things first just because you have enough voltage doesn't mean you have enough current, because potato batteries usually have high resistance and so low current. To increase the current you could add more potatoes in parallel (put all the positives together and all the negatives together), make sure you have fresh potatoes slightly heated (don't cook them though), and/or use bigger electrodes in the potatoes. Also it would be wise to check if it is the load from the wheel part is making the motor not spin.

[Ca2024]

Thank You for suggestion. I tried parallel not heated and did not work. Right now I’m not using the Ferris wheel until I get the motor working. I bought the Sntieecr Fruit Battery Science kit from Amazon. The fan motor comes with it. We also made a battery with the National Geographic battery kit and still the motor will not turn on. I’m going to try with the heated potatoes on parallel and see if it works.

Thanks

[bfinio]

Hello,

To add to this response - to clarify, you will need a LOT of potatoes in parallel to power a motor. Electrical current is measured in a unit called amperes, or amps for short. Tiny LEDs - like the ones included in the Science Buddies version of this kit - will produce light with just about 10-20 milliamps (thousandths of an amp). However, even very small motors typically require hundreds of milliamps. We can't say exactly how much motor your current requires without more information (e.g. a datasheet included with the kit, or a part number so we can look it up ourselves). But if you did have that information, you can figure out how many cells you'd need to connect in series (to get enough voltage) and then how many identical cells you'd need to connect in parallel (to get enough current).

Hope that helps,

Ben