Seems to me conservation of energy is always going to be the spoiler.
You can extract as much hydrogen from as much water as you want, as long as you’ve got a sufficiently large supply of energy to use.
This is the fundamental flaw with HHO, however. You’re using the energy stored in the gasoline to separate the hydrogen in the water molecule instead of to power the car directly. The argument is that the hydrogen will then increase the efficiency of burning the gasoline sufficiently to more than make up for the energy used to extract the hydrogen.
I don’t buy it. All you’re doing is burning the hydrogen that you just extracted. Will it increase your fuel efficiency? Only if you ignore the gasoline you had to use to extract the hydrogen in the first place. It’s summed up nicely in this article:
“So, simplifying this, they’re breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burning hydrogen and oxygen to create water. This is, of course, possible, but you can’t get more energy out of the system than you put in. Otherwise, it’s simply a perpetual motion machine.
Until someone puts a box on the driveway and it generates more power than goes into it … everyone who says you can power a car with water is either a fool or trying to take someone else’s money.”
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/ecogeek/585/…
The whole thing is just a scam.
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You can accomplish almost the same results just by spraying a mist of water into the carburetor intake. What it does is to cool the intake flow and make the mixture denser so engine pre ignition is reduced imitating higher octane fuels. This will give slightly more power and slightly more mileage as long as you do not let the sprayer run out of water.