How To Make an Earth Battery

 Believe it or not, you can use the earth to make a battery. This shouldn't be too surprising, as the ability to use moist dirt to generate electricity, was demonstrated by Alexander Bain as early as 1841.

In this article, we're going to take a look at how to make an earth battery, so that you can create one at home or in school.

What Do You Need To Make an Earth Battery?

To make an earth battery, you will need the following:

• Zinc or Aluminum rod

• Copper rod

• Wire

• Electrical tape

• Multimeter

• Wire stripper

How To Make an Earth Battery

Start off by placing your two rods into the ground. They should be around 3.2 ft away from each other. This will produce a voltage of around a volt.

Next, you need to get your wire ready. For this, you can use the wire stripper to remove around 1.5" of insulation from 2ft pieces of wire. On the other end, strip around 1/2".

Once you have your wire, you need to carefully strip the longer one, around the rods that you placed into the ground.

What Soil Conditions Are Best?

Something that you can also test out is different soil conditions.

If the soil conditions are different, they will affect the battery differently.

Some soil conditions that you can test out include:

• Dry

• Moist

• Swamp

• Lawn soil

• acid forest soil

• Clay

You can use different soil conditions, and track which one produces the most electricity. 

How To Calculate Earth Battery Power

Once you have made your earth battery, you will probably also want to calculate the power it can generate.

For this, we use a simple equation:

(W = I * V)

If you would like to see an example of this calculation, we've got one for you below.

If a dry soil battery produces 0.70v, 0.2mA current, it would have a battery power of 0.0014W (0.14mW)