What's up guys welcome back it is summertime and that means summertime grilling so for this video
I thought it might be fun to try messing around with barbecue charcoal and high voltage electricity now for this experiment today
I'm bringing back my neon sign Transformer this lovely little unit converts house power to Twelve thousand volt 30 milliamps
Which isn't a whole lot of power?
But it is very high potential which will definitely make you squirm
If it touches you the wrong way now if you've ever really studied your charcoal briquets
Oh, probably realize that they're just pyrolized wood of course there are a few other components added in to help with your barbecue experience
But for the most part this is just compressed pyrolized sawdust now since we have access to
12,000 volts of electricity and a piece of wood
I want to show you something kind of interesting
If we take our two high voltage electrodes and touch one to the piece of wood and then bring in the other one you'll notice
Absolutely nothing happens at all that's because wood is not conductive or should I say it's not very conductive everything has a dielectric breakdown
But wood is very difficult to toss an electric current through if I bring the electrodes themselves close enough together
They'll eventually strike an arc on their own and the heat produced from the arcs will actually scorch the wood and begin to Char it
As that char develops and the carbon goes deep enough eventually it will develop an electrically conductive
Path that when I bring the two electrodes close to that
It lights up a path that kind of resembles Lava flowing down the side of the volcano
The only difference is this is electricity flowing through the wood not Lava
Let's keep this going a little bit and see how far we can push it
And I can actually draw that pathway out all the way to the side of the wood
There, that's pretty cool
That's pretty cool wood by itself is not conductive
But once you burn it a little bit you can actually conduct electricity through it or at least through the carbon path that you created
within it
And this is actually a well-known fact hundreds of years ago back when Thomas Edison was developing the light bulb because he actually used pyrolized
Bamboo as the filament for his light bulb so here's the question
I have today if we can get burnt wood to conduct electricity so well then what would high voltage electricity do to charcoal
I mean theoretically this stuff is basically just carbon, so it should be conductive, right?
so for this first experiment
I'm going to take this piece of charcoal set it down on these paver stones and first of all just see if we can even
Run electricity through it at all. All right here we go. So we're going to touch one side here
So that's connected and then theoretically this electricity should just arc out and straight into the charcoal oh
I actually had to get kind of close there, but you can see that is conducting
Very cool bring one close the other close
and now it makes contact because that
Has just established a route now if I hold it here and try it somewhere else. Maybe up here I
Have to get within about a quarter of an inch right to spark up
But then once that connection is made I can draw the arc out about two inches
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Now if I prop these things up and leave them electrically connected to the charcoal long enough
I'm pretty sure we can build up enough heat to get these things to ignite
But before we do
I just want to try another experiment with a few more bricks of charcoal to see if we can get the electricity to hop from
One to the other. All right
So I've got a second charcoal briquette set up the question now is will it jump the gap between the two let's find out
three two one contact
Nope, it doesn't so we apparently have to start this one off
Let's go ahead and bring this close so we can develop a path, right?
There and then once that's developed let's see what it does now
Boom it actually does jump the gap. That's cool
And now we can move these all over the place wherever we want, and it's going to stay right there in that middle point
That's been established
Cool, so apparently two works. Let's try four
I'm guessing we're going to have to start these off individually so get that one going there
That one going there going this way. This way
and this way
Oh look at that
That was cool, right there
So you can see that even though we're using four different
Briquettes once we started them all they connect very well together with electricity I could just bring it close and they all connect they all
Turn on they all turn off
they all turn on they'll turn off and starting to smell like really good barbecue because
While we've been playing with electricity these briquettes have absorbed enough heat that they've actually started themselves in fact at this stage
We could really just take these briquettes put them in a grill and get ready to start cooking hot dogs and hamburgers
Which is really cool because we started these things with electricity
Not just any electricity though high voltage electricity and that my friends is how you start your barbecue like a mad scientist
But here's one more trick now
If you want to see an even more fun and slightly dangerous approach try stacking your briquettes down in the bottom of your grill
Take one of your high-voltage electrodes and connected to the frame but at this point
You don't want to touch it because if you do it will shock you
Then if we take the other electrode and put one hand behind our back
We can stick it down inside draw an arc and ignite the rest of the briquettes as well
It's certainly not an efficient way to start your barbecue, but you got to admit
It's pretty cool there you have the guys while my grill is warming up and getting ready for hot dogs and hamburgers tonight
Let's Recap what we learned here today
We start off this experiment today playing with high voltage
Electricity and a piece of wood and what we learned was that wood by itself is not naturally conductive
but if we strike an Arc and use that Arc to burn the wood
Eventually the char will go deep enough to run a carbon Arc through the wood itself
Carbon is conductive and since charcoal briquettes are basically just carbon
We tried an experiment to see if they'd conduct electricity as well, and they did now with a fresh charcoal briquette
We brought our high voltage electrodes to the sides almost to the point of touching but once they actually struck an arc
We could stretch that Arc a couple of inches long
fascinating one piece of charcoal worked pretty well
So we brought in another one to see if we would jump the gap
and it did so we brought in two more and made a cool little pattern hopping electricity between them all and in playing with the
different designs
We watched the briquettes absorb so much heat from the electricity that they actually started
Themselves to the point where we could transfer them to our grill and use them to cook our food
So there you have it guys that's how to use high voltage electricity to start your grill this summer
Not a very practical or efficient method by any means, but definitely a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me for this experiment today
We look for the next one talk to you then
So cool right on
You hear my finger's shocking that's dangerous