How to Make a Potato Battery using Zinc and Copper

In this video, you will learn how to make easy Potato Battery that can power a small LED Lamp or you can also use it to power a clock.

All you need is galvanized nails (Zinc nails), copper nails (or copper coin), copper wire, few potatoes, and a little Led Light.
The easiest way to get the Lamp is from a Lighter, that's a 4,5 volt Lamp that is ideal for this experiment.

This is a great potato experiment that kids will love! Also, a great STEM Engineering activity that will help you learn a lot about electric power and a potato battery.

Materials needed to make a Potato Battery
- LED Lamp. If you can get your hands on the 1.5V LED lamp, that would be best. But they are rarer. The easiest one to get is from the lighter that you can buy in any convenience store or from Christmas tree decorative lamps. That one requires 3.5V but that is still good enough to create our potato battery.
- 3 to 5 Potatoes. This can vary and mostly depends on the Voltage of the lamp you will be using. We used a 3.5V lamp since it is easiest to get. Also, it can depend on the potato freshness where more fresh potatoes can produce more Voltage. But the general rule of thumb is that we need one potato per 0.5V. But don’t forget we can slice potatoes in halves and each half can produce 0.5V, so we can say that each potato (sliced in half) can produce 1V. If you plan to use slices, we can plan: 1 potato needed per 1 Volt required for our lamp.
- Copper Nails. Copper coins can work well here too, but copper nails are more convenient to work with. We can get them from any hardware store. We will need 6-12 copper nails for our battery. We need the same amount of nails as potatoes (slices).
- Zinc Nails (galvanized nails). Same as copper nails. We will need 6-12 of them and we can buy them in any hardware store.
- Copper Wire. We can also get a copper wire in the hardware store and one meter of it will be more than enough. The thinner wire you can get the better since it will be easier to wrap it around our electrodes (copper and zinc nails).
- Knife. Regular kitchen knife used to cut our potatoes on halves.
- Pliers. Used to cut and wrap our wire around nails.

What will you develop and learn by making the Potato Battery?
- Knowledge about electricity and electrical circuits
- The functioning of a battery
- How to make our own battery
- Engineering skills
- Chemistry and chemical reactions

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Authors:
Vedran Leder & Iva Leder

Music:
"Neolith" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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