So far, so good. I made two electrodes from the lead of a #2 pencil and attached them to the leads of a 9-volt battery clip, then covered them but for 1/4 inch with shrink tubing. I drilled a hole in the bakelite cap of a 2mL bottle and stuck the bare portion of the electrodes through it into the bottle. The electrodes were held in place and the hole sealed with 5-minute epoxy.

MIOX states that a 60g NaCl per liter of water solution works best for making the mixed oxidants. This translates into about 2oz salt in 500 mL of water. The EPA states that municiple tap water should contain between 0.1 and 0.2 ppm (parts per million) of free chlorine to be considered safe. I picked up a "3-way test kit" (designed for measuring free chlorine in pools) for $5 from Walmart. It's capable of measuring from 0.5 to 5 ppm of free chlorine. ).5 is a bit high, but oh well.

So, the test: I placed 1mL of the 60g/L NaCl (salt) solution in the 2mL bottle and ran current through it for 2.5 minutes. This 1mL solution was then added to 5mL of deionized water which was already in the test kit. The resulting solution was 2-4ppm, 10-20 times too concentrated. Cool, I'm making free chlorine!

What this all means: The system works albeit at a slow rate. This is partially due to not using a fully-charged battery (the 9-volt was only putting out 6 volts) and not using a large enough sample of the salt water solution. My next step will be to rebuild the device using a 5 mL bottle, longer electrodes and a new battery. Then I'll have to test it on some pond water to see what happens. I'd also like to get some free-chlorine test strips rather than use the 3-way test kit, but Walmart was out of those. Anyone with a pool want to donate 6 test strips to help support this research? <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Massacre's idea of incorporating a multimeter into this setup is good, but somewhat beyond the scope of this project. I'm just trying to make the simplest system possible because, well, I'm lazy.

-Blast