Citrus Amps and Spud Sparks

Using potatoes & lemons to power LED
Grade 5

Presentation

No video provided

Hypothesis

We think that the potatoes will power the LED and more potatoes means more light. 

 

Research

We decided to do this project by discovering that electricity can be created using fruits and veggies while watching youtube videos. We wanted to try something similar to other scientists to discover if we would get the same results. In other videos we saw kids use one or more potatoes to make electricty flow. We also learned how to connect the potatoes but not exactly what arrangements or potatoe types would work. This sparked our idea to try our project topic.

 

Variables

Independent variables:

  • Amount of potatoes

Dependent variables:

  • How much light is produced

Controlled variables:

  • LED lights 
  • Copper wire
  • Zinc coated screws

Procedure

Grab 3-10 potatoes. After you have all the potatoes grab copper wires and cut into 4.5 inch pieces. Stick the wire into one side of each potato and screw a zinc coated screw into the other. When your done that connect the wire to a nail and connect the LED to the copper wires

Observations

!st attempt: It failed because the light did not light up. We think this failed because we used 3 potatoes.

2nd attempt: This test we used 7 potatoes and it worked! The LED light lighted up!

3rd attempt: 10 potatoes  failed. We both came up with different ideas why it failed. Gideons idea is because the original 7 potatoes were out of electricity. Evans perspective is that we added 3 more potatoes of a different type. 

 

Analysis

We learned that we can use potatoes and lemons to power LED's. When we placed an electrode into a potatoe we learned that you could put the copper and zinc screws into one part but the potatoe would eventually go black in that area and no longer work. When this happend we eventually learned to move them to new spots or new potatoes. We also learned that ten potatoes is enough to power leds at 7 on the brightness scale and 4 lemons allowed us to power at 8.5. We think this means that lemons are more effective at allowing electricity to flow.

Conclusion

Yes, potatoes can and lemons power an LED.

Just as we predicted  found out that more potatoesor lemons means more light but , like a battery they run out of juice.

We can improve this project by adding more potatoes or lemons.

Don't use potatoes or lemons to power anything unless you  are doing a experiment .

 

Application

We did this so that everyone could understand that using potatoes / lemons to power lights is much more expensive than buying electricity.

Sources Of Error

Our sourses of error are the potatoes and lemons with there unbalenced voltage.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank our parents for arranging time to work together and providing resourses. 

Special thanks to Evans dad for buying the potatoes and lemons for us to use.