With the borax, I also saw a green deposit show up on the nickel coin.
However, that fell off with time.
I'm running with a much lower current, approximately 50 milliamps.
After about 48 hours, the resistance across the cell has started to drop
and the current is increasing slightly.
My experiment is running with a control and an active cell in series
across the power supply. The control has graphite for both the anode
and cathode.
No heat detected yet, but I am encouraged by the drop in resistance
which appears to be continuing.
Paul
On 10/2/2012 12:32 AM, David Roberson wrote:
I am not confident that borax would be better than my electrolyte
since hydrogen is the needed material and it shows up at the cathode
in either case. The happenings at the anode only concern me when I
detect strange effects due to the choice of materials. Borax lead to
several bad deposits that screwed with the resistance and dirtied the
bath while sodium carbonate did not seem to have any serious evils. I
would recommend that others switch to sodium carbonate.
