How to make a Lemon Battery – Step By Step Guideline

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Batteries help to perform our daily tasks easily. It is vital to operate any portable electronic device. A battery consists of two electrodes in an electrolyte to produce electricity. If your flashlight stops working immediately, you can easily make a small battery to turn your flashlight ON using a lemon at home. It is inexpensive and serves your immediate need. Batteries are widely used in electronic devices like toys, flashlights, cars, cell phones, and radios etc.

Two different metals are used to generate electricity in a battery. One electrode is positively charged whereas the other one is negatively charged. When you insert positive and negative electrodes in an electrolyte, the current passes between these two in an electrolyte and electricity is generated for our needs. Read to on to know about how to create a battery at home using a lemon, copper and galvanized nail.

Items Required for Making a Lemon Battery at Home

  1. 18 Gage Copper Wire piece
  2. Large lemon
  3. Galvanized nail
  4. Wire stripper
  5. Multimeter

Procedure to make a Lemon battery at home

  1. You need to remove around half inch insulation of the copper wire. You can make into a coil form as given below:



  1. You need to straighten your steel paper clip. You can make use of the wire cutter to cut the paper clip into the same size of the copper wire. You can make use of the sand paper to smoothen its surface. If you have zinc covered nail, you need to apply the sand paper lightly to expose the fresh portion.
  2. You are advised to roll the large lemon on a table to loosen the juice and the cell walls inside the lemon. The juice in the lemon is required to initiate chemical reaction for our battery to work.
  3. You need to insert the copper coil about a half inch deep into the lemon.
  4. It is also necessary to insert the zinc covered nail or paper clip about half a inch deep into the lemon. However, you need to maintain at least 1 cm between the copper and paper clip or zinc covered nail.
  5. The metals should not touch each other.

You have just made a voltaic battery using a lemon. It should be as given in the below image.\



You can make use of the multimeter to test the voltage between the terminals of the lemon battery shown above. It shows some voltage. However, the voltage level for one lemon battery will not be sufficient to drive your electronic circuit.

You can make use of ten lemons and ten sets of electrodes to make a bigger lemon battery for your application. If you do not have a paper clip, you can also make use of galvanized coin for your application.

You need to connect the lemon batteries in series to get the desired voltage as indicated below:



You need to connect the copper terminal of the first battery to the galvanized coin of the next battery. The same logic is to be repeated for all the batteries to get a series connection and the desired voltage. You can connect an electronic device between positive terminal (copper) and negative terminal (paper clip or coin). The device starts working.


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