Deep reengineering of recent car and truck engines is probably not a good idea in the general case; the things are tweaked to the gills these days, with sensors upon sensors, wires everywhere, and the computer the master of all. Certainly I’m not going to try it. But what about something simple, that might never have been done before?

A negative ion generator, is a widget commonly used to improve air quality intended for human consumption. It “ionizes” molecules and atoms in air, giving them negative electrical charges. This observably coalesces dust particles, which fall; and also destroys odors. One can find more health-related reports about them too. Reportedly, right after a thunderstorm, most of the “invigoration” one encounters in the air, is negative ionization.

There used to be “negative ionizer” things which were little bricks that plugged in and hung onto wall power sockets. These did help, but the dust tended to coalesce and adhere around a few inches radius of the device, on the wall et cetera, which is why we don’t see those much anymore! But the electronics are being built into quite a few air conditioners now, even the window air conditioner we bought a year or two ago has one inside it. Little ionizer appliances with fans, suitable for desks and auto dashboards, are now available from quite a few different companies.

And I do enjoy testing the walls of my current box. So, thought I, I wonder what would happen, if we charged the air going into our friendly household truck engine. I have a 1998 Tahoe, 5.7L EFI V8, which underwent some mods before she asked to come into our life (her name is Bertha, she is a big girl with a very low voice)…and she has a certain amount of airspace available in her engine compartment, so I thought, why not. I remember just enough physical chemistry (which I mostly failed) to be dangerous, and the idea of adding electrons to air bits to make them more reactive, sounds like a way to get a very nicely helpful sort of energy into her heart. After all, it’s not how much energy you have, it’s the preparation of that energy into usable form. We have enormous amounts of unused chemical energy in every engine cycle: if we can bleed off a little engine power electrically to get a noticeably helpful net result, that’s a definite gain.

So I ordered one of these,

after a lot of looking around, from Alanchi on AliExpress. The pic is for the 12VDC version, it comes in 110VAC and 220VAC too; I ordered the 12VDC of course, to wire straight into existing electrical. It is advertised as a 30 million particle per cm3 negative ionizer, which appears to be much more powerful than any of the others I could find, except one which is 220VAC-only from the same source. That one is at 100 million particles per cm3…but I’m not going to try to engineer 220VAC under Bertha’s hood ☺ Also unlike what I had seen in the past, this class of ionizer throws its output off little carbon brushes, rather than rows of thin and sharp metal needles. I have seen the metal needles degrade over time, due to corrosion and possibly more interesting behaviors (I saw what looked like a slow-moving, brightly glowing spark, rising off a needle, on at least two or three occasions); the carbon brushes strike me as a very good idea.

If you are in the U.S., you’ll spend a lot of money on shipping from AliExpress unless you are willing to wait a long time; I waited a long time ☺ and I don’t regret it, it gave me time to think about setting this up in as durable a fashion as possible, which we really do want in an engine compartment. We don’t want to cause ourselves electrical problems of any sort, bad ones are very bad; we have to be careful, and this is my daily driver. One nice thing, this 30 M/cm3 ionizer element is only using 1 watt of power, just a tiny sip.

Do note that what we want is explicitly not an “ozone generator”. Ozone is a peculiar and less stable molecular form of oxygen, and it is both poisonous and corrosive. We do not want any noticeable amount of this, in regular contact with anything we care to keep. It is used sometimes as a cleansing agent, to kill invasive bugs and other unpleasantries, but it is not what we are after here. Most if not all electronics produce very tiny amounts of ozone, thunderstorms produce more; the devices we want for this purpose explicitly produce only infinitesimal amounts, and they are explicitly rated for this as well, because years ago this was not done so carefully, there was confusion.

I have been just a tad concerned with possible corrosion. Ionization means reactivity: various components of air are being made more likely to do chemical reactions with things they encounter, than they would otherwise. But as of this writing, 2019-08-15, the project has been going about eight months, and no evil signs yet, and quite a lot of definite good. I’ll be updating as I learn things and encounter things happening; see the “results” section at the bottom if you wish ☺ One idea which did come up recently, was checking the spark plugs, this can be one way to find badness in the cylinders. Haven’t done it yet, but will sometime soon. But I deliberately used two metal screw-eyes in the securing of widgets four, five, and six; there is absolutely zero sign of trouble on them, and they are sitting right next to the brush-electrodes.

So back to work. I set up the electricals as well as I know how, with crimp-on terminals for every wire, because I intend to run with it in the long term, and Kansas sometimes (and never always) gets very cold winters, very hot summers, wet springs, etc. We could wire straight to the battery, but that would mean opening the hood to switch it on and off every time. Since we want this widgetry to always have power with the engine, we use something called a “fuse tap”,

which I learned about through web-searching. You take out an existing fuse in the engine fuse-box, plug the fuse tap in that socket, and then plug the old fuse and a second new fuse into the fuse tap’s own sockets. The fuse tap has a wire end to crimp onto, and that runs to the widget needing the power. These are very commonly used, I am told, for custom electronics.

But local auto retail had only 10-amp fuse taps for Bertha, and she has just one 10-amp fuse socket which turns on and off with the engine, marked “IGN” (Ignition I believe). There is a certain amount of web-advice against using this (in general one does not want anything to touch ignition besides ignition), but I ran with it for a while until the nagging in the back of my head got to me. Then I found a very few in web-retail rated to 20 amps, and she has a few appropriate sockets like that, so I chose one and we’re off :-)

So I ran a new wire from the fuse tap, all the way around the back of the engine compartment, threading through items which don’t get hot to hold it in place, to a little switch with a light in it, so I could know for certain when the widget is powered, and so I could shut it off if anything happened within certain categories ☺ I followed the simple wording on the switch (+12VDC here, alien widgetry [translated: accessory] wire there, ground there), and grounded both the device and the switch directly to the battery. Then I drilled four small holes, one for each of the carbon brushes, in the casing for the air filter. This is emphatically pre-filter, not post-filter, because I don’t care how strong those brushes are, I don’t ever want bits of them going into Bertha’s engine! Here’s the first result:

Everything sat in that little cavity just under the switch, I pulled it all out for the pic. You’ll notice the four wires going into the air filter casing. I used a very nice epoxy from JB Weld advertised to bond any plastic; it works very well, highly recommendable. Unlike other products, it does not make you wonder how much destruction you are doing to your lungs, or potentially, to your sense of reality; very good stuff, just works, and I have been using it for lots of different other things too.

It is true that I may end up regretting using epoxy if/when I eventually have to replace the ionizer units. But that’s fine, that’s what cordless electric drills are for ☺ Also I still don’t know what I would/will use instead of the epoxy. It seems important to hold those wire ends so they don’t get sucked onto the air filter surface, or flap around a lot; they’re sticking through only about an inch.

I can imagine a little metal screw-in stud with a hole in the middle for the wire, but I don’t know what it’s commonly called, or if anyone is actually making them right now ☺ They probably are, these days. If it becomes desireable, I’ll probably send up a RFQ (request for quote) to MFG or AliExpress or something. Wording is the problem then, and the fact that although I might have seen one or two of these in the dim mists of memory, I don’t have precision for it, and my drawing skills aren’t great. I once taught myself rudiments of the DOS version of AutoCAD though, maybe I could revisit that kind of graphics; someone must have an open-source CAD these days, right…?

Results

Lots of them. All of them good so far!

The device has been in place for about 8 months as of this writing. It went in in the dead of a very cold winter, ranging from -5 to +35 F (-21 to +2 C) or so. The first set of results came using just one of the negative ionizer widgets discussed above:

• Cold running. In the extremer cold, Bertha used to sound a bit strained until warm, like many other engines I’ve heard. Not anymore. Even stone cold, at minus five, the gas pedal seemed to have about as much juice as warm. She burned a bit more gas doing it (until she heated up), but was much happier to run than without.
• Starting. Bertha has never had real trouble starting once I gave her a really good (and pricey) battery and new starter, just normal behavior. But now it’s not normal. Hot or dead cold, she takes off, probably turning over once.
• Idle has an interesting sound change (she does have glasspacks…), very very regular, and when hot quite a lot less in volume, clearly doing more with less.

After about two months, I put in two more ionizer elements, a total of three. Just one of the electronic widgets are visible in the pic below, there is actually some good space down there.

• Definitely more power at all times. My sweet Lori, who is not often very impressed with my occasional forays into unusual creative [some might say bizarre] engineering, actually commented on this as we hit the freeway together for the first time after the third went in.
• Sweet Lori and I did two careful fillups at the same pump at the same station and exactly the same route and approximate speeds, and ran two there-and-backs to Lawrence, Kansas, about 30 miles away. There was about 3% (half a gallon) of gas less used with the widgets on, than off. I won’t say that’s clear and present advantage, because 3% isn’t huge, and you’d really want to do testing on a dyno. But it’s not nothing, and it was a rainy day with very wet air, the very condition most likely to hinder the air chargers. Very much looking forward to more testing.
• I was actually surprised at how little change there was when the air chargers were turned off, given the initial experiences of three. I am theorizing that a lot of the overall effects at this point, may have been due to a simple general cleaning effect of having the charged air running through.

A few months ago, I installed air chargers four, five, and six ☺ She now has a cute little harness connecting all of those wires to the switch. Nice and clean though!

• Improvement in horsepower is immediate and noteworthy. Ponderworthy had a gig a few days after, about thirty miles away, which was a great first long-ride test; I was amazed at how interesting it was holding Bertha down to the speed limits ☺
• Overall engine smoothness, and idle tonality, is improved also.
• Now it being August, we finally have had 70’s and 80’s and the occasional 100’s in air temperature; and so far, the warmer it’s been, the better the behavior. In 80-degree-plus weather Bertha actually idles in a quiet murmur once hot. Amazing.
• Starting with air charger #3, stone-cold idle became sometimes a bit grumbly, as if the computer was trying to figure out what was going on. As of now, four through nine only start up after a temperature switch on the upper coolant fitting on the engine registers more than 60 F. This has eliminated some, but not all, of the variable idle. I’m going to play with this more over time to see what appears best, and probably set the temperature switch to kick from three on up, given that three is where this first began. Also will probably use a lower temperature switch, maybe even as low as 40 F.

• Have installed air chargers #7 through 9. One more notch of performance. Sweet Lori noticed too.

Haven’t run a rigorous fuel use check since the previous, but that will come!

Do drop me a line if you have questions, are interested, or try it!!!