Make a Water Bottle Capacitor

Do you have loads of water or soda or frizzy bottles everywhere in your house and want to use them for something good?

Well, here is one good use of them, make a High Voltage Water Bottle Capacitor! The bottle capacitor is very similar to the Water Leyden Jar I made a while ago, but the only difference is it uses a bottle, not a jar.

Disclaimer:
The bottle capacitor is a high voltage capacitor, high voltage capacitors are one of the most dangerous things you could ever use in electronics. A large charged bottle capacitor is potentially lethal if you touch its live terminals, and a small charged bottle capacitor can cause injury and it still be lethal in some ways.
So, I am not responsible what ever you do with this information and bottle capacitor.

What you will need are:

• A bottle of any kind
• Water
• Salt
• Stainless steel nail
• Aluminum foil (or even better, use AL foil tape if you have any!)
• Tape (you won't need it if you are going to use foil tape

Not much tools is needed to make a bottle capacitor.

• Hammer
• Hot glue (or anything to seal up the container to prevent water coming out)

I think that is just about it.

Before we start making a bottle capacitor, take all of that sticky stuff off! It can reduce the performance of the bottle capacitor, or even cause problems if you don't take the sticky tags off!

Fill the bottle with warm water.

Add a few teaspoons of table salt, and stir well! After that, put the cap of the bottle back on.

Hammer in the nail in the center of the cap, and leave the head of the nail about a centimeter away from the cap.

After that, put some hot glue around the nail and the cap to stop the water coming out.

Cut out a sheet a foil that will wrap nicely around the bottle. Then wrap the foil around the bottle, I used tape to hold the foil onto the bottle. You can use glue if you want, but don't use flammable glue because of sparks, it is likely to catch on fire, or maybe even explode... Then I soothed the foil down onto the bottle to increase the efficiency of the bottle capacitor.

You can use something much much better than foil if you have, use foil tape. You can just simply tape around the bottle and not have a hard time wrapping the bottle with foil and tape (or glue).

Attach a piece wire to the foil of the bottle - that would be the negative terminal of the capacitor, the nail on the top is the positive terminal,

There! You made a bottle capacitor!

I also added a magnet and a ball to give it a "Leyden Jar" like.

I measured the capacitance of my bottle capacitor and my meter reads 1842pF (1.8nF)! That is very high for a cheap high voltage capacitor!

If you want to electrostaticly charge your bottle capacitor, read this site, it will show you how to make a simplest charger you can ever make.

Or even far more dangerous, treat it as a normal high voltage capacitor, you can use it as a capacitor bank for the tesla coil, or something like that.
I tested my bottle capacitor with high voltage power supply to see if it works. Never ever try that, unless you have good experiences with high voltage.

Well, I hoped you enjoyed this instructable!
If you have any questions, or need help, or found an error, or anything, make a comment! ^{I like comments! :)}