Lately I made my garden accessible again. The garden was a local jungle and could be easy be picked out by looking at my street with google earth. Now it has been transformed in a nice place with a place where I can sit free from onlookers.
A garden also has plants that are not wanted, weeds. Those keep poping up everywhere. Now I thought if I burn the root system by high voltage. And it works great!
For it I took the high voltage transformer from the microwave two capacitors and two diodes (each diode is 6 x 1n4007 in series and the caps are the caps found in microwave ovens) to make a full wave voltage doubler.
The only problem is the tiles become black from the burning. Weeding is great fun now! ZZZZZap!!!
Here is the schematic:
Easy to build. The diodes are 6x 1N4007 in series. On the output I used high voltage wire (6kV) and connected that to pvc tubes with a metal wire on the end. To those I connected the high voltage lines. Be careful this is very deadly when touched!
Oh yes I did not connect the earth to the center of the caps and I disconnected the one wire from the secondary coil to the housing of the transformer. The prickers I use are also ground (kind of) and grounding the transformer would mess things up. Be careful not to touch the transformer when in operation the isolation between the high voltage and the metal of the transformer is not too good.
When you are ready with the zapping and did turn off the mains power wait a few seconds and the touch the two prickers together. This will decharge the caps and avoid a nasty shock. DO NOT short the prickers while mains is on, this will destroy the diodes.
The tips of the prickers will get very hot wile in use, take that in account when you make them.
Happy weeding!
