I have been watching Russ for years and was curious about his latest experiments. Particularly his statement that "the load does not consume the power". He also posted a link to Rick Friedrich's work. I was interested in the battery swap circuit and so, since I had a set of 4 brand new LiFePO4 3.2 volt cells on hand, I decided to do a little test run. I modified a 4 cell batter holder to have two of the cells in series and two in parallel. see diagram.

here is a link to Rick's work
https://www.youtube.com/user/rickfriedrich/videos

So the motor does run and the 2 batteries in parallel do charge.

I labeled the batteries 1 through 4 and put a piece of red tape on the end of the motor shaft so I could see it spin.

I put the current viewing resistors on a little piece of perf board.
There is a switch on the battery holder that disconnects the battery negative lead.
The red wire is from the positive lead of the two batteries in series.
The light colored wire is from the positive terminal of the two batteries in parallel.
The little DC motor is connected between the red and light colored wire and draws about 14 milli-amps when on.
The grounds are connected together with a third current viewing resistor.

Here is some data from two runs (this was before I added the CVR's).
The first run is with cells 1 and 2 in series (like in the picture) with cells 3 & 4 charging
Then I moved the batteries in the holder so that 3 & 4 were in the series configuration and 1&2 were charging.

Here are the voltage readings from my first two runs. All 4 cells were brand new and were never charged by me so I do not know how much charge they started with. I took them off the blister pack and just plugged them in and turned on the switch.

Quote from 1horn444 on October 10th, 2017, 12:12 PM

The little DC motor is connected between the red and light colored wire and draws about 14 milli-amps when on.

Is the motor a brushless type (with internal controller) or a cheap little brushed motor from China?

If brushed, you should see little spikes on an oscilloscope as the communicator makes/breaks connection.

I didn't look at the motor itself but here is a scope shot of the voltage drop across the CVR looks like.
all three CVR's look identical and my equipment is not good enough to measure any difference.

I decided 10 ohms was too much resistance so I doubled them up in parallel to make all three CVR's = 5 ohms.
The average DC voltage measured across them is 74 milli-volts. All three measure the same.
The scope probe is set to 10:1 and so each major division is 50 milli-volts in the picture above.

So I measured the current through the motor as 14 milli-amps.
The calculated current with the 5 ohm CVR is 14.8 milli-amps

SO I noticed that the current is the same before the load, after the load,
and after the parallel battery that is charging.
SO I decided to do a new experiment. I only have 4 batteries now so I ordered 4 more.
They should be here in a few days. I am going to hook up this circuit. I am pretty sure that 2 sets of
charge batteries will charge off 1 set of run batteries.  I have 5 ohm CVR's now because I don't have a
good enough micro-volt meter to use the 0.01 CVR's I started out with.

I just checked my log book. So far I have run 320 milli-ampere hours through
my little DC motor with no sign of the batteries becoming depleted.
Remember I never even charged the batteries to begin with. What ever charge
remained in them was put there by the MFG.

So are you feeling pretty confident yet, the load does not consume the energy?

I am still collecting data, but it looks like it may be so.

:thumbsup:

I found out the initial charge on LiFePO4 batteries is 50% or less by law for shipping safety.
The self discharge rate is 3% per month.

Update: 10/18/2017
So far I have run the same batteries (swapping run and charge every few hours) for over 83 hours
running my 14 milli-amp DC motor. Total mAh run through the motor is around 1165 mAh at 3V.
The batteries were 7 months old when I got them and so should have had an initial charge of around
330 mAh. (due to 50% charge when they left MFG and self discharge of 3% per month)
Assuming no charging and no swapping each set of two batteries should have had a maximum usable
power of 330 to 400 mAh. So both sets would have had a maximum of 800 mAh available to run the motor.
The batteries are still running the motor just fine although they are somewhat reduced in voltage from
their starting value. I so far have no way to prove whether the motor (load) is actually consuming any
of the available juice (electricity) because the voltage is slowly going down but it appears that at least
a good percentage is not consumed. I did the first run on the 4th of October and can only do a few hours per day.
So I know I am getting some self discharge.
I am planing to do some additional experiments as suggested by Russ to get a better handle on it.

Good info.  Keep us posted.

My hunch is the load maybe loses some energy or causes the loss of some energy, but doesn't actually consume it.  Even with batteries you can still have a slight impedance mismatch that will lead to self discharge.  I couldn't make a intelligent guess as to how one would reduce this impedance mis-match.  I just have a strong feeling it is there.

I cannot say I entirely agree that the most reliable test of OU is by battery unless the testing protocols are very precise.
Skeptics say oscillation causes false read on 1) power supplies,  2) adapter transformers, and 3) AC reactive "power" is harmless reflectivity.

For one thing draining a battery causes a bounce back effect with real power so there must be a stabilization point.

Filling or charging a battery takes more power than when discharging that power the exact quantity must measured.

Following a charge there is a voltage drop that needs a time stabilization period to be accurate.

These "effects" can be included in testing but these are the challenges.

positives:

1) It rules out "digital adjustment compensation in the meter is fooled some how"