- Oh! - Oh!

Mitch: And we'll be working up a sweat

as we try to bike enough to make our entire home off-grid.

I'm scared 'cause I have to pee,

and it's so dark outside.

Greg, this is way too scary.

Greg: Strobe light.

Mitch: I hate going outside in the dark.

Mitch: We're feeling the heat,

and it's not just our sexy good looks.

- It's climate change. - Oh.

Mitch: So we're taking our passion for the environment

out of the classroom and into the country.

Greg: We are going off the grid.

Mitch: One by one, we'll shut off our basic necessities.

- Aah! - Oh, my God.

Greg: And with help from our team, we will use science...

Mitch: For a little self-reliance.

Yes! It works!

Mitch: See ya, city, because...

Mitchell and Greg: This is "Shut It Off Asap!"

Mitch: Our power has officially been shut off.

We're off the grid now, which means that we can't use our lights in this cabin,

we can't use our phones or our laptops.

I am also gonna go on airplane mode.

I mean, we can until they run out of juice.

Honestly, I'm a little nervous, 'cause I don't think we realize

just how much we use electricity in everyday devices around us.

Canadians alone use 30 kilowatt hours a day.

That's enough energy to wash 13 1/2 loads of laundry.

We're hoping to power our cabin and the devices that we're using in it.

We have four light bulbs,

we want to be able to charge a laptop,

and Greg has an addiction to his phone.

I like my phone more than most of my friends and family.

It is my escape from the existential dread that is life on this planet.

Mitch: At this point, everybody knows that wind and solar are failsafe ways

to make power off-grid,

but we want to explore some more unique options first.

We do love renewables here at AsapSCIENCE though.

#LeaveFossilFuelsintheGround.

We are in our absolutely pitch black cabin.

Where's anything that I need?

We have our flashlight, but sadly it's in here somewhere,

but it's so dark, we can't find it.

We literally can't find our flashlight.

Mitch: Now, let's be clear, individuals are not responsible

for the vast majority of emissions.

Just 5% of the world's power plants

produce 73% of electricity emissions,

but we believe that making individual change where you can

is the first step towards impacting the bigger picture,

both socially and politically.

Plus, it can be fun.

I am obsessed with pee.

I'm doing something real bonkers.

I want to charge my cell phone with pee.

And the way I'm gonna do that

is by creating a microbial fuel cell

using my urine as a fuel source.

Now in here we have anaerobic bacteria

whose waste is electrons.

Oh, for real?

Yes, and if we can feed it our urine...

- Oh, ew, is that yours? - Literal urine as a food source

for bacteria in this mud-- anaerobic bacteria.

The breakdown of the nutrients in our urine,

like the glucose and the potassium, will release electrons.

If we can harness that in a direct circuit,

I think I could power my phone.

That's cool though if that works.

It just seems really disgusting right now,

and I'm doubting myself and whether we'll air this.

Now my project is something I have been dreaming of doing for a long time.

Honestly, for two years he's been talking about this, so I hope it works there, bud.

So my dream is hook in some bicycles and use that as a power source.

I'm basically gonna be using the kinetic motion of their wheels

into a generator, and collecting that power as you can see here.

Hopefully we can get enough to charge our home.

Good luck, hons.

Before we get started on our projects,

we need to talk about what electricity actually is.

The secret to understanding how electricity works

is understanding atoms.

Now, atoms make up everything you see or touch,

and in fact, you are only just a complex conglomeration of atoms.

Sorry, hon.

In simple terms, every atom has a nucleus

that contains positively charged protons and neutral neutrons

which are surrounded by negatively charged electrons.

These electrons "orbit" the protons and neutrons

as seen here.

And there's a lot more complexity to this,

but we're gonna keep it quite simple for now

and not try to enter the quantum realm.

Now electrons, in particular the outer electrons,

can move between atoms.

Generally that movement is in all directions,

but if we can make them move collectively in one direction,

that becomes an electric current.

What's, like, the hottest way to hold a shovel?

Like, over your back?

So we're on our way to get some anaerobic bacteria.

Mitch: In some mud!

Greg: We're looking for Geobacter bacteria

as well Shewanella bacteria.

Basically, anaerobic bacteria exists in environments

where there is no oxygen,

so not only do we have water covering this here,

we're gonna dig down under the stream, pull up a bunch of that mud,

and hopefully we'll be finding anaerobic bacteria.

- Imagine we found, like... - A terrifying animal?

Or treasure of sorts.

Like all living cells,

microorganisms like bacteria need energy to live.

They generate energy by consuming nutrients,

in this case supplied by our urine.

Greg: Bacteria that live in the presence of oxygen

go through aerobic respiration.

This means they create energy by using oxygen

as an electronic accepter, ultimately creating ATP,

the energy molecule.

But the absence of oxygen,

some special anaerobic bacteria

are able to transport their electrons

to other substances like metals or even graphite

to create their own energy.

If we can provide them with that metal

and harness those electrons,

then we might be able to create our own bioelectricity.

Heave ho.

I really hope that you guys are in there.

Oh, if you look real close, you can kind of see them.

Totally kidding.

It's too bad. We won't really know

until we start our experiment if we got them.

Now that Greg has his mud,

it's time for me to start my experiment.

The average Canadian household uses around

30 kilowatt hours of electricity per day.

We only have a few light bulbs and a laptop in our bunky though.

So I only need to generate a fraction of that,

about 0.6 kilowatt hours with my bike generator experiment.

But to pull it off, I need help from our buildmaster Paul.

Thank you so much, Paul.

For our bike experiment, we have built this rig here

to hold onto the back wheel,

and we have it connected down here to a little skateboard wheel,

and that skateboard wheel is actually spinning our generator.

Generators use magnetic fields to move electrons through metals such as copper.

This principle is tied to Faraday's law of induction,

which states that when you move or change a magnetic field

in the vicinity of a coil wire,

it induces an electrical current in that wire.

Greg: And copper is a very conductive material

'cause there's only one little measly electron

here in the outer shell that can be easily moved.

That's why copper wire is so good at having electrons

move in one direction along it

and having electricity flow, and we'll be using it today.

For my experiment, I'm going cutting edge.

Few people in the world have successfully built

a fuel cell with microbes that can charge a mobile phone.

The guy credited for doing it first

is Professor Yannis Ieropoulos.

It took him close to 20 years to make it work.

I'm attempting to do it in less than a week.

Okay, wait, there's a lot going on here.

I thought you were just trying to figure out how to charge your phone with pee.

I know. We got carried away.

So in this first urinal is funnel where you will pee.

Your pee will come through down here into this jar.

This jar will fill up with urine.

Okay.

- And then you get on here. - What is this?

Put this up, wash your hands.

- What? - You get off.

- Boom! We're watering our kale, first of all. - Beautiful.

But our pee now has the force of gravity

- to come down into our fuel cell. - Oh, my gosh.

Here's a good place to explain

how the fuel cells harness the electrons

being expelled from the bacteria.

We'll do this chamber with two electrodes.

Electrodes are conductors inserted into a substance

where electricity can enter or exit.

The electrons move in one direction

from the negative electrode to the positive one,

and then that creates an electric current.

Well, I'm so excited. Like, when do we put the pee in?

I mean, I have to pee.

'Tis a coffee pee. Don't judge any coloration.

So I'm in here.

- It should be coming! - Oh, there's pee!

Oh, it's not too yellow.

This is kinda gross, Greg.

Boom, boom, boom. Pee.

Okay.

Greg: Here we go! We're filling her up.

How was it?

It was a bit of a mess in there.

Okay, so we got some leakage.

So already we are getting electrons

passing through our direct circuit,

which we can tell from this volt meter.

And you're gonna see that it went from zero to two volts.

So that's power coming from here?

Yes, and hopefully the bacteria's gonna go absolutely ham

- and release those electrons. - Okay.

The pee construction is really cool.

The question remains, okay, Greg, does it work?

Hopefully we can pull it off,

and hopefully we'll get some phone power.

It's "Blair Witch." Aah!

Mitch: It actually looks way scarier in here

- without daylight outside. - I know.

Mitch: This is what we have to live with.

This is our gorgeous bedroom.

But I am actually excited to go to bed, like, out here.

Like, it's cozy. Like, it's horror vibes, but it's cozy.

Do you want me to tell you a story?

Mitch: He looks like just a pure ghost.

( wolf howls )

The one part I didn't fully count on in the beginning

was just how much I personally would have to bike.

Greg's gonna charge a phone, but I'm tasked with all the light bulbs, the laptops,

like, everything else in our cabin.

As it's spinning, we're generating electrons

that come through these wires and enter into a rectifier,

which is essentially pushing the electrons in one direction.

And then they hit our charger or regulator,

and this is gonna help us stabilize the voltage.

'Cause I might be pedaling slow when I'm lazy...

Or fast when I have a lot of energy.

So those electrons are gonna be coming at all different speeds.

So what this little device does

is it outputs electrons at a consistent rate.

So the voltage comes out of the regulator

and into three ten milliamp batteries.

When we're ready to use it,

we can turn on our inverter,

and that's basically changing the DC current,

or direct current, into alternating current,