Whoops - hydrogen is not your friend

Sounds like bad labwork to me but the article doesn't go into too much detail. From the Bellingham Herald -- Kendall is just a few miles down the road from here:

Police: Kendall man injured in explosion of home science project
An explosion caused by a backyard science project sent a Kendall man to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle early Wednesday, June 12.

Investigators believe the 44-year-old resident conducted the project in a two-story shed: He used an electrical current to separate hydrogen from water, then captured the gas in a 5-gallon propane tank, said Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo. The man meant to use the hydrogen as a fuel supplement for his vehicles.

But about a minute after midnight the tank overpressurized and exploded. The blast rattled the neighborhood near the 8300 block of Golden Valley Boulevard.

"Our whole house shook," said Mark Metcalf, who lives about two blocks away. "Everyone in our whole cul de sac came out to look."

The man, identified by family members as Andrey Lukyanchin, suffered severe burns on his limbs and torso. He was airlifted to Harborview with critical injuries.

Lukyanchin remained in serious condition as of Wednesday afternoon, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Law enforcement found no evidence of a crime, Elfo said. Family members told investigators the man had a hobby of conducting his own science experiments based on videos he found on the Internet.

When I first read the headline, I was expecting a meth lab (there are a lot of them in a ten mile radius). Our prayers go out to Andrey -- hydrogen is nasty stuff. It is combustible over one of the largest ratios of fuel to air (Hydrogen - 4% to 75%, Gasoline - 1.4% to 7.6% by volume - Acetylene and Ethylene oxide are worse), its flames are near invisible and it causes iron and steel to become very brittle when held in contact with them. My other concern is that using electrolysis to generate it for use as a fuel is one of the most stunningly inefficient reactions out there. Especially if you are using stainless steel for your electrodes. You will see at best around a one percent return on your investment -- the very property that makes stainless steel 'stainless' also makes it one of the worst electrode materials for electrolysis. Commercial Hydrogen production is done through steam reformation of Methane Gas.