There’s a good chance that you haven’t given hydrogen a thought since eighth grade chemistry. Heck, there’s a good chance you didn’t even give it a thought then, much less now in your everyday life. But with gas prices on an apparently endless march upward, hydrogen has become a fixture in the news and in a lot of people’s life.

So you may be asking what’s the deal with hydrogen? What it is it and, much more importantly, how can it save me money? If I inhale it, will it make me talk funny? Can I use it to disinfect cuts?

Okay, maybe not the last two. But for the record. It won’t make you talk funny, and I wouldn’t use it to clean out your cat scratches, since liquid hydrogen is cold enough to turn your flesh to solid ice. Which, admittedly, probably would stop your cut from getting infected.

Hydrogen is an element, one of the basic building blocks of the universe. In fact, hydrogen is the most common element of all, comprising more than seventy five percent of the universe. That’s universe, as in, everything.

It’s also one of the components of water, and a heck of fuel. It’s highly combustible, and incredibly clean burning. That, along with its abundance, is the reason that you’re seeing a lot about it in the news.

The more futuristic way to use it is by way of hydrogen fuel cells. A fuel cell is more or less a battery that never runs out of power, with the caveat that you need to keep refueling one of the chemicals.   It turns hydrogen and oxygen into water, a process that releases energy that is then used for power.

Which is wonderful, but not especially handy for those of us who aren’t living in the future. But there is something that can help you use the power of hydrogen right now. That’s the Water4Gas system.

What this system does is use electrolysis, the same process fuel cells use, to turn ordinary water into a hydrogen gas that your car can then burn in place of oxygen. Normally, your car mixes oxygen and gas to power the engine. Obviously, this works, but it’s shockingly inefficient.

By allowing your car to mix the hydrogen gas with gasoline, it means that you can go farther with every tank of gas. This means you’ll have to fill up less often, which means you get to save money.

All by using the simplest, most common thing in the universe.