ZPOD Replication

So I did my first ZPOD replication. The ZPOD is a device by William Alek that uses multiple toroidal transformers wound 1:1. The primaries are connected in parallel and the secondaries are connected in series. A blocking diode on the secondaries prevents current from flowing while the primary is being charged, upon discharge current flows through the secondaries. Alek claims the device produces excess energy by converting ambient heat to electrical energy. Additionally I added biasing magnets between the toroids, lining the toroids up in a row with a bottom and top magnet.

Initially I had some trouble getting this device to work effectively. I had mostly written it off when I decided to take a second look at an anomaly I encountered in early testing. This led to an interesting discovery or perhaps rather a confirmation of Alek's claim of conversion of ambient heat. The summary of what I found was when the primary was driven only by a signal generator attached to a transistor and the input for the primary was a ground wire (my oscilloscope probe ground) the device while consuming no power except what was provided by the signal generator produced a small voltage around certain frequency and 50% duty cycle and could charge a capacitor on the secondary.

If you think the circuit described above sounds stupid you are understanding it correctly.. Input to coil is ground wire, base of coil connects to transistor collector, signal generator on base and emitter... Stupid, but it worked.

What I found was when I placed my hand/arm on the secondary windings of the toroids the capacitor would charge to a much higher voltage. Removing my hand would allow the capacitor to discharge down to a lower voltage. After finding the frequency at which this effect would occur, I connected it back up to a battery and its behavior was much better.. Some interesting problems were encountered.. The device produced enough interference that the multimeter would flash making it hard to track voltage. When I moved up from 12V to 36V my monitor which was about 2 feet away would flash off and on when the device was engaged.. This seemed very odd as I did not expect so much interference from the device since it was based on toroids the magnetic field should be constrained to the toroid, but the device caused significant interference at the higher voltage.

Attachment: Picture of ZPOD transformer