The tree that I soldered together has about 20" of surface area on the outside of the tubes. I created a much larger anode to accommodate that surface area. the tubes are about 3" long and my sacrificial surface area should be more than twice the tree surface area.

The wrapping copper pipe was one I had run through my garage sale kiln to check the temp and was pretty ugly and oxidized and gnarly on the surface until I ran it through the bath in copper sulfate.

I soldered my original short tube to the original UCB and brass tube.

I was able to get reasonable results with the voltage divider (this is not a recommended solution btw) because my voltage divider was a 470 ohm and a 47 ohm which should have given me a 10% drop, but instead of getting .12v from 1.2v I was getting more like .05v. 

I changed out my voltage divider from a 470 over 47 to a 220 over 47 and got an improvement, but the biggest plus was that the 220 was a 1w resistor instead of a .25w one. So I could run the voltage up to see what sort of voltages would work.

I like the copper I was getting at .8v, so I dropped the voltage divider and ran it at 1.2v and was still pretty happy.

That's when it struck me.

This is hilarious to me...

I was getting .8 or .9 volts from an earth battery I dinked with.

As a side note, the motivation for me to do a blinkenlight project was because I have another project in mind that I really think could work, but I really need to learn some other things first. A soil sensor to check for moisture, temperature, ph balance, could be run on an earth battery. It would just have to harvest energy into a low voltage cap and run something like a very low voltage RTC and wake up the sensors for reading and pop them into a register until it was full, then wake up a wifi or lora or 433 transmitter for just long enough to dump it all to mqtt and go back to deepest hibernation. I just don't have enough component knowledge to get there yet.

So, I have a earth battery putting out voltages perfect for electro-forming electro-plating 

This gets me all excited...