I just discovered something which I completely do not understand and was wondering if anyone knows the explanation for this phenomenon or has seen it themselves. When I reverse the voltage across my dry cell, the current draw is half of what it was in the normal direction. It's as if the plates allow the current to flow in one direction more than the other. I'm guessing whatever direction the cell was originally run at becomes the least resistance path, but don't understand the physics of why that would happen.

This leads to another problem I recently started having. When I originally built my cell, it worked great and current, voltage and gas output values were as expected. But then after taking the cell apart several times and expanding it's size, I can no longer get it to draw the same current as before. Since I was not aware of the above phenomenon, I did not take care to keep the plates in their original order and they got shuffled around. So I'm guessing some of them are reversed and adding more resistance to the current path than they originally were. Since I wiped the slight rust colored stain off the positive sides I no longer have a visual cue as to what the original plate orientation was. Is there any other way to tell, or will the new orientation eventually "burn in" after some time and get back to the original resistance values?