We extend previous work describing the passive electrical coupling of two periodic chemical states to include quasiperiodic and chaotic states. Our setup resembles an electrochemical concentration cell (a battery) whose half cells [continuous-flow stirred tank reactors (CSTRs)] each contain the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. For a closed electrical circuit the two half cells are weakly coupled by an external variable resistance and by a constant low mass flow. This battery may produce either periodic, quasiperiodic, or chaotic alternating current depending on the dynamic BZ states chosen in the half cells. A lower fractal dimensionality is calculated from the electrical potential of a single chaotic CSTR than from the difference potential (relative potential) of the two chaotic half cell potentials. A similar situation is observed in model calculations of a chaotic spatiotemporal system (the driven Brusselator in one space dimension) where the dimensionality derived from a local time series is lower than the dimensionality of the global trajectory calculated from the Karhunen-Loeve coefficients.