personal hydo-electric

[briansol]

I've done a bit of research on these home hydo systems. Nothing seems to offer any real info without buying a $100 ebook (and its probably crap anyway).

My property borders a "babbling brook". it's not a river by any means. With the exception of the very dry late summer months, it flows pretty steadily throughout the year and rarely completely freezes more than the top couple inches.

Bad pic attached, but you can kinda see it down there in the valley.

I'm not looking to spend 10k on a system and power my whole house. i'd just like to spend ~500 in parts and maybe save 10-20 a month on my power bill.

Any have some good insight to this?

 

[Skier76]

We have a similar streatm in VT. I looked things up before and you're right...seems like the only things out there cost a few bucks. I think it would be cool to have a very simple setup; something to suppliment "grid" power...or run a few things in the event the power goes out.

It seems that you need a decent amout of water to spin things. I'm starting to think you'd need to have some type of small dam to hold things back...then funnel it through a turbine.

 

[Jags]

Thinking out loud---A water wheel (like the old paddle wheelers had), with a pulley on the shaft turning an old GM one wire generator charging a 12 Volt battery (or bank of batteries). Depending on the size of wheel and water flow, I wouldn't expect to get more than about 10 amps.

If I remember correctly I think it takes one HP per 10 amps at 12 Volts to give you an idea of the energy required to spin the generator.

Edit: on the flip side of that, if you think you can stop the shaft by grabbing ahold of it with your hand, you probably don't have enough energy available to mess with.

 

[briansol]

its hard to say if i could or not without actually having it in front of me.
i'm guessing i could.... but i'm no wimp either

It certainly doesn't flow very quick and there's not much head (the angle downhill), but i bet i could move a couple small rocks and make a bit of a velocity stack of sorts to increase flow speed before the entrance into the shaft.

 

[CarbonNeutral]

Search web for micro-hydro if you haven't already. What sort of vertical drop do you have?

 

[briansol]

not much. maybe 1 foot per 10 length.

 

[Gooserider]

Also before putting much effort into it, I would want to check out any legal questions - if the brook is a property line, what sort of agreements do you need to have with the abutter on the other side? Are there any local / state / federal restrictions on such things? I don't like these rules and restrictions, but it is worth finding out what they are before you put down any serious time or money, only to find out that you can't readily do anything... If there are any fish that use the brook for spawning, there will probably be some pretty significant restrictions on how much of the flow you could tap in any case...

That said, what is the total drop from where the brook enters your property to where it leaves? I am not an expert, but the two big issues as I understand it is the volume of water flow and the distance that it drops. The drop distance needs to be pretty near vertical to be really useful... What might work would be to create a "tap" near the high end of the property and divert some of the flow into a culvert or aquaduct that you kept close to level as it flowed across the property to near the low end, and then dropped all at once through a turbine or water wheel before rejoining the original flow. I don't know the details, but I seem to recall getting some pretty serious levels of power out of that sort of setup.

Gooserider

 

[CarbonNeutral]

The vertical head is what is important (along with the flow). You can divert flow into a pipe that runs down the hill - you'd get pretty much the same energy out minus some frictional losses - this is how many micro-hydros in developing countries run.

Some stuff:


http://www.nooutage.com/hydroele.htm

From that site with a 10ft drop over 100ft at 20 gallons per minute, with losses you're looking at 14 watts - maybe one cfl lightbulb. Don't know how that compares to your situation. A lower flow shower head puts out 2 gpm, if that's any help with comparison - I've no idea what a brook gpm rate could be.

 

[DBoon]

Home Power magazine is a pretty good resource. They periodically have articles on small scale hydro, and advertisements for small scale microhydro systems.

 

[JustWood]

Backwoods Home Magazine has had some DIY articles on the subject over the years. Goto their website and search the archives

 

[briansol]

Well, it looks like this idea is shot. running 1 light bulb isn't worth my time or effort.
thanks for the feedback guys.

 

[CarbonNeutral]

But, with my caveat, your brook could be 200 gpm - that's better, and maybe worth it for fun?

 

[ccwhite]

They used to use water wheels to grind corn or wheat into flour with only a 5 - 10 foot head. If that has enough power to turn those big stones and grind corn I can't imagine that with a couple pulleys and a belt you couldn't ramp up the output speed to run a car alternator of some sort. If I had a stream of any reliable flow near my house I would definitely have a try at it.

Check this out http://www.waterwheelfactory.com/ all the way at the bottom there is a link to this http://www.waterwheelfactory.com/HP Table.htm which will help you figure out your potential for producing electric.