May 30, 2008 - Micro Hydro - Dan Krill's BLOG on BinaryBedlam

Micro Hydro
May 30, 2008 09:31:34 AM

     I've been looking more and more into this whole idea of self sustainability and the use of alternative power. I already know that I'll use wind and solar power, I even made mention of the use of water for a small hydro electric power house, but I never really looked too much into that one, I mean, I knew it would be nice but I never really thought about how I'd go about implementing it. As an inventor (sort of) I use a lot of power, so the more sources the better, and it looks like hydro would undoubtedly be my biggest energy provider. It's more constant and provides greater output, so I started looking into how I can do it efficiently.
     After watching some more documentaries, reading lots of articles about how past designs have been executed, and factoring in my own power needs and construction abilities, I came up with this initial design concept:

I figure all the parts needed to do this could be obtained fairly easily and construction shouldn't be longer than a month or so. I honestly think the most difficult part of this whole project would actually be finding a good location. Now I don't necessarily need a waterfall, but the key here is finding an area of the stream that pools, like a fishing hole. Then building the powerhouse downstream from there, and to obtain enough pressure for the turbines, there has to be an elevation change of at least 50 feet. And since most streams tend to run along level ground, the pipes could run thousands of feet before achieving this head height.
It seems like a lot of other micro hydro projects done by other people only use 1 generator. If I'm going to take the time to build a whole hydro plant, you better bet your britches I'm going to incorporate more than just 1. I will try to use at least 5! And for cost savings, SUV or luxury car alternators can be used in place of expensive permanent magnet generators (which also require external governors, the alternators have built in regulators that automatically adjust the field strength to maintain voltage). The only downfall being that even the most powerful alternator can only produce about 2800 Watts while some gens could hit 8k. But this is why I will use 5 :-)

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