AMAZING 250+ Watts of Micro Hydro Power Off Grid
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- An Amazing 250+ watts of continuous power from this Turgo Micro Hydro system. I travel to an off grid Yurt to meet Eric in Western North Carolina. He shows off his Micro Hydro Turgo install. This is making all the power he needs to run basic appliances like coffee maker, mini split air conditioner and lights. This setup has a coanda screen feeding 700 feet of 4 inch pvc pipe penstock. The head pressure is 57 feet of drop resulting in 25psi at the turgo. Eric has a few nozzle sizes that he is able to swap to for flow rate change in the creek. In the summer he is running a single 5/8" nozzle making 250 watts all the time.
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I love these, but I fear that they will freeze up in winter colder climates. only reason I havent looked into them that much.
Hey brother, where were you several years ago when İ lived in Bakersville?
57 ft head flow through a 5/8" nozzle = 55 gpm
55 gpm * 8.34 lb/gallon * 57 ft head / 60 seconds / 550 ft lb/hp = 0.79 HP available.
0.79 hp * 3/4 kw/hp = 0.59 kw
0.250 / 0.59 = 42% efficiency - not bad for a small system, but could be better.
You will have about 12.5 ft head friction loss through 1000 ft of 4" pipe @150 GPM.
Pressure (and flow through the nozzle) will change based on head pressure, so a bigger nozzle is self regulating as far as nozzle flow is concerned, because the head in the pipe will change.
The manufacturer should have chart for turbine efficiency based on pressure and flow so that can be optimized.
You can vent the pipe to eliminate air with a 'T' a few feet of fall below the intake. (this may not work if head falls below the T, and may depend if there are any flat spots lower down.)
How much is a turbine like this setup?
I haven't finished the video yet, so I could be wrong: it might be an idea to use Watt hours instead of Watts for units of energy. Watts is instantaneous power, while Watt hours is total energy produced over a time period.
I suppose saying 600 W is a bit click bait. So I changed the title to w hours.
come on everyone know's Voltage is the "best" measure of power lol
@@LandtoHouse 6KWh/day is still quite impressive.
Thats exactly what a watts are, joules per second lol. but I know what you mean.
@@LandtoHouse Saying "AMAZING 6000 Watt Hours of Micro Hydro Power" is not at all ..
Nice setup. Great to see examples of what didn't work and what does. It may save others some time, money and trouble as they work to set up their own system.
Also the decrease in the split value pressure vs non split can be looked up in a k-value table depending on type and angle. Beautiful work
Very neat setup. Pretty cool that there are some efficiencies that could be improved, but as he said it already powers everything he needs, so don't fix what isn't broken. Makes it that much more future proof too. Great video!
How's the saying go? don't let perfect be the enemy of good?
Very interesting. My creek runs 24/7 from a cistern spring, even in the severest drought.
This was fascinating, thank you for bringing this to us.
Eric has some neat design concepts that you might want to consider for your dream list for your Mark III:
- All nozzles have their own ball valve to select the best set for the current water conditions instead of having one "always on".
- Stepping up to oversize Y fittings, then back down to flexible lines for a graceful curve into the nozzle to improve flow efficiency over sharp right angle turns in elbows and T fittings.
- Running 2 smaller opposing nozzles instead of one 'just right', to improve the efficiency by having balanced pressure on opposite sides of the turbine.
Thank you for sharing this.
9 O0L Pl MO ilk p no oo m o 9o
Love it. Will fix a similar system for my cabin! Thanks for the inspiration
This looks great. I have a small spring on my property and would love to do something like this.
When the system is run on a large scale, it's important to integrate into it fish culture, preparing fertile soil, filtering water for drinking, etc.
Thank you for this video. Eric has an impressive and professional setup.
Thank you for watching. His work is great.
the gentleman is a hard worker and busy with his work respect for him from algeria sahara greetings and good luck Erik nice work and smart Don't waste the water that roams to enjoy
Awesome setup and thanks for sharing.
Thank you for watching. Stay tuned for the walk through if his off grid yurt.
This man is living my dream! God bless! thanks for the video
Amazing setup.
6000 Watts a day != 6000 Watt/hour thats 250 Watt hours. I'd recommend exchanging the title. Otherwise, nice build as always!
It is misleading for sure. 6000w/h is enough for everything in house. Other just for TV.
I added the "per day" so its accurate.
@@LandtoHouse thank you very much Seth! I know you only mean well!
@@LandtoHouse yeah didn't want to sound mean :) never the less it's cool project
Good video as always but, unfortunately, now it's not only misleading but wrong. :/
Watt times hours is energy, in units: watt hours, Joules or calories if you want.
Watts is a unit of power, like horsepower.
If you say my car has 150hp per day, that's just wrong.
Sorry,
Nice job Eric, this setup is very clean and well thought out. Probably the nicest I have seen. I am glad you showed the previous intakes and explained why they weren’t working too.
yes - failures can often be as or more important than success!
This is a very nice, neat setup.
Congratulations man ! Great good job !
Great video! Wonderful application of conanda effect! Thanks for stating watts per day as I think it is best way for folks to understand how an energy producing system will (or will not) work for them. It's similar to sun's insolation at surface e.g. 2 kwatts per day per square meter in winter vs 4 kwatts per day per sq meter in winter. And also thank you so much for putting system specs in description, e.g. head, etc.
I was watching other people build their turbines and generators, and they move rather slow. But yours moves so fast. Really goes to show how much difference precision and professional builds can make.
The speed (rpm's) also depend on the load.
Yes, nice set up.
very nice setup
Great video and hydro set up!!!
He has put a lot of time and effort into this system. I also filmed the off grid yurt. Very cool stuff
Great build and good video!
That's Some Neat But Wild, Crazy Stuff There 👍👍👍
Cant wait to build one
Oh 6000 Wh, not Watts; I thought you installed some kind of monster turbine somehow.
Great video, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for watching. Eric was a really cool guy to hang out with.
I like the tune you used in this. It should be a recurring theme.
That song and the others by that guy are the best on the free youtube music
Very good choice of inverter and epanel schneider and midnite solar
Good job!!
The drop in pressure on two nozzles will be because you don't have enough water coming in the intake and the head level will drop until the new pressure balances with how much is coming out of your nozzles.
Dynamic friction lowers available pressure significantly at high flow rates.
Very good Seth, thank you. I hope you are planning to go visit other sites.
Very nice!
Thanks!
Speaking of tweaks, you should talk to someone who builds hot rods if you want to get some ideas about how to reduce flow resistance with the shapes of your piping. I've always wondered how much loss you get through a PVC pipe fittings because they are not designed particularly well for flow. They have ridges that naturally form at the point where the end of the pipe and shoulder inside the bore meet. You want smooth smooth smooth the whole way through if you can. Also, the actual shapes of the angles aren't ideal either. You don't ever want to see a complete 90 degree turn in such a short radius. You want a nice wide sweep in any directional changes. I'd be interested to see what a nice 1 into 2 collector designed basically the reverse of an engine header collector. Have someone fab one up out of stainless and see if you get any improvements in flow. I think you would. Also, in those places where you have 45 degree fittings, you could heat the pipe up enough to bend it and get a sweeping turn that way. PVC can be formed like this at a relatively low temperature. When I was laying my irrigation pipe I used a heat gun to get the turns I wanted rather than using fittings because it was just easier to make them conform to the hillside that way. Granted it was only 3/4" schedule 40, but I'm sure there's a way to get it done with the bigger pipe. The last thing I'd look at is the straight fittings of the PVC itself. I'm not sure how you'd get this done, but you'd basically need a street type setup like they use in PVC conduit where the fitting would be built into the ends of the pipe and oriented so the female end would be upstream. There would still be a ridge there, but the female ends of those fittings are chamfered to reduce drag.
I agree with you... he should be show up the process, how to make it not just mumbling, I mean talking...
thank you!! great explanations!!
Probably 6000 Watt hours per day :)
But nice Video, I really like such small, simple Hydro systems
I changed the title to be a bit more accurate. Thank you.
@@LandtoHouse - We do want our efforts to be truthful - I applaud your willingness to change the title to reflect reality. Thanks for the video - this stuff is right up my alley, although it's only in my mind as I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a very urban area. It's what I'd LIKE to do!
Absolutely. I also lived in a one bedroom apartment in the middle of town. When I had the opportunity to buy land it changed my whole outlook on life.
Oh man, I really think you would benifit from boosting the voltage before that wire run to prevent a lot of losses!
A step up transformer would work well here
I just did the math and he's loosing 6.7% due to the voltage drop over 1000'
Cool!!
We were looking a property at one time, had a stream and waterfall, this is exactly what we were going to do, well, the concept, my bud was an engineer/inventor, he would of got er done!
Your videos are great for an old engineer to watch, so thank you. I have one suggestion on the pelton wheel principal that may be of interest. The steam engine came of age with the triple expansion engine which used the spent steam. I'm thinking that concentric pelton blades that increase in size/angle could reduce the outflow to a calm drip which would harvest more of the energy from the water.
Steam and water have different properties. Steam condenses as it gives its energy away. Water can't. The outflow MUST equal the inflow. What happens is, the flow slows as the energy is delivered. Potential energy turns into kinetic energy as it falls and the kinetic energy supplies the electric energy, thus slowing the water down. But always, flow in MUST equal flow out.
@@ianhelyar6383: What Rolf means is reducing the outflowing water’s speed not volume! A more efficient turbine would harvest more of the jet’s kinetic energy and leave a slow flow.
👍 Danke fürs Hochladen!
👍 Thanks for uploading!
👍 Very good and beautiful, thank you!
👍 Sehr gut und schön, danke!
Great system guy's, I love this technology. I would try to get the conduit sooner than latter if possible, pesky varnments..👍👍💚🌧🌧. unbelievable that little coffee pot uses so much electricity..🤔🤔🤔
Im your biggest fan here in Philippines hope I'll get one of your hydro here. Thank you
I love this stuff! Great setup man! As far as coffee goes, consider boiling water with gas or fuel and doing pour-overs. They taste better anyway.
Need to build a giant timber box about the size of 4 refrigerators. Intake the water and a foot or so above the bottom is your outtake. You also need a way to pull a slide up which will dump all water and debri from your trash box. Gridlessness shows a guys system that works wonderfully
About 1 ohm of resistance on your 1000' of wire. If it's at 59v @ 252 watts per the end of your video, you're doing 4.25 amps (your charge controller is finding the sweet spot in MPPT mode). So V= I*R = 4.25*1 = 4.25 volts of loss. So you're at 63.25 v at the turbine. So 59/63.25 = 93.3% transmission efficiency or 6.7% loss. Seems not too terrible and it would cost a lot to upgrade that. If you were looking for better performance and you were running higher power levels more often and you needed the power, then you could go chasing a few more percent... but I think your effort would be better spent elsewhere.
Awesome system!
love to watch and keep learning as much as I can as things in South Africa are getting bad with our national power generation is going down every day. Blackouts and what they call load shedding almost weekly. One day we will be able to afford these systems or build our own. Looking at your individual components could take a while before we can afford them. Looking your dual turgo units kits at $4,150.00 is just but a dream because when you convert it to rands we are looking at R67371,93 today if one would buy it. But please guys keep up the good work we are learning a lot from ou guys.
One additional thought for methods of lowering losses. I wonder out loud whether boosting the voltage via AC inverter at the generator would help. A 90%-95% efficient AC inverter creating say, European 240V single phase (cheap Ebay purchase) would drop the wire losses to about 5% and bring 240VAC to the shed. Add 5-10% loss for the added 240VAC inverter, you're at 15% or less voltage drop to the shed, instead of 26%, not a bad improvement. Also brings you AC power that's directly usable. It's predicated though on changing the battery charger to AC power. Another possibility is now that you'd have converted to AC, you could put a transformer in the mix, and step up the voltage even more, reducing the losses proportionally to the voltage increase. Blame Tesla :-) Would have to really make it safe from accidental shock though...probably not worth the risk. For a few hundred watts total generation, you might never recoup the additional investment, depending on how much value you set for the produced power. On a safety note, I hope you've grounded the generator with a #6 copper wire to an 8' ground rod for safety and to comply with NEC? I'm a bit envious, I always wanted to do this, my stream is unfortunately too low head and flow to do anything with.
Hell yes on the die hard set up.
Wow cool
Look up gutter helmet. It uses a round edge design so that the water surface tension holds it around the bend but debris falls off. Scale that up with sheet metal for your intake.
Молодец мужик
The deeper the sediment pond is the easier it is to control a steady flow and power.. all it needs is a clean out pipe to clean the sediment from the holding pond once a year
so interesting
Just a thought regarding air in your pipe. I’m thinking that a T just before the Y section at your turbine, with a short section of vertical pipe , say 1’ high at the full diameter, then reducing to say 1” clear pipe which is capped. If you are getting significant air, it should be ‘caught’ in this pipe. If necessary, you can get air bleed valves ( a weighted float seals when there is no air in the pipe, but is lifted, sealing shut when there isn’t).
You mentioned that you were unsure of the kind of losses you would have in the 1,000 ft of wire. The calculation is simple. Divide the output power at the turbine (250 watts) by the output voltage at the turbine (48 volts), which will give you an output current of 5.2 amps. Multiply the current by the resistance of the 1,000 ft of wire which you can find from a table based on the wire gauge. For 10 gauge it will around 1 ohm per 1,000 ft. Square the current and multiply it by the resistance which should give you about 27 watts. So, roughly 27 watts is being wasted in the 1,000 ft of wire. Keep in mind these losses will also increase as load increases. For example, at 500 watts, 108 watts (quadruple the power) would be wasted in wire.
I can see water discharging "directly" from the turbine, and moving down stream? Would it be possible to use the pulling force of the weight of water on the discharge side of the turbine? Are you using a stand by trickle charger to prevent sulfation of the battery plates, when hydro-generator system is not producing enough electricity? Also... would there be a way to use pulse-width modulation to move the electricity from the turbine-generator to the batteries? I like your setup, that is cool stuff, thank you for the info!
This is the person the government and power company fear. A self sufficient person with no fees or use of city power.
YES! I will have his off grid Yurt video up soon. You can get a closer look at how he lives.
Your 4 inch micro hydro at the reservoir, uses small sharp bins as you can get away with the water will flow better through a 22 angle multiple 90 than a 90 single bend. Use a multi-blade multi system on the shaft to get a stronger reaction to the flow for your alternator.
Simple and practical system. All one would need to do ifthe power became more then the turbine could do isto add a second identical battery bank to help add amp storage so as to reduce pull down onthe batteries.
Can you share more info on the battery bank set up? Such as what exactly those batteries are? What are those connectors we got a glimpse of? I think that is a Really neat micro hydro system! The 1000' of 10/2 would worry me, have you tested the line loss yet?
Off grid living 😍. UK is too densely populated.
Depending on flow and pipe size you need to figure entrance head of water to flow full in pipe. That is the problem at your inlet box
Great video! So my neighbors behind me put down a few hundred square feet of Astroturf under their kids' playset and is causing my yard to erode. I'm currently (very slowly) digging a trench across the back of my yard to try to slow the flow a bit until I have time to find a real solution. I like the idea of somewhat damming up the water and diverting to a micro hydro. Question: Could a solenoid be used to open and close a valve for the water to where if the electricity goes out it shuts off the water flow to save the turbine. Depending on how far away your system is it may be beneficial to manually have to restart the turbine to open the valve rather than burn up another turbine. Thanks!
Dang that sucks about the mice chewing through your wire. Nice to get the warning about that tho before I tried it with a wind or hydro turbine and got my motor locked up too. Ouch.
Banked designs are the best they produce a lot of power.
awosome, that is amazing easy siple system,,, wondeing where can we find those turbine in australia or newzealand? cheers
Nice video, can't you make energy from the output from the turbine?
Youtubist Under Dunn made a dust collection system that could be modified to help with cleaning debris from your inlet.
Maybe just stones overlapping in a triangle like roof shingles before your inlet so you only get eddy water would keep a large amount of debris from your intake.
Congrats from india.
Nice set up 👍👍🇺🇸
Eric did a really good job with this one. His intake gave him some trouble but it seems to be very good now.
I have the same 48 volt system.
Increase the height of your SS water collector to at least twice the diameter of your pipe, but it all depends on the flow rate. If still not enough to maintain the water level higher than the pipe then increase further.
Turbine Assembly ( possibly have a selection for User Requirements) should be on top( dry) & easily disassemble for Repairs/ Maintenance Required .
Like the Comments from Viewers( engineering) the Rotational Water flow should be in sync for Minimal Flow Resistance ( higher revolutionary levels)
And why not use some additional hydro when the water comes out from the system?
Looks like this water has a decent speed / impact, so there are some watts over there :)
Great job!.
Отлично. Человек объясняет очень подробно, как всё работает.
nice work very nice American know how.
How long will your battery bank last overnight just on solar also if the inverter being on is dependent on the main power grid how does it work during power outage. And on your hydro system the water losses at the collection box, could you use one of your ram pump to catch some of the loss and pump it back into the barrel to keep your flow rate a little higher
Could you add a circuit breaker to protect the cables coming from the generator
Could you get more power if there was a ram pump before the jets?
Eric's setup is one of the only ones I've seen so far that puts the rectifier so far away from the actual generator head.
It'd be interesting to see what his drop is over that line, as well as some kind of experiment to see if that vs. the super close rectifier to A/C conversion results in a higher efficiency setup.
It's also be curious to see if using a pair (possibly?) of transformer sets to step up and step down the voltage could improve power transmission. I'm thinking that, one of the reasons power transmission voltages are so high, is to lessen losses.
Some basic digging I just did, says Eric's losses should be about 53W over that 1000' run. If he halves the current that brings the losses down to 13.3W, quarter the current brings it to 3.3W. So a 4:1 transformer group on each end would do wonders for his power losses. The question is finding appropriate transformers, protecting them in the harsh environment near the generator head, what their respective losses are, and of course their cost.
Perhaps this is also an opportunity for Langston, to make a unit that puts out much higher voltages, with a matching transformer for the other end.
You bring up some intriguing points to consider. 10g wire comes in at about 1ohm/1000ft under nominal household current, so his losses with the new wire will actually be quite minimal when you consider that a 60 watt bulb measures 2 ohms resistance. It looks like he's running 14g wire right now which comes in at 2.5ohm/1000ft, but considering the trade off between cost of the wire and how much loss is recovered and you can find that the 'best' answer for efficiency may not be the best answer for the economics.
Putting the rectifier as close to the charge controller is actually a very good choice, 3-phase AC transmission over long runs is much more efficient than DC transmission; that's why we use Tesla's answer instead of Edison's for the power companies long run power transmission.
You are right that a step up transformer at the turbine for the long line transmission and step down at the charge controller would be more efficient, with much higher voltage and much lower amperage the wire's resistance becomes less of a factor, but the costs of the transformers would be very difficult to recover for the few tens of watts that it might save.
I can pretty much make the voltage whatever you want it to be by changing the windings . have them that will do 600 plus volts . They work well with the grid Inverters . Schneider makes a charge controller that will take in up to 600 V but normally run under load 250v to 400v and will step it down to 48 volts⚡. The charged controllers cost $1500 so that basically just comes down to 💰
@@workbenchz
I got my numbers by taking 10ga wiring, 4.26A (based on the voltage and wattage listed on the controller), 1000' (304.8M) length, used www.engineeringtoolbox.com/awg-wire-gauge-d_731.html to get the cross sectional area, and plugged it all into www.electrical4u.net/calculator/cable-power-loss-calculator-formula-calculation/ to arrive at my values. Hopefully they're remotely accurate based on that. :D
@@SpencerLAPower That... is interesting. Are there any cons with doing higher voltage windings? Any experiments to see if there's a "sweet spot" between voltage and current.
@@johnhufnagel It really depends on how long a distance you're trying to run the wire for 48 V system if you get over 150 V you end up dissipating a lot of it in heat with the Transformers in the charge controller. But if you could use this with a say 72 V system you could get almost double the power.
I'm not sure if I got it all. The microturbine generates AC output? up the 1000' wire then goes through a rectifier bridge to go back to DC which is input to the inverter? So is there a schematic of what was used for that rectifier bridge that handles that much power?
Just wondering why he does not have a stand pipe down from intake so air in line can escape?
Nice!
Sure wish I would of been smurter when I was younger and went this way with micro hydro!
Awesome score on the coanda intake. Quotes from Elgin are quite pricy !
was about to say the same, almost $1000, crazy price.
@@dodgeplow Yeah theres plastic coanda tiles that can be 3d printed. Definitely would be nice to have a solid SS one though.
@@VanillaAttila even for SS that is pricey. That is not a lot of material and TIG welding not that many hours worth of labor.
I suspect where you have your pressure valve and clean out are creating a backflow which decreases your psi. If you move pressure valve to the other side of the Y. Then move your cleanout to the other side and make it vertical. This should increase psi and help alleviat air in the system also.
I'd say it's a better idea to put the first circuit breaker on the AC input unless it is specified for DC. Otherwise it can have arcing problem and be damaged even after one use.
Mantap 👍👍
There's a chap in the UK with a similar setup to this intake, search Kris Harbour
Yes kris is using a unique 3d printed coanda screen. Same idea. I like his work.
I haven't watched the full video yet, but is there a chance you can run your unit in a way that doesn't cut off the entire flow of the creek?
From the initial looks of it, it seems that this set up mirrors conventional hydro power but at a micro-to-pico scale: block off an entire water flow to build up enough head for sufficient power conversion.
There are micro-hydrokinetic turbines that you can use for small stream stuff (this creek does look too small for that, but I'm wondering if you could do a run-of-the-river type installation where you divert like half of the creek or less to the side, leaving the other half or more open to free flow.
Doing a run-of-the-river installation allows for the creek to mostly continue it's natural erosion/sediment-generation pattern while offering sufficient head if you run a pipe far enough.
I love that you're thinking about how you get your energy, and at least are trying to use your surroundings to substantiate your way of life, rather than relying on energy from far away places that you don't really have control over.
Next step is ecological harmonization, and, well, probably storage too (although you might have that but haven't watched the video yet) 👍
Consider a microphone, or mention to everyone on camera not to look at the project, but rather the camera. We'll see behind them and see the project. Great intro!!!
Let me say I love this concept. I would like to know how long does it take to recoup your electric money? Reason I ask, is just the plumbing pipe alone had to be a small fortune not to mention 1000 feet of 10-2. Then of course the generator. All the batteries and associated electronics plus the panels had to be somewhat expensive. Just looking over you're system what would a guy have to plunk out to get all the same stuff? I am just wondering and I mean no ill will. By the way the system looks well built so I gave it a thumbs up.
Just because it has a stream/waterfall does not guarantee the right , (riparian), to install a hydro unit? Would love to see some content including best locations in U.S. for this type of setup..... Great video!
I'm going off grid im 2 weeks. I am retired from military and I have a water source on.my property. But today is the first day I've heard of this. So how do you bring the power into your home?
cool
Is there a way to have a direct power transfer to the light 💡 in the house rather then through batteries?
Hi, nice video. How do I get this turbine ?
What is the service life of this device and the failure rate?
Very noice !
Thanks! Very cool setup.