AMAZING 250+ Watts of Micro Hydro Power Off Grid

[Music] welcome to land of house i'm seth i'm here with eric in western north carolina to check out his micro hydro turgo system it's currently running at 250-ish watts and he's seen it up to over 400 before so we're going to walk around this system look at his intake and the various intakes he has tried and then we will head back down here to the actual turgot and after that we'll walk up to his off-grid yurt to take a look at the power system up there hope you enjoy this is my my third attempt at intake design um first two were pretty much epic failures this was the most epic of the failures and um this was when we get down there it'll make more sense there's a rock ledge that i could get some water flowing into this thing and the pen stock came out of there uh this i had in the creek it's kind of like this running into here and it was doing pretty good that immediately started to clog so i cut the hole um it filled up and was running fantastically but i was a little over ambitious on my site selection um it's wide and there's multiple little places where the water's running well i came back the next morning and all this was i had to go look for it down the creek because the clay is just not substantial enough to hold back that kind of water pressure so this is uh this is attempt number one attempt number two worked well it stayed in place it's concrete but it was it's it's kind of this sort of setup you know and it did what it's supposed to do it collected water out of the creek perfectly but it collected everything else out of the creek perfectly too so it was a daily thing to go unclog this thing and so finally thanks to to chad and spencer and everybody i've got this colander box down here now that's working pretty much flawlessly the uh the barrel that we looked at previously this is where it lived for my first attempt and you can see where there's the water just sort of finds its way around in every little niche and cranny and um so i had it here and i had this thing built up with this big elaborate thing and a bunch of that clay oh it worked so well this was ponded up nicely had a little bit of leakage over here but i didn't think anything about it running great until the next morning when it was all down there um so that was attempt number one this is attempt number two and this was quite a feat in itself um i had to this was a there's kind of a hole in the bank there and so i had to address that first and i had several bags of that clay and um so i took a bunch of rocks and stuff out of the creek and patched up this hole put this epdm rubber on it kind of armored it with the creek stone there so water didn't wash around it anymore and then had to build a dam right here uh with sandbags and had another piece of rubber that damn the whole creek up here and diverted everything you see what kind of washed the soil away here and it diverted the creek around this and while i could pour this concrete and um and it worked great i mean it all the water kind of goes into there we have plenty of this is a nice little overflow area here but it's just so problematic with the late glitter and detritus and things that just pack in there and it was a daily daily problem so as you can see where i kind of union things together with not a union but a furniture moved further on up this is attempt number three and just by quickly looking at it you can see was uh engineered and designed by professionals with much more experience than myself it looks good it works good um chad barber from elgin was nice enough to send this thing to me to to try out and uh it's really working flawlessly it does what it does perfectly i mean i haven't had to clean the screen off at all or anything i do need to i've got a little bit of tidying up to do with the pond liner in there but um yeah this this one just made more sense to me i looked at several locations from the other intake back to this one and there's a big rock here which i thought i could probably use as sort of a buttress you know to hold the dam material in we got about gosh a couple inches of rain overnight a week or so ago and it was really i mean it dug a big hole out here where it was coming over so i feel pretty confident that this setup is going to stay so this thing is just fantastic and i can't tell chad thank you enough and spencer for hooking me up with him i'm really pleased with it so far i haven't you know haven't had a long-term test yet but thus far it seems to be doing exactly what it's supposed to do originally the first setup i had was this pipe coming in i had a really sharp 90 that went directly into this this fern cove coupling here and and that was it and i had a problem right off the bat with it with sucking some air you could you could hear it and you could put your hand on the pipe and it would kind of chug you know and um i thought gosh what is that and so i just walked the pipe up looking for holes and things and i i think i figured it out that the top of this six inch pipe is kind of close to the surface of the water and right now that's just a little bit of overflow i have seen it way up here but even when it's down like this and i i think the the closeness of the pipe to the top of the water and how much this thing it's really sucking hard and i think it was just sucking a little bit of air in through right there and so took it all back apart and now this pipe this four inch pipe runs all the way through this coupling and all the way across to about here in the box and it's capped on the end and if it's in there like this the holes come in kind of from the bottom corners like that so it's pulling the water in from the bottom and not sucking air in through here anymore and i think i have a limit so this is just kind of full of water it's not pulling water you know what i mean so i think i've corrected that problem i'll be honest i do still have some air infiltration but i think it's coming from i've got a couple of fern cones down below and i'm pretty sure that's where it's coming from i it's what i had on hand and it's a long way to load so that's just what i used so that's that's uh maybe tomorrow i'll address that issue just a brief overview of my system i the flow rate i'm not really sure what it is currently i know in the winter time it averages about 150 gallons a minute maybe 160. it's summertime now so it's uh you know a fair amount lower than that this is running one 5 8 inch nozzle with you know this this kind of overflow so i really couldn't tell you what the flow rate is at the moment but it's enough to run what i need to run with the 1586 module there's approximately 700 feet of pin stock from here down to the turbine and it's about 57 58 feet of fall which generates about 25 pounds of pressure on the nozzles and my setup only we'll see a minute has a two five eighths nozzles and two 9 16 controls okay uh don't have any hinges yet so i just have to do this manually yeah so this is my uh this is my turbine it was built by spencer langston and uh really really works good um i went through a fairly lengthy process of checking different nozzle sizes in this split hose setup here and you know and let spencer know which ones work good which ones would flow you know with 100 flow rate and still have overflow with the intake which is really important for me i don't want to dry the creek up so the pen stock is a four inch whale casing it's approximately 700 feet long runs from the turbine up to the coanda intake box up there i've got about 57 to 58 feet of drop and with one nozzle running i have 25 psi at the turbine with two it drops a little bit and i think that's because more water flow increases friction loss and i think that's where that's coming into play but the water comes down it hits the this y splits into two two inch flexible hoses and runs to the opposing nozzles in the in the turbine box um and i have currently two 5 8 inch nozzles and two 9 16 inch nozzles it's nice to have the flexibility um in the summertime i can run one 5 8 inch nozzle currently because of the the creeks are kind of low in the winter time i can run both of them and with both of them running i can get little over 400 watts and i have the two 9 16 inch nozzles as well just for kind of some in between stuff but there's a pressure gauge that i installed here in the t and that just lets me know you know what's going on it's nice because if there's an issue with the power up at the yurt um i don't have to necessarily go to the colander box because it's pretty much maintenance free i can come down here and see the gauge and if the gauges come off of 25 i know that there's probably there's some air or something that's gotten into the system i can shut it off and let it do its thing and just sort of start evaluating some of the problems from there but spencer langston built this uh this turbine based on the flow rate and all the parameters that that he asked me for with my system i have done some tweaking um i cut some off of the stand because it was it was about you know 12 inches higher the pipe was probably 10 inches lower and just by doing that by gradually raising the pipe level up and lowering the turbine down and got those more in line decreasing the length of the two flexible pipes i was able to gain probably 30 to 40 watts it's really amazing what little little tweaks will do but this thing runs from here one thousand feet up to the charge controller i have a one 000 foot spool of tin two wire that i'm going to put in conduit soon because i'm worried about squirrels chewing it up and i would never find it over the thousand feet but i don't know how much loss i have i haven't put a meter on it here and then checked it with a meter there to see what the what the loss is over that much wire but it's it runs what i need to run and that's all that matters to me so this is uh this is my my power set up here this will start down low i've got 16 um 12 volt agm batteries and i have those you know wired in series i think it's right positive the negative positive to negative positive to negative and so essentially that makes one 48 volt battery and so with the 16 i have four of those wired in parallel uh negative to negative positive to positive and so i have about i have a 48 volt battery bank with about 385 amp hours of storage um power from the turbine comes in here this uh that's about a thousand that's a exactly actually one thousand foot of tin tube uh ground contact wire runs through this bridge rectifier i left it sticking out from the wall just so the heat would disperse there and the wire is pretty rigid but it runs through the bridge rectifier which turns the ac power from the turbine into dc power here that runs through the circuit breakers here up to the charge controller which runs uh back through the bigger circuit breaker and then to the main one that shuts the batteries off and onto the inverter so these come in from the batteries these go out to the inverter this is a split phase inverter which is really cool it turns somehow 48 volts into 240 volts and this runs the conduit back to the yurt over there where the 240 is nice because it will run both legs or both sides of the breaker panel and it's you know spencer was saying that it's best to keep it balanced and so that works out well and then i've got a line comes from that one into this little panel box over here which powers this shed uh but i got it done i didn't kill myself or burn anything down so i'm feeling pretty confident about that so far i think there are some things i could add maybe in the future like uh this thing has an automatic generator start um it's kind of cool i'd have to reread to get that figured out but so far i don't need that i don't i don't use the power that this thing produces i don't have a lot going on here so um this makes more than i need so far he's going to turn on the coffee pot to pull a lot of watts and we should see the turbine pull full watts of its potential here on a charge controller yeah 250 you know 253 252. this thing here is the control panel for the inverter and it's kind of cool it shows you what the battery level is at and what the current load is on the inverter and that little coffee pot is 670 680 little coffee pot is you know 690 that thing draws a tremendous amount of power and that concludes the look at eric's system here so he's got a four inch pipe coming out of that coanda screen dropping uh what do you say 57 feet at uh 700 foot of pipe and he's got so 25 psi down here and then a thousand feet of tin two is going back up to the yurt and he's going to be putting conduit around that to prevent the squirrels from chewing straight through it if you've watched my system at my house i had mice chew through it and it locked everything up burnt up the motor it was terrible so if you want to watch that video i've got a link in the description down below i want to shout out to spencer langston from langston's alternative power he has been really working hard with a lot of people here in the mountains and beyond across the country to get micro hydro systems set up so definitely check out his links in the description down below and also if you want to learn more about the elgin intake screen i have a link to that video as well thank you so much for watching be sure to subscribe and hit that like button leave me a comment to see so i can see what you think about this whole setup and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Land to House

Views: 304,205

Rating: 4.8698831 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, micro hydro, turgo, micro hydro turgo, turgo turbine, install micro hydro, water power, off grid, off grid micro hydro, pelton, hydro power, off grid yurt, yurt life, living off grid, green power, turbine, electricity, micro hydro turbine, micro hydro power, off grid hydro power, micro hydro system, micro hydro install, 6000 watts, amazing micro hydro, water turbine, waterwheel generator, free energy, off grid homestead, homestead

Id: Flz4_OE4CGI

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021