Awesome Low Head High Flow Grid Tie Micro Hydro 530 watts!

hey i'm seth with land the house if you're new to the channel be sure to subscribe and ring the notification bell i'm here in western north carolina with my new friend bill thank you for having me he has installed a turbine from spencer which is langston alternative power and his setup is a lot different from mine he doesn't have the head pressure that i've got but he has a lot of low rate so he's going to walk us through his setup here and we'll go to the house later and see how much power he's producing from his turbine behind me is a pond that is several feet deep and there is a dam on this side which drops approximately eight feet from this point here down to the rock and then there is an additional drop from that rock down to the bottom for a total of 15 feet so you can see there is a couple of hundred gallons coming across this all the time and here is the intake to his unit he's got a screen cage that prevents debris from entering into the pipe and then he's got a six inch pipe elbow down into the water here see if i can move you across here without dropping the camera pipe goes over about six feet and then 90s around this little concrete pillar and that you can see here goes over to the turbine and this is all six inch pipe up to the turbine that spencer has provided here three phase we'll get to that here in just a bit but you can see there is about an eight foot pipe dropping down another 90 which heads over here and there's going to be a demonstration of how this unit is turned on here in just a moment and from the edge of the white pipe it then upgrades to an eight inch pipe creating a vacuum with a venturi effect so we'll be distribut demonstrating all that here in just a bit because the other end of this pipe here is sticking down into the water the siphon has to be created to get the water from the top of the dam into this pipe here to do that without some kind of suction device would be quite difficult you would have to have a port here with a shutoff valve and pour water into the pipe to produce that siphon but with this design bill has got a shop vac that will create a negative pressure and we'll pull water over the dam for him without much work at all so he's going to demonstrate that right here so simple shop vac creating negative pressure in here and the negative pressure is being displaced by the water coming right in which will happen very quickly so as soon as i turn this on that turbine will begin to turn within five seconds or less so get ready to watch that and here we go [Music] there we go starting to spin now i'll just shut this off the air bubbles will get cleaned out of there in quite short time as soon as those air bubbles are out of there i'll open up this vent to give you a sense of the amount of vacuum suction at this lower level of extra water volume and now it's probably a good enough time as you can see that's yours on staying wrecked so this is an example of the amount of vacuums that this is now created [Music] it's a lot that is a lot that is a sucking gorilla that's pulling so much more water out of this than just the cycle alone this is a three-phase ac unit so you can see he has the three wires of the ac coming into this jointer box here and it has 10 2 wire that's ground contact he's using the ground of this wire to take the three phase to the house so this thing creates so much suction that as you can see now after this thing's been running we started up about 10 minutes ago the flow rate over the top of dam is significantly reduced and the suction here is just powerful you can see below the creek how much water is still running through the creek and who's not coming over the dam and it's all going through this system so the gallons per minute rate i don't know but it was all of what you saw before this thing also creates so much suction and it'll create a vortex and when that vortex strengthens to the point where it then becomes an air suction this whole system then loses efficiency so i came up with the vortex destroyer simply a tennis ball in there that when a vortex begins that will seek it out it sort of gets sucked over to it will spin with it and prevent air from being sucked down and it'll destroy that vortex and then it'll just search for the next vortex until it finds it and destroys it so currently with the flow rate of the creek he's using most of the water out of the turbine and there is just enough overflow currently coming over the dam he has seen it where the turbine is pulling all of the water and it's draining the lake so definitely has to watch for that the wire run from the turbine to his house is 100 feet so with ac he's losing very little power from the turbine to the house let's step inside here and show you what he is doing to get this power to the grid that turbine is generating it's coming out under full load it's generating 200 i should say 24 volts of power with full load on it it's making 520 28 watts of power and this phase is now right now taking from the grid some wattage because i turned a few things on so this is the power from the grid into the grid this inverter coming in here with the dc at 24 volts this guy is converting it to 530 watts of power that is then fed directly into one phase of my panel this is the sensor wire that tells this whether it's calling for power and if it is this essentially is what's preventing the backwash out so in the event of the power is down this thing will not be pumping out into the grid which will protect the workers out there but also my meter is not geared for reversal so essentially it would be charging me for power going backwards because it doesn't know the difference of direction in order to do those situations where you're getting paid for power you have to have a different meter socket that analyzes the directional flow which i don't have all right well here's my rectifier the rectifier takes the three different ac bolts to the rectifier converts it to dc positive and negative i don't know how that happens but that's what it does here's a look at the waterfall after the turbine is running for about 30 minutes you can see that it's consuming most of the water from the creek here it'd be nice to have an overflow all the time but here in the middle of summer when the water may be flowing a little bit less there is a gap where it's consuming all the water in the creek it's been a fun project and so just to wrap up a sort of synopsis the price of the turbine with the inverter that i bought through spencer at langston alternative energy and i can't tell you how valuable the information was that i got from him the health the constant ongoing support there's nobody else like that spencer is the man and my investment in the initial parts which consisted of the inverter and the turbine in that six inch pvc t were twenty five hundred dollars i probably spent another five hundred dollars in plumbing components with the different things the fittings and all of that i probably spent in the planning stage because no one else was doing what i've done before here and trying to calculate it i've spent months thinking about it the actual once i've got all the components here and the installation time with myself and a helper doing the putting it all together tap conning it down and all of those things probably consisted of all day one day and then i had an electrician friend of mine come and make sure that i did everything up to snuff if you will and safe and they those guys were here for about a half a day figuring things and checking things so now my usage of electricity from the power company from the grid i still maintain my grid hookup i went from approximately eight 900 kilowatt hours per month at a cost of about a hundred dollars a month down to now about 300 kilowatt hours a month that i'm purchasing at about 40 to 45 dollars a month so the payback period is about five six years providing everything runs smoothly clockwork and but it's been more of a hobby than really trying to offset the entire expense and it's been fun and spencer has been fantastic absolutely thank you bill for having me out here well thanks for coming out appreciate it um so definitely check out uh spencer's website it's langston alternative power i'll have a link in the description down below he has spent hours on the phone with me for my two turbine installs and you've also spent a good bit of time hours hours you call spencer for one question and he'll give you the answer that you've been eating for most of the project in that time so definitely nice talking to him very knowledgeable and very willing to share what he knows thank you so much for watching if you'll hit that like button and be sure to subscribe ring the notification bell and i will see you in the next video [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Land to House

Views: 3,276,370

Rating: 4.9012241 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, micro hydro, water power, off grid, grid tie, power, electricity, self, prepper, how to make, waterfall, turbine, alternator, pma, penstock, siphon, pond, dam, hydro power, low head, high flow, waterwheel

Id: V82SVeVXKcA

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Vault69Survivor]

Nothing about this is red neck. Aside from the rec needing a proper cooling system this is a very clean install.

[u/Alaishana]

Still laughing about his 'vortex destroyer'!

That's what I love to see: simple solutions that make you grin.

[u/squeevey]

Uhmmm...what is this guy doing that he's using almost 1MW/mo‽