Awesome Mountain Hydroelectric Power

it's been a long time dream of mine to have a micro hydro system that supplements power to my house and i'm happy to say that that dream has finally become a reality i'm seth with the land the house youtube channel and this is my journey into micro hydro the journey started in the early parts of 2020 i went up the mountain and got some basic calculations my flow rate here is around 30 gallons a minute most of the year the distance from my source down to where i wanted the turbine was 1100 feet the head pressure from the source down to the turbine is 150 feet which gives me roughly 65 psi i was doing all these calculations and making videos on them when i was contacted by langston's alternative power spencer langston said he would like to work with me on this project and uh it has been incredibly beneficial for my micro hydro journey so i'll talk to you more about that later on i wanted to show you the steps of my journey to get to where i am today my early setup was um not very pretty and not very functional and what i have now two years later seems to be working quite well and then i also want to talk to you about some changes i want to make in the future so let's step over here to the intake and i'll talk to you about that my source water is a creek that comes off the mountain it's spring fed and it falls down into my wooden box that i've made and there is an inner tube behind this box that prevents water from escaping behind here so it all makes its way into the box and this is kind of the first catchment it also collects a good bit of sand and silt and sediment which i clean out from time to time and this kind of helps protect my intake box here from all that extra debris so my intake box currently has a piece of roofing rubber which just flaps down here and lets the water slowly go over this edge this box is called a cowanda screen and it basically is shaped to pull water in and sloth off most of the debris that gets to it so if i were to take a handful of leaves and place this over here they wash off instead of going down into the box so of course you need a little bit more water than i have right now to really wash that off but that's the concept at least how it's supposed to be self-cleaning and i've found that it does a pretty good job so you can see that right now i have a little over 30 gallons a minute coming down the creek and this cowanda box is sucking all of that in quite nicely the cowanda screen has a two inch output but i already had this inch and a quarter piping and so i made this little manifold it goes from two inch and then has these unisil grommets and those allow these three inch and a quarter pipes to come out and that is uh able to carry more water than this single two inch right here so it does really well to take this water down the hill this intake box has been through a couple of iterations in my testing phase the first one i tried to make a wooden box that mounted onto the rock surface and i then used window screen and the problem was a big rock probably about that size right there came tumbling down the creek and smashed a hole to the screen so i fixed it and then i came back later and a stick had rolled down and punctured that as well so the creek definitely has a lot of debris that falls down in flood times and so spencer langston started working with elgin and elgin is a company that makes giant triwanda screens for large scale micro hydro but they started making these small ones and so he gave me one for testing now they're not cheap this little guy right here i think is pushing 700 dollars which is in my mind it's rather expensive but i will say it's one of those things that you install once and it's there you forget about it so it is worth having even though it's a little bit costly so the old design it lasted for several months before it just kept carrying apart and the new design has worked flawlessly all year long on that first design the three pipes came right out the front and there wasn't enough area for the water to rest in and so i had a lot of spill over and loss so having this manifold off to the side seems to suck more water down in order to get these three poly pipes to flow water downhill i had to have them at a gradual slope and so i used this little bridge it's just some simple one by fours and basically i zip tied the pipes to that and it just has a gradual slope down to the next stage of my micro hydro system and this has worked just fine now for two years i don't really see any reason to change it unless it just falls apart but for now it's doing the job it's supposed to do the next stage in the micro hydro system is this 55 gallon drum this thing does two different tasks the first one is that it builds and catches sediment down here in the bottom portion of the barrel and that prevents those bits of sand and debris from being shot down the pin stock and hitting my turbine blades the pelton wheel is made out of a hard plastic and i don't want that to be damaged with sand particles hitting it the other thing this does is it gives this much space for variation in my water flow and also reducing the air bubbles that get down to the pen stock so as water goes into the source it's dumped into here and the air bubbles can float back up real quickly before being sucked down the pipe and you can see over here it has an overflow and that just goes back to the creek so i have enough water right now i could probably turn on a second water jet down at the bottom and get more power you can see i have the three different poly pipes coming into different locations here on the barrel besides an overflow pipe i also have a clean out pipe down here at the bottom and this clean out pipe allows me to drain the silt and sediment that gets in here over time the 55 gallon barrel has worked flawlessly over the past two years i definitely recommend that this be done in your own system if you're looking to install micro hydro having the silt down at the bottom and getting the air bubbles out of the top will help save your turbine in the long run now the one thing that has not lasted is the way that i had the outlet to the pen stock setup because the 55 gallon drum has the outlet right here in the middle of the drum i had to build a little stand to hold up the pin stock and position that so that it would not uh torque that hole in the barrel well in the winter time this pin stock got cold and shrank and it pulled out my pipe here from the barrel so i had to come back up and get that put back in and when it shrank it just destroyed my previous little stand that i had built and so i've had to rebuild this the new one seems to be working just fine and it's holding up this pin stock nicely i also had to rework some of this piping because of the way it froze and busted and got stuck so having this section of pipe right here will allow me to disconnect it in the winter time so that if shrinking does occur it won't pull this out i'll just be able to have this move back and forth because i don't run this system in the winter the pin stock is 1100 feet of 2 inch poly pipe i purchased this in 100 foot rolls so it would be a bit more manageable than getting bigger rolls and i started unwinding this in the cold months i forget it was maybe march i'll have to look back and see and uh even laying in the sun for a couple of days it took weeks to get this totally stretched out let's follow this pen stock down the creek and i'll talk to you about the difficulties i had with the couplings and what finally worked in the end sometimes i'm asked the question am i consuming all the water in the creek and the answer is no i'm not there is plenty of flow still in here and there are actually several springs right over here that continue to run on down the mountain and so there is still plenty of water flowing here in the creek by the time it gets back down to the house it's got at least 20 or 30 gallons more water so there's a about 60 gallons flowing here in the creek here's the first of the 10 couplings i had to use on this 1100 feet of pipe this right here is what gave me the most difficulty because i was trying to use couplers that would allow full flow through the pipe and not have to have the barbs inside the pipe that reduce the flow rate and so i went through several iterations of that trying to find something that would work but in the end i wound up going with the barbs because they hold the best in here you can see the barbed fitting i have metal hose clamps on that to hold it in place and then i've used some unistrut or later on i use fence posts and i've put more of these metal hose clamps on there and that further prevents this pipe from being able to separate now my very first attempt was with these blue and black connectors but the problem was my poly pipe is afraid if it's maybe 100 psi and so the 160 is what i needed to use those couplings and this pipe is not thick enough the pipe that i tested those on was the correct size at the hardware store and then i wound up ordering the smaller size so that didn't work then i got these other fittings they were metal fittings and those didn't work at all and then i tried fern co and they weren't designed for pressure either and that's why i wound up with the old tried and true barb fitting that goes inside one nice thing about the micro hydro system is how it self regulates you notice i had plenty of overflow coming out of my 55 gallon barrel but if it hasn't rained for a while and the flow rate drops down the water will slowly start shrinking down the pipe until it reaches a point where the pressure pushing out the nozzles is equalized to the pressure up the hill and the flow rate will maintain at that point so it's still able to make power even though it doesn't have the full pin stock of water so it's pretty cool now there is a point where it drops so low that it just flows out the bottom and it doesn't have enough force to keep the turbine spinning but for the most of the year it has somewhere between 50 and 100 watts of power coming off the mountain now if i were to crank open more jets i get up to 400 watts but then i risk losing all the water in my pen stock and not making any power this is bridge number two on my micro hydro system with your pin stock you want it to be sloping downhill the entire way otherwise if it has a raised spot an air bubble might kind of rest in that area and reduce the full flow of the pipe and so what this bridge does is it kind of skips over the creek so that the pipe doesn't have to go down into the creek and then pop back up because wherever it pops back up is where there's potential for an air bubble i built this bridge and it seems to have held up quite well for the past two years no issues whatsoever i just made it a double channel and then zip tied the pipe so that it stays in that channel and it just keeps the pipe at a constant slope downhill once again i wanted to show that the micro hydro turbine is not using all the water in the creek so if i show you right down here you can see this has 10 to 15 gallons a minute flowing through and then if i step over here to the main creek you can see more water that's not making it into the micro hydro turbine we've just reached the end of the 1100 feet of pen stock and we're here at the micro hydro turbine i'll show you what this looks like and go through some of the iterations that i have been through to get to this point and also like to tell you about a couple things i like to change for the future just like with my other connectors i have a barb fitting on the poly pipe and i've used several of these hose clamps to keep more of this unistrut on here and that prevents this from breaking free it then swaps over to pvc pipe and goes first to a t with a pressure gauge so i can see what the pressure is running i do have a relief valve over here if i need it for anything i've got this ball valve here which will turn on or off the turbine to allow water flow and then it goes into this box now this box has made several iterations and i'll show you one of those over here this little wooden box over here is the first attempt and it worked somewhat but was not allowing enough exit water to go back down to the creek and so i stepped up my build game to make this all pvc version and it has done well except i need to water seal this a little bit better on this side you can see it's got a leak over here one of the cool things about this box is that it has a clear base on it so you can see the water falling down into this base and then going back down to the creek i can open up the lid here i don't know if you could hear that or not but when the winds hit the turbine it slowed things down a bit this turbine is from langston's alternative power he built the box and geared up the motor so that it would work well with my flow rate and head pressure it also has the pvc pipes going around and i have four different nozzle sizes that will spray water into that pelton wheel currently i only have one nozzle open and that's a 3 16 and that's generating close to a hundred watts this is a three-phase ac turbine that sends power on all three legs up to the house which i'll show you the electronics here in just a bit now my first version of this had an issue i had it in my wooden box and a mouse got in there and chewed one of the wires of the ac power so you can imagine the mouse met a sudden end but it also caused the turbine to meet a sudden end it had electrical short that would cause the turbine to actually burn up so spencer sent me a new one and this is the one that's been working now for quite some time doing very well so the moral of the story is you got to keep the mice away from your turbine wires now i also have solar power and it kind of takes precedent over the hydro and so whenever there are clouds that pass by you can actually hear the hydro turbine slow down because the charge controller will use the power from the turbine to feed the house instead of the sun and whenever the cloud goes away and the sun shines in the solar panels the turbine here will spin up to full and so it gets louder and louder when it's not producing as much power and then gets quiet whenever it slows down with a load on it now when the water leaves the turbine it goes into this three inch pvc pipe which is sloping downhill and this goes over here and returns to the creek so you can see the water right here is just flowing back on down and returning to the creek [Applause] the three phase ac wires come out of the box and go into this conduit pipe here which then travels 250 feet to the house to be honest the only change i really want to make down here is to fix the leak of the water coming out of the box i think just a bead of silicone would stop that from happening and if i have to remove the turbine i can just pick it up and break the seal on the silicone the other change is just to clean up the debris that i've left down here like the old housing for the turbine the 250 feet of 10 3 wire goes through this 1 inch conduit it's buried for the most part but then it does pass over like this little drainage ditch here and it's exposed so it may heat up a little bit inside of there but hopefully it's not too bad the wire goes up into the house through this box right here i actually measured where the turbine placement was going to be based on this roll of wire so i put the wire into the house first and then rolled it out and then whenever it landed is where the turbine went in the crawl space of the house this 10 3 wire comes up to a ac to dc rectifier basically it takes the three phase and turns it into a straight dc and that is what goes over to the electronics for going into the house this is where the biggest changes have happened for my micro hydro system i spent countless hours squatting down here on these two panels installing my electronics and moving things around trying to get the best configuration it was a nightmare i had to move my batteries down here and they're very heavy and so i built an outdoor power shed so number one i could stand up and work and not have to squat down here in my crawl space and then i also was able to place the wires where i wanted them and i kind of had an idea of how things would work based on my setup that i had down here so let me show you a little clip of how terrible this looked and you can see why i wanted to get this tangled mess out from under the crawl space so you can see that i also had my solar electronics down here as well and it even further complicated the tangled mess that i had so now that you've seen how disastrous it was let's move on to the outdoor install so you can see how much better it looks now i'll still warn you i'm not an electrician so when you see this and your electrician you'll probably still cringe but for me it is a hundred times better than it was before this is my outdoor power shed where i moved the electronics from down in the crawl space out here and i did this for a few reasons like i mentioned before i can stand up and work i got my wiring where i want it but also if for some reason there was some tragic fire this thing is double lined in this hearty concrete siding so hopefully any fire that were to ever break out would be contained in here or at least not have much to burn once it gets to the outside that way it wouldn't cause any kind of a house fire theoretically if this were to have an issue with a fire so that's another reason why i put all these out here okay let me walk you around this place and i'll talk to you about the electronics inside the input and output of my electronics are through these two conduit that you see down here and those go into the back of this 2 by 8 little power shed and it is up off the ground hopefully that prevents any moisture from forming inside so far it has done well the door here on the front is nice and big it opens up like a garage door and that lets me work in the rain if i need to it's got a metal roof on it and if you look here on both sides i've installed a vent so that's just an open hole there with some screen on it and over here i have a solar panel and that brings power to a fan in here which helps to pull the air out whenever it's hot so it is uh really cloudy today but it is blowing a little bit of air out temperature is nice and cool in the winter time i'm going to have to block those up to keep the heat inside i do have a basic padlock down here on the bottom just to keep anybody from tinkering with this or getting themselves hurt so i open it up like this and then i'm able to use this piece of unistrut to open the door into position like this right here seems to work out pretty good because i have both solar hydro and off-grid going on in this little powershed i'm going to take a moment to break down the components so you can see how this is put together and working to begin let me show you that the hydro and solar are both coming in from this conduit pipe back here they run up into a breaker box which i have labeled hydro right here so this breaker on this side is where the hydro is contained so that then moves over here and feeds this midnight classic charge controller and you can see currently the battery is at 100 percent and the main reason for that is because the solar coming in down here is uh looks like we have about 630 watts or so and the hydro is just not really needed so once the power goes into the midnight classic it then moves down to the batteries so currently i have eight of these agm die hard batteries and this is actually one of the first things i'm going to be changing here next year i'm going to move to rack batteries so that i can have a whole lot more storage space instead of these agm so the hydro and the solar will charge these batteries and i'm working with a 48 volt system so currently i just have two sets of 48 volts so once the batteries have been charged by the charge controllers you can follow the red wires up these two right here will either turn off the solar or hydro you can see it's got hydro right here and then moving up to these i can turn on or off the power to the grid tie inverters i'll talk to you about those in a moment it also goes up here to my off grid inverter which is a 6000 watt so i can run things like the microwave or refrigerator if i need to off my batteries here i've used it a few times but our power has been pretty consistent what's nice about this one is that it has a remote control where i can turn it on from inside the house now if we follow the black wire the negative it goes up here to a shunt and this allows me to read what's going in and out of the batteries so that's very handy from there goes up here and then these just go into the charge controllers or to the inverters over here so as far as these inverters go they have an amp clamp that goes around the main of the house and from there it reads if there's any amperage being used by the home if there is then it sends power into the house we only have 29 watts right here on that leg and we've got 87 on that one so basically those are supplementing the house the air conditioner was on a moment ago and it was pushing a lot more power into the house so if i zoom back into the solar you can see it's dropped down to 198 or so alright so that's the basics these inverters just simply plug into the house power as you can see right here and just supplement the house with their use the moment that the power grid goes down these inverters are turned off they're excited by being plugged up to the grid so if you're worried about being shocked when the power goes out those turn off with everything else it's 10 o'clock at night i just wanted to show you that the hydro now has input that the solar has stopped working so let me zoom in here so i'm seeing anywhere from 88 up to 103 watts coming in currently 105 watts on that inverter 149 on that one although my wiring is far from perfect it's much better than it was when i had it in the crawl space under the house well this concludes the journey through my micro hydro system over the past two years if you've enjoyed it be sure to hit that thumbs up button and make sure you're subscribed for more content so now let's go ahead and talk about what this has done for me over the past year so i don't run it during the winter time but it's making about 1.5 to 2 kilowatts a day the sun is actually reducing that significantly i actually had it doing about 4k when the solar was turned off so you can kind of compare how that's doing if i were to run this at 2k per day all year long it would save about a hundred dollars on the power bill so you can imagine it's going to take quite some time to pay off the system just on the hydro alone now for me it was a youtube based thing so i was able to pay it off a bit quicker than that but my thoughts are i'm able to use this to supplement my power just during the normal day but let's say i have the solar as well and the power goes out i can then use this big inverter up here to keep my stuff cold in the refrigerator and i can run the oven or the microwave and make food so it's nice to have that back up if the power is to go out if you're considering micro hydro for your place there's one calculation you need to consider and that is the power calculation for hydro so you have your flow rate gallons per minute times the head pressure that's in feet divided by 10 and that equals your power so let me do an example here on my system i have 150 feet of drop that's head pressure times 30 gallons per minute that is 4500 if i divide that by 10 my total system power potential is 450 watts so if i were to have 30 gallons flowing through that 2 inch pipe and opened all my nozzles up to full i could get up to 450 watts all the time so you can see that it takes a lot of water or a lot of head pressure or a lot of both to make usable power through micro hydro i hope you've enjoyed this journey through my micro hydro system whenever i get the rack batteries installed i'll bring an update video to you so you can see how well those perform my power bill has been about 75 dollars a month here in the summer and i anticipate adding those batteries will let my system power the house through the night and that should drop down hopefully even more like 65 dollars a month or less so having the hydro and the solar together has made a huge difference i'm seth with land of house thank you so much for watching if you want to learn more about micro hydro i have several playlists that you can watch and also be sure to check out the langston alternative power website and give spencer a call if you are considering micro hydro yourself it's a very fun hobby and can provide power if the power is out and also supplement the house as well so thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Land to House

Views: 1,167,568

Keywords: land to house, land two house, off grid, power generator, hydro electric, hydroelectric, power, hydro power from small stream, hydroelectric power plant, pelton, pelton wheel, turgo, turbine, hydro turbine, pelton wheel power, pelton turbine, turgo turbone, water power, off grid water power, off grid hydro power, hydro power, diy water power, hydropower, grid tie power, off grid living, sustainable energy

Id: f62o9SNwmEU

Length: 31min 18sec (1878 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022