AWESOME WATER POWER 500w Hydro Electric Off Grid System

welcome to the land house YouTube channel I'm Seth I'm here in the mountains of Western North Carolina to take a look at a Micro Hydro System that is producing over 500 watts of power this is feeding an off-grid cabin and I wanted to show you the whole system from intake all the way down to the electrical system if you're interested in that then continue watching The Box behind me is the beginning of this Hydro System it's called a kiwanda screen and it is allowing water to flow over and be sucked in while keeping debris and other things out of the system so the Creek right now has about 200 gallons per minute flowing and only about 110 gallons of water are going into the system that allows the creek to continue flowing while pulling some of the water out for the hydro system now the kiwanda screen is a special design it has little metal plates that allow water to be pulled into the system and it does not allow debris to get pulled in it just swaps off which means it's a self-cleaning intake screen if you're going to spend your money on hydro I recommend spending your money on a good intake otherwise you're going to be doing a lot of walking and cleaning of your intake system in order to direct the water into the kiwanda screen a small concrete pad has been built to capture the water from these two Culvert pipes the water makes its way down here and then is channels into a little concrete sleuth here and directed over the kawanda stream now the kiwanda itself is bolted into the concrete as you can see right here with these large bolts and that allows the box to be mounted flush against the concrete so all the water that enters the system goes over the screen this is a dual sided box to bring the pen stock out of either side now the water here is moving pretty quick a few rocks have been placed right here in front of the screen to slow the water down so it flows nice and softly into the kiwanda screen the kiwanda box has air slits close to the Top This lets the air out so that air free water can travel down out the six inch pin stop you can see this fernco coupling takes the water through a 90 degree T and then heads down the creek in this direction there is a little bit of debris that has gotten stuck here but you can see that it's pretty easy to clean off any excess water going into the screen leaves the system here towards the bottom if you look close you can see where the water is rolling back out of the box which is a really good way for self-cleaning [Applause] site selection is important whenever you're installing your intake for your Micro Hydro System you want to have a place that is going to have a consistent Creek so over time a creek can reroute itself and it may skirt around your intake if you're not careful in this case the homeowner has selected a site that has two Culvert speeding water into the creek which basically makes sure that the creek is always going to be right there where they want it to be this was another potential place for the intake it would have reduced the 45 degree angles that they use to get away from the creek but it also would have lost about two feet of input head pressure so there was a trade-off in both sides and also this area is prone to having some washout on both sides and may eventually have the creek to reroute itself and go away from the intake so definitely keeping find the place that you have your intake to make sure it's going to be consistent over time after the intake the next portion of the hydro system is the PIN stock and that is the pipe that's going to carry the water from the source all the way down to wherever your turbines or turgo Pelton wheels are located so the pen stock is important to have both big enough to support the amount of water you need and to limit the friction loss and it also needs to be air free and that means this pipe needs to be facing down the whole time and not have any up spots that could hold an air pocket because anytime you have an air pocket it's going to reduce the pipe's ability to carry a full flow of water so let's go ahead and take a look at this pin stock for this install here you can see coming out of the kiwanda screen there is a six inch pipe it takes a 90 right here and moves down this way there's one joint right there and then right down here there is a fern Co fitting that reduces from the six inch pipe down to a four inch pipe now the 110 gallons a minute that are flowing in this system can easily be passed through a four inch pipe without too much friction loss four inch pipe is also readily available at most of your plumbing and hardware stores now like I mentioned before it's important not to have any high spots in your PIN stock so if you were to shoot a grade right here from that go on to stream the homeowner says there's approximately 15 inches from where it enters in to this portion right down here they have a clean out which allows the system to be flushed and returned back down to the creek this also allows a spot for maintenance to occur with this giant four inch ball valve now an attempt was made to reduce the air that might be getting into the system but the problem was there's only about 15 inches of head pressure here and about 50 on the downhill side so that much the high pressure was pulling air out of the standpipe so it is currently locked down this particular Creek can have flood stages with over 700 gallons a minute and so the homeowner has moved the pipe away from the creek and now it is traveling down over here and will return to the creek after it has gone through the turbines as you can see a little Bridge system has been made to allow this pipe to go over this little dip right here without having a spot that then returns back up so a very simple design just a couple of cross pieces of wood and then some decking boards up under that to support the weight of this pipe now if I were to get here on the pipe you could see how it has a constant downhill slope the entire way all 50 feet of this head pressure I mentioned before the importance of not having a pipe too small to allow friction loss and you can see here the exterior pipe couplings are used these are pressure couplings and so the inner portion of the pipe still has full flow if you're using poly pipe it can be more difficult to find a way to connect these to allow for that full flow of water for places that would have a dip you can see a block of wood has been carved out to hold the pipe now I'm actually hearing a little bit of air running through the pipe right through here I doubt that'll pick up on camera but I am hearing a little bit right in there foreign the creek is dry you can see there is easily another 100 to 200 gallons of water flowing past at this moment that's not here into the turbine system I just walked down to the end of the pin stock where the permanent magnet alternator or PMA is resting this is the PowerHouse that's generating the electricity to be sent to the house so how this is working the 50 feet of drop or head pressure in the pin stock is producing about 22 PSI of pressure that is then sent to nozzles that point down to the cups or spoons hooked up to this that's called a Pelton wheel that is basically pushing that wheel around very quickly and turning the motor to allow electricity to be made this is producing three-phase AC now that's not usable by itself and has to be rectified into DC which will then be put into the inverter and batteries so we'll get to that here in just a moment but for now let's step down here and take a look at this PMA first of all we have a large ball about which allows the system to be turned off for maintenance it has this massive Union to allow this whole system to be disconnected and so it goes from four inch pipe here reduces down to three inch pipe the homeowner has put a piece of glass over this unit so that you can see the moving Parts but it also keeps it dry in there the static pressure of this system is about 22 PSI with the system running it's dropped down to about 10 psi which is still enough to produce somewhere around 500 watts there is a gauge down here homeowner has locked down the turbine on this nice platform and that prevents a lot of noise from happening because the system is locked down so tight that three inch pipe skirts all the way around the unit induced down to two inch now there are four nozzles on this system two of them are 19 millimeters two of them are 16 millimeter basically it's 0.6 and 0.75 inch is what has the nozzles that go in there and hit that Pelton wheel that's underneath this spinning PMA so the permanent magnet alternator has magnets that cross over coils and when that happens AC power is produced as you can see there are three wires leaving that PMA and those are carrying three-phase AC takes this wire right here and goes on to the house now of course you want to have as little air in the system as possible and you also want to have a little friction in the pipes and that's why they're using these big sweeps to allow for the water flow without any real reduction compression now that we've seen the permanent magnet alternator we're going to follow the 10 3 wire up to the house to see what happens with the electricity produced by this hydro system the 10-3 wire is traveling through this conduit to the house the homeowner had forethought to put a pipe through their concrete slab in preparation for this hydro and so you can see the conduit comes in right here and then goes into the house and this prevents any mice or other things from getting into this system it's a lot quieter I've now stepped into the house where the electronics are stored let's go ahead and take a look at each one of these components so you'll know what they do as you can see there are several things required to get the electrical side of Micro Hydro up and running so let me start off with the very first thing the very first component here is this rectifier this takes those three wires the three-phase AC power and it converts it down to DC so you can see on the right here there are three wires coming in and on the left there are only two wires going out so those wires take the DC power and it goes down here to a breaker box that will allow the homeowner to disconnect the power if they need to from there the wires go up here into the midnight Classic 200. this is an mppt charge controller basically what it will do is take the input volts and amps from the hydro unit outside and it will find the best position for the speed to allow the best power output here on the unit so if I zoom in real quick you can see it's currently locked down at about 57.7 volts and it has 540 Watts coming in today you can see it's done 7.8 kilowatt hours which is pretty impressive the battery is currently charged at 54.1 volts and it's got around 10 amps coming in this unit right here will basically control the speed of the hydro unit if the batteries were full this unit would allow the turbine to spin up at almost a free Spin and it would bring the volts way up and the amps way down from there the power goes out back to a breaker which then does two different things the first thing is it stores power in these batteries over here the homeowner has 30.6 kilowatt hours of storage on these lithium iron phosphate batteries so if we take a look here these are eg4 batteries and each battery has cables that will connect one to the next and this basically allows all of these batteries to become one single battery each battery is connected to a rail which has one big positive and one big negative over here and each of these has a jumper it's kind of a uh an Ethernet style cable and all of them are able to talk to one another from there you have one data cable out which goes to this over here this is an eight kilowatt grow watt inverter the power from the batteries goes to this inverter which converts the DC power to AC power which can be used in the home a DC breaker is found down here so that the batteries can be disconnected from the inverter the battery is connected down here you've got your black and red which are negative and positive your data cable goes right here so the BMS of the batteries can talk to the inverter over here you have the AC output as you can see there are three wires a red a black and a white that means this unit is outputting 240 volts to the house main panel that way the homeowners can put either 240 or 120 circuits into their system and run them just fine on this 8K inverter this is the main breaker box of the house and as you can see the black red and white wires that we saw from downstairs are going into the top of the box one side let's say the red over here goes to the right side and the black goes over here to the left and the center point is this white wire which means we have 240 coming into this panel and each side has 120 volts the homeowner has got these staggered and kind of separated the loads from one side to the other of the panel and just wired it up like a normal house would it's just that the power is coming from Hydro to batteries in an inverter instead of main power we've now gone over everything there is to see on this Micro Hydro System starting from the intake the pin stock the PMA and now the electronics if you've enjoyed the video please hit that thumbs up button and be sure to leave a comment down below I have several more videos here on the channel that you can check out for Micro Hydro and if you're looking to install your own Hydro System I highly recommend you check out Langston's alternative power I'll have a link to that website in the description down below Spencer Langston is a wealth of knowledge and can help you to install your own hydro system I'm Seth with land a house Channel and I will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Land to House

Views: 493,418

Keywords: land to house, land two house, micro hydro, hydro electric, water power, off grid power, micro hydro power, permanent magnet alternator, 500 watts of power, mountain hydro, micro hydro turbine, micro hydro power generation, micro hydro generator, micro hydroelectric generator, micro hydro electric power system, micro hydropower systems at home, diy micro hydro

Id: A2QoKRWANs4

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2023