Building A Dam for Hydroelectric Power - Part 1 - Off Grid Cabin - EP #22

[Music] we're getting ready start a project that I've been wanting to start from the very beginning how to do the cabin first how to get it done next project is the dam a waterwheel to do hydropower for the cabin [Music] so if you're just following our channel for the very first time we've got a spring right here by the cabin produces a lot of water on the rainy seasons I would say between 500 to a thousand gallons per minute per minute any other time I would say about 300 or so because I can stick a five-gallon bucket in it really at any time and it'd be full in a second I've always wanted to do a waterwheel I thought it'd be super cool and it would go with the theme of our cabin of being old rustic barn you know just just the way things were powered or the way things were done a long time ago that was a theme we've always wanted to keep within our cabin is because this this place also has history right over here in the woods was an old Shack and a guy named Isaac Pippin used to make moonshine with the spring water and he did it for many many years right here there's stories there's I've talked to his grandson or great-grandson so anyway there's history here and I wanted to keep some of that history alive so I just thought a waterwheel would be a really cool thing to have here so originally what we were gonna do we were gonna put a dam in maybe right down here with these rocks are you see right down there some rocks not quite as far as where Jerry is in the woods right now what we're gonna put a dam there and just dam up this little area here where the four-wheeler is where we've got a little fire pit there we were gonna Dam that up have some water in there and then we're gonna put a waterwheel in then we thought no let's not do that because of the fact that we were going to lose a lot of our outside space we were wanting to do a fire pit we also love the natural cascading of the spring and so we thought if we put a dam here we're gonna take away from that natural cascading down and so we thought okay let's just do away with the dam instead what I want to do is I want to build a flume from the spring head have it come down and then have a waterwheel somewhere like right here where this cement mixer is and then I got to thinking about okay well how much water am I gonna actually need to get this water wheel to spin because the flume is not gonna pick up all of the Springs water really the only way catch all the springs water to get the water wheel spinning to get the maximum amount of power producing would be to have a dam and then have the water wheel after the dam to where the water wheel gets a hundred percent for the water we're gonna have to put a dam down there and put a water wheel down there that way we're catching all of the water so the other really good thing about putting it down here is that I'm actually gonna be catching more water than just what's coming from the spring now of course 90 some percent of its gonna be coming from the spring but right here there's also another part of the Creek right there you can see and so that's more of a dry creek there is a small spring up there that's also behind the cabin on this side the main spring is over here on this side but it produces a little bit of water now in the summertime probably not much if any at all in other times of year when we get some rain or more consistent rain instead of just getting all the spring water now I'm getting a spring water plus this ravine now you may be concerned well what about flooding this does not get up very high at all so there's never been any debris up in here from flooding so I know it's gonna the dams gonna be fine they just came off though where do you think was flat just came off so am that thank you little over that person it'll get it in a little bit of a bi-metal - yeah so I haven't been at the cabin for a few days I come back and this is what Gerry has done I'll tell you what Gerry gets it done because we're on a time crunch we've got rain in the forecast for the entire week brain just doesn't stop here here lately anyway and so we've got concrete trucks coming today we got to pour the concrete because what we don't want to have happen is us to get to this far and then we get rain for a week and say we get three or four inches well this water is gonna double and when it doubles there's a good chance that it could destroy what we've done so far so if we get the concrete poured give it a chance to set up and dry then we don't have to worry about it and then we can continue on with the rest of our project after the rain stops so because it's been a wet spring my dad's brought a little bit of a rocky downforce purpose of the rock is so that the concrete truck which weighs a lot can get down here and not get stuck on this muddy area so we're gonna be putting down some rock because this concrete trucks gonna have to come to about this point he's got hopefully a long enough chute to worry it'll reach that and then we'll have to spread it from there on over to the other side so what Gerry did while I was away was he cleaned out all of this area down here as you can tell with his trencher then once he got it cleaned out and got all the brush we cut down a lot of dead trees there was I had probably five before Sycamore trees down here next to the water that had died for some reason so we had to cut those down then Gerry got his trencher and he dug out basically a trench he had to also at the same time while he was digging that out he had to push a lot of dirt up against where the water is back there to kind of create a makeshift dam for right now then he built a flume or trough that caught the water and carried it over where we're going to be actually pouring the concrete now it's not catching all the water there's still some of it running underneath through the rocks but as we begin to pour the concrete it'll push that water out I have had a lot of people asked me how much water the spring is actually producing and they've told me ways that I can measure the water but I have to capture the water I have to capture it into a certain place like what we've got going on now and I can measure the flow that's going over however I'm not going to do it just yet because I'm still losing some again like I said underneath here through this dam so even if I measured there what's falling over the flume it still wouldn't be accurate so once we have the dam built then I can actually get a true measurement of our flow how many gallons per minute than our spring is producing the whole purpose of this project of building the dam is all about the cabin because we have to be producing electricity for off-grid cabin so imagine a dam right here okay after the dam we're gonna have a flume pretty similar to this one that is going to collect the water from around the top area of the dam and then it's going to catch all of that water and send it over the top of a waterwheel and get that waterwheel to spinning then that waterwheel is gonna have a hydro generator that is going to be attached via pulleys and then that generator once it reaches 500 rpms is going to be producing 24 volts of electricity that's how fast we have to get the generator to be spinning and then it's going to send it on up to the charge controllers to the batteries to the house I think out of all of the projects we've had with our cabin this one has probably stressed me out the most because it's something that we've had to kind of hold off and wait until the very end and when you build a cabin that's supposed to be off-grid you're banking all of that on well I hope we can be producing electricity you know what I'm saying and I think that's why it's worried me so much about can we do it because and I think we can I've seen lots of people on YouTube that have produced electricity but nothing quite like how we're doing it I see a Pelton wheel which is a smaller micro hydro generator the coarse solar of course wind but really it's a rarity for somebody to have a good enough water source in order to be producing electricity from it now you also have to check with your state maybe your government area to see ok can I actually dam up my water source here in rural Missouri where we're at I don't have to check with anybody and I'm not saying that out of cockiness I'm just saying that out of that's actually the law I can Dam it up if I want to I can actually capture it and send it to another piece of my property if I want to now ultimately it's still gonna flow off of my property onto somebody else but that somebody else is not private land that somebody else is government because we join national forests so all the water that comes from my property flows through national forests goes on down into Lake of Bull Shoals but it begins here so legally it's mine now what happens to it after it goes on to government land that's theirs so again Dam waterwheel electricity going up to the cabin is the idea we'll see how it turns out so what Jerry is doing right now is he's trying to level up our road because of all the rain and us traveling on this old path what it's actually done is it's wore out this side of the road and so anytime you come through here in the truck you're always leaning this way so you can kind of see dad leaning there in the tractor so anyway Jerry's trying to level that up so when the concrete truck does come through here he doesn't almost tip over [Music] [Music] you guys come watch the concrete [Music] yeah forget how far from there there I didn't go get my mushroom you know why didn't you bring your love mousse I didn't think we're gonna have this we knew you'll be playing in the water teamwork makes the dream work series continues it's nap time so he's just gonna crawl up and take a nap on on his back thanks daddy don't worry Oh well just when things started getting good and ran out of memory on the memory card on my camera so we didn't get the final shots of us getting everything Blaine was actually videotaping some of that for us whenever we were doing it and it was a job mainly because the cement truck only had I think like six chutes total and so it really only reached to the very first section the rest of it we had to break it all over or shovel it all over and then we got to a point where it just wasn't going as smoothly as what we wanted it to we were having a lot of water coming into the forms it's really hard to keep all the water out and so then we started shoveling the cement into buckets and then moving it over and dumping it into the side that's the farthest away and that went a lot faster for us and we got that done pretty quickly so the next step is is wait for the rain to stop so that we can continue on with the next section which is going to be another four-foot higher than this it's going to be a thinner section maybe only eight inches wide but that's going to be the main damn part this was just kind of the foundation or the footing so to speak and then we'll have the the main wall part which will do again like I said once it dries up [Music] okay great Gabriel Tyra hey hey guys go rinse your hands off in their water you

Channel: Loftis Party of Six

Views: 380,594

Keywords: hydroelectric power, off grid, off grid cabin, hydroelectric, hydroelectric generator, how to build a dam, building a dam, off grid cabin build, living off grid, off grid life, off grid family, ozarks, missouri, spring

Id: sLGcF5zfB4Y

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020