Chasing 500 Watts, Big Pelton Turbine

all right Spencer Langston sent me a care package here well this is the package that my alternator came in he sells a lot of these himself yeah look at that whoa ready I imagine this will have higher efficiency because it's a larger diameter I'll be running at a lower rpm and because the larger diameter should be more efficient from a water velocity interaction standpoint right now I have it running a full bore on my two brass nozzles we see we're getting a little over 400 watts on average here and we're gonna see if this is gonna get us more efficiency out of the same two nozzles I'd like to thank Spencer Langston of Langston's alternative power for sending me this in exchange for I'm not exactly sure what I did send him some impellers for a low head turbine so maybe that's it check him out at Langston an alternative power com this is a Pelton runner by the way I just measured the voltage at 209 volts this is limited to two hundred four point six so it's 209 and change is fluctuating a few a few volts so we're gonna see what our p.m. that is I'm gonna guess somewhere around 4,000 rpm and my RPM meter here and it's really grip four and I can hear it from here the snow is actually dampening a lot of the noise [Music] [Music] whoo yeah and that thing's loud so here's how fast and easy it is to disconnect this first I have the three electrical connections tada seconds mmm disconnect that all right now I have to connect collects all of these fittings and things here that's pretty good now after we run and get my hose that's a bypass so my pen stock does not freeze there's a little bit more ice in there huh will it thaw out in there although I now realized that my vows are on the turbine and not here which is okay I can fix that too now I could disconnect this and put it here but I think I think the easiest thing will be to just put a cap right here now that gets set aside and then this is the easiest thing in the world to just put that on there with the cap and that's done this is probably thought out enough to go on here here we go and then I grab a concrete block okay maybe not that one that's got I sorts of debris on the top let's try this one let's stick this in there and I put a block on it coming out and then I can turn this on all right all right looking at this after a few months of operation there's something that I realized that's interesting this spoon here is half broken off and then I was just spinning it at 3200 rpms and it's got a broken spoon so I wonder if that might have broken when one of the + the 3d printed Jets that I made blew apart and probably took that with it and it's been working like that ever since so never here's my favorite tool not really but it does the job got some Loctite on there that keeps everything from corroding and freezing up and then this should just pop right off come on here we go yeah see that spoon I can't believe I was running it like that I feel bad now but we can look at the where on the other spoons and really I don't see any effective wear at all they might look a little bit more matte than normal they're not like a shiny glossy inside but they're a little bit more flat matte like they've been seeing blasted or polished by a little bit of debris in the water you know I'll put this back in here so I don't lose it because this is a very special thread that I could not find except in one hardware store of all the hardware stores in town and that hardware store has now closed so I don't know where I could even get one of those anymore besides going online and we're going to replace this with this which have the same same spoons on them but this one is just much larger we can see that the if we line it up here the diameter is considerably larger I think this is about 5 inch pitch diameter and then this one is an 8 inch pitch diameter so it should spin a lot slower be a lot more torque you look hopefully more efficient the only problem is you don't fit so I need to build another one of these off-camera I built a new housing here I'm trying to peel the plastic off of this plastic and then it's got a haze on it from sitting on some bose shield too much and then I put it on the plywood box that I built and painted and then I attached the turbine alternator to the turbine itself with some spacers then I install the Jets and then here's a final cap that's an adapter to fit on the existing turbine pit alright reconnecting it should be just as easy as disconnecting it I hope well I'm gonna do it a little bit differently and believe this disconnected hook up the turbine to the hoses there and then reconnect for that get that out of the way wire out of the way know where exactly I put my phone I guess there would be okay so I need it to monitor the GoPro so first I guess to make sure that fits in the pit and it does so that's good I apologize if a lot of this is washed out and can't really be seen that goes that way it's not and that should go on this side okay that one's done there we go that's in Henry attempt to reconnect this looks like it should be okay let's turn the water off first huh yeah okay this looks like it should be pretty easy yep there we are okay that's on it's good and they'll check tightness for everything else okay I'll reconnect to the electrical now I know that I still need to connect these better and that's on my to-do list but I love these Wego connectors for their speed you can very quickly connect and disconnect stuff because this is three-phase it doesn't matter which wire goes to which the rectifier converts it into DC okay those are good all right we're really turn it on turbine revision 0.2 in the another temporary plywood box to verify that the diameter of the runner is gonna be approximately right for when I go to turbo and a stainless housing again all just temporary let's see what it does turn that off make sure both these are off to begin with turn our water on it slowly verify they'll get anything blowing apart yeah looks pretty good now we can turn this on looks like I'm getting some blow by there [Music] so we've got some power coming out of it I need to find some more loads yeah I've got some more loads on that's a heated pad there you see the battery voltage is low enough to actually push some amps into it we're at 450 watts 58 volts in so we've picked up about 50 watts approx now I'm curious if maybe the charge controller is not really best suited to put a whole bunch of power into a 12-volt source because this will do up to 48 volts and I need to get whole 48 volt system I'm waiting on my buddy to hook me up with some used telecom batteries for free so that's why I haven't gone forward with doing anything with those maybe I'll have to talk with Spencer about this and see why the efficiency is not good I let the bearings warm up and we're over 500 watts

Channel: Joe Malovich

Views: 1,637,522

Rating: 4.8258095 out of 5

Keywords: Pelton Turbine, Joe Malovich, Turgo Turbine, Off Grid Power, Midnite Classic, microhydro, Micro Hydro, hydro power, prepping

Id: cOgO8z71D0o

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020