Honest Cost for my Micro Hydro Install and Payoff Time

hey i'm seth with land of house i've installed micro hydro power here on my property and i wanted to walk through the system and give you an honest breakdown of the cost and also a payback period for when i'll have this thing paid off so here is the unit itself it's down here running pretty well but what i'd like to do is head up the creek and start from the source and walk back down and i will try to remember each cost of each component as we go along so let's head up the creek here and give you an honest cost of this system okay we've made it up here to the top where the intake is let me just show you this real quick i have made a wooden box that has three different outlets coming out each of those are an inch and a quarter on top of the box is some window screen and it basically just captures the water sloths off the debris and takes the water down those pipes to the second stage of my system down there so let's talk about cost here like i said this is an honest cost overlook here so the wood was given to me by a neighbor and that would be somewhere around i would say 15 to 20 dollars if you were to purchase i then have the window screen which came in a roll so i used probably about 50 cents worth out of that roll of screen the bicycle inner tube that is behind the uh the whole box was five dollars so then you move on to the bulkheads that right there is going to push you somewhere around four dollars a piece and i've got three of them the inch and a quarter pipe that i've got here is hooked up also by pipe uh barbs and those were about 50 cents a piece so three of those the pipe itself i actually pulled from my parents creek years ago we're talking like 20 plus years um so but if you were to buy that new it's going to be somewhere around uh let's see what is that 90 feet let's say 100 feet of that is going to run you somewhere around uh gosh i'll have to look it up but probably about 50 bucks or so then you come down here to this little wooden bridge that i've got built that was also given to me that lumber was but material wise you're looking at somewhere around 20 to 25 dollars for all of that so i'll kind of give you a list on the screen here of what i paid versus what this system is actually worth here might be helpful coming down here i bought this barrel for uh 13 spray paint to cover it gray was another two dollars a can i used two cans then i've got three more uh pipe barb 90s and those were a dollar a piece a couple of hose clamps which one you about 75 cents uh pvc pipe over there uh that's less than 50 cents oh dear oh gosh i was hoping not to get these shoes muddy but it just did all right so let's go over here to this side i've got a couple of unisil which were actually sponsor products so for this build they were free but you're looking at about five dollars for the three of those here i paid 20 for that stainless steel valve and then the rest of this material up here you're looking at about ten dollars total including the barb fitting the hose clamps the uh plumber's tape with screws and then various fittings here's some more lumber she's looking at about an eight dollar four by four and then the rest of that material there is going to run somewhere around ten dollars so about 18 for all that now the pipe that i used is a two inch flexible poly pipe and i have eleven hundred feet of that pipe uh so the total cost on that was one thousand two hundred and eleven dollars for the pipe and then i have uh hose barb uh fittings that were about two dollars a piece and i've got ten of those that connect all of this together plus we'll go down here and i'll show you what i'm using to kind of give extra support to those connections i'm just making this video on the fly here so i don't really have everything written down so what i'm going to do is you'll see the numbers on the side of the screen i will edit all that together and then have a video at the end of me kind of breaking down cost versus payback uh for the honest truth there it's rained for the past 24 hours creaks running well which is just what you want in a micro hydro system okay here's the first connection you can see i've got some unistrut on this one with a couple of hose clamps and then that barb fitting in the middle so later on you'll see i use fence posts instead of this unistrut i just use whatever i had but that right there is just a couple of dollars for all of that and it has worked remarkably well the setup is more of the same as we go down so i'm going to meet you back at the turbine and we will discuss all of that stuff when we get there so enjoy this quick uh very fast speed up of the walk back down i have a small bridge that crosses over the creek here and this is more of the wood that was given to me but i would say about 10 more dollars in order to cross the creek here which is definitely well worth it because you don't want to have any dips like this one would be right here it'd have to dip down and then raise back up out of the creek to continue on made it down here to the permanent magnet alternator or pma this is from langston alternative power this was a sponsored item and so i did not pay for this unit myself but i do want to mention real quick that spencer langston was a huge help in all of this build i spent lots of time on the phone with him and he has really gotten this thing going so if you want to check out his website link in the description down below and be sure to mention land a house and he will give you a nice discount on your own system here so price breakdown we've got more hose clamps we've got another of these barb fittings some pvc and then i installed stuff that you wouldn't have to do that is a little surge tank and a couple of valves here that you wouldn't really need i do highly recommend that you install this valve here a pressure gauge and it'll let you know what your pressure is built up to so right now i'm at about 70 psi from my 163 feet of head pressure so that valve and that pressure gauge right there cost a total of about 16 and then these two over here would be about 12 plus some fittings so this little setup right here from the hose clamps on is going to run somewhere around 80 bucks because you got your 20 dollar shutoff there and then a union and more fittings so 80 bucks for all of that and then if we go over here to the housing this is more donated material so i didn't pay for any of the box i did buy the screws and then the hinges were my purchase and that is it for all of that but if you were to buy that um you're probably looking at another 30 plus the metal roofing another little bit there so i may add up this and put it on the screen of what i feel like it's worth so in the turbine it varies on what you need from spencer uh from alternative power so but this one right here is going to run you somewhere around a thousand dollars for everything that is included there with the four nozzles and the uh the pma all the plumbing and uh all that good stuff so if we move on to the wire which you can see i've just kind of got spliced together right there that was 208 dollars for 250 feet of 10 3 ground contact let me do the math for you on the conduit it's ground contact wire so i did not have to put it in conduit but i felt like i needed to just for protection so i've got 250 foot of that plus this box right here and a couple of fittings so you can just see that on your screen let's go ahead and turn this on and open up a second nozzle so that we can get about 330 watts coming out of the top so open that up actually i'm going to open that separate so you can kind of see the difference between it cranking up here so with one nozzle open we're generating approximately 210 watts and as soon as i open this one up we'll be pushing 330 roughly all right let's follow this conduit i almost forgot my outlet here that takes the water back to the creek it's about 30 for the pvc and then i've got some couplings in there that are about two dollars a piece and then up under here i have got a unisil and another uh 90 degree t um so that's gonna run you about ten dollars for all of that all right let's head up here a couple more fittings and a box going into the house here let's go ahead and jump inside yeah so i'm gonna be covering up this rectifier later but so the wire comes to that and then i shrink down to a 10-3 this comes over here i'm only using two wires of that 10-3 now here's where you can save a lot of money on the electronics so here's what i've got i've got uh the power coming into a breaker which those are kind of expensive i'll have to price that out a little plastic box uh wire comes down to the midnight solar which you can see it is running around the 330 watts right there 345. so anyway that right there you don't have to have the midnight solar charge controller they're expensive you can actually get by with something that's uh as cheap as about twenty five dollars and uh this one right here cost seven hundred um i think i got a discount actually it was a six 675 is what i paid for that um come down here to a switch that's 18 there are four of well let's just do one leg of the main power so two of those the cables were expensive i've got about uh 40 bucks worth of cables in here phone cables you don't have to have those because they are doing the follow me mode to the other charge controller then you come down here to the whizbang this was 75 dollars for that whole setup and that just lets me read the watts coming in and out the batteries down here you do not have to have all these you can drop down to a 12 and just have one battery or you could have a 24 and have two batteries so my cost on these i got them 25 percent off so they were a hundred and sixty-five dollars a piece um your cable connectors in here you're looking at uh four dollars per set i've got one two three four of those then this is the grid tie inverter it's pushing 131 watts on that one 30 on that right now so the house is not using very much at all um this was 285 dollars and then if we move up i've got an outlet that was uh four dollars total with the receptacle and the box and then you don't have to have this but i've got a kilowatt meter there and then uh wire was 25 to get up to the house there and then i bought a breaker which is over at the main panel and that was five dollars so that's all you really have to have for this setup but you can go much cheaper on charge controller and batteries and uh if you want to do grid tie i highly recommend these sun 1000s because they have a limiter that will only push power if power is needed so very nice to have that was way too much for me to remember to just give you a quote right now so let me go ahead and edit all this together put the numbers up on the screen for you and then i will come back with the final result to show you how much it cost and then how long it's going to take to pay back this system there's also something that i'm going to factor in that will pay off the system way faster also keep in mind that i'm going to be doing a off-grid system here pretty soon i've already got the batteries lined up over here so i'm dropping down from a 60 volt to a 48 but i'm gonna have double so i'll be able to run a lot longer with the power i have coming in so right now we have 92 watts of solar coming in on a very cloudy day and 330 watts on the hydro all the time so anyway i'll be back with uh some numbers for you my wife just turned on the heat and uh 382 watts coming out of this system here and then over here we've got 285 so we are basically powering our house with heat without having to use any grid power okay i finally took the time to write down all the stuff that you saw on the screen and i have tallied it up and so i have what i paid personally or what you would pay if you bought everything new so your total if you were to buy everything that i've got new four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars now because a lot of my stuff was either sponsored or was just old stuff i've had for years my cost was three thousand eight hundred and two dollars i just rounded it to thirty eight hundred uh so i said that there was something that's going to reduce this or my cost significantly and that is the video series so i added up all of the revenue so far in a month and a half from the whole series the 10 part plus the addition of all those little things that i've done like the internet and the whiz bang and um the youtube revenue is uh 14 35 so and that's i'm just going to do the rest of the numbers as if the video watching stopped right now and didn't continue to pile up as it does so the payoff i'm going to do here is based on the current value of the system that i so owe which is 2 320 so our power that we pay here is 15 cents per kilowatt hour it's a little lower at night than it is during the peak but 15 cents is pretty typical so all right if i ran this thing all year long at 200 watts it would be 150 kilowatt hours per month which comes out to 22.50 cents a month it would take 103 months 8.5 years if i just run it at 200 watts 330 watts which is what it's running right now um 218 kilowatt hours 32 hours a month 32.7 a month 70.9 months equals 5.9 years for the payoff my system has a potential of about 530 watts if i were to run it wide open but i have to change out my intake up top to get more water and then i have to increase the size of the output at the bottom to allow more water to escape so both of those are future videos but if i would run this at 500 watts for the whole year which i can't do because it drops real low in the summer time but if i did that's 360 kilowatt hours a month 54 and it would take 42.9 months which is 3.5 years so that's just kind of an idea of what it would take to pay off my system if um you know 200 watts to 500 watts if i just ran it to pay back through power savings now i'm going to be adding another couple of batteries that you saw in doing an off-grid system and that's going to allow me to run the house whenever the power is down so the value of that is huge because when we don't have lights or tv or internet the whole family gets upset so anyway the the value to us personally is definitely more than 15 cents a kilowatt hour okay so all that being said the um for me as a youtuber the revenue will just continue to grow over the years so um like one of the videos i think is making like 50 bucks a month right now and so you can see when you add that extra 50 to the you know 32 dollars a month it's going to add up quick i've also added solar panels back here and that has almost doubled the power production during the day at least so you're looking at instead of that 2250 i was saving somewhere around 45 dollars a month on power but i also added another inverter in that mix but same battery so anyway it's a big a lot of information to go over um but it kind of gives you an idea you know if you were looking at the 4950 for my setup several years to pay that off but if you reduce your batteries if you use a less expensive charge controller you may not have to have as much pipe as i do there's just there's several things you can do to cut this cost pretty significant so like if you had just one battery you're looking at 165 dollars instead of 800 whatever it was so anyway you can actually use those uh sun 1000 inverters without batteries so if you want to just go from turbine to house you could do that and you would save a thousand dollars easy maybe even like 1400 but anyway um i'd love to hear your thoughts on what i've just given you and the setup up here so write those in the comments down below and also be sure to subscribe i would love to have you join the channel here so upcoming videos um i'm actually going to step away from hydro for in solar for a while and do some other things that i have pre-filmed but in the future i'm going to be using i'll just take you over here so you can see it um see this white board over here that is pvc trim board i've also got a bunch of plexiglass it's half inch so the plan is i will use that to make a new housing for the turbine so that we can see through the bottom and actually watch it spin up and see the water flying through the jets and kind of get an idea of how much splashback there is in this system so maybe i could add like a little cone shape up in the housing to deflect water anyway uh lots more content on the way um hopefully that's incentive for you to subscribe thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Land to House

Views: 454,748

Keywords: land to house, land two house, micro hydro, penstock, cost, how much does micro hydro cost, price of power, off grid, grid tie, price

Id: L16s6aUJ0ns

Length: 22min 26sec (1346 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020