Installing the Turbine Micro Hydro 6/10

hey i'm seth with land the house you're watching the micro hydro series [Music] this video is a critical moment for the install here i have got the turbine which is right here let's take a closer look at this thing this unit here is from langston alternative power spencer langston has been working with me he's the sponsor of this series he is incredibly knowledgeable about this topic i have spent hours on the phone with him talking about the specifics of this install so i'm very thankful for that if you're looking for your own micro hydro turbine i highly recommend you check out his website he's not going to just give you any old turbine he's going to take your head pressure and gallons per minute and he will wire up a motor that will fit your specific needs so let's go ahead and take a close-up look of this turbine and then we'll get it installed and see what our output is for this unit i've got a two inch input which then reduces down to one and a quarter have three different ball valves a 5 16 nozzle here 5 16 over here and then a quarter on the other two sides the turbine is wired up to be three phase so you have three wires coming out on this one i've got a rectifier here so three wires which comes down to dc the motor spins like this up here and is connected to a pelton wheel down below so let's go ahead and flip this up you can see it has a nice metal housing so that's not going to be breaking apart anytime soon i'll go ahead and flip this thing over so you can see what's going on in here so here's the pelton wheel i'm assuming that's a four or i think it's about a five inch wheel right there uh you can see the four different jets positioned to hit those spoons in the right position now i believe these can be removed and replaced with different sizes but i should be able to just turn off the ball valves whenever i don't have enough water to run this in full in the previous video i made this little housing for the turbine to go into it's got a drain here in the middle and then it's got this hole over here for the pen stock to come in through so i installed a union on this piece here so i'm going to unscrew that stick it through this piece so then i can take the turbine it down in here and i can attach it to this little portion here so it's easy to attach and detach go ahead and get that screwed in i was hoping my union piece would fit through that hole but it doesn't so it's not as easy to detach as i was thinking it would be but still possible and now i can move the pin stock around may have to lift it up a bit to make sure that it is in the right spot i brought a couple of two by fours here to help lift this up just enough i think that's going to do it that's a nice heavy box that's right where it should be just tighten down that union looking pretty good so far there's that rectifier i may keep it up here out of there for now in case we get some splash and so if you missed it up under here is where my output is going to be now i'm going to go ahead and put some screws in here to keep this from bouncing around if there's going to be any water hammer the turbine is now installed so hopefully the housing fits this well let's make sure here oh yeah we got about three inches or so before it hits the top of that turbine so let's keep the rectifier out here for now we won't be touching that uh yet but we'll be using multimeter here now let's see what we're working with we've got approximately 65 psi uh you can't see that can you there you go i know of at least three leagues in the system so far so we should get even more than this all right let's see what happens i think we should uh cut it down to two 5 16 nozzles so we're cutting out this quarter inch and this quarter inch so we've got 5 16 5 16. let's turn it on yeah it's some that's tough what's wrong with that thing there we go i don't know if we're gonna maintain water pressure with that it's flying open it up all the way shoot so i am noticing uh that was not enough to pull out all the water so now we have a flooded housing in there let's go ahead and close this down my spike got up to 75 but didn't go any past that so i think we're still good on hose connections well we learned a lot from that quite the leak here in my housing so we need to figure out how i can better waterproof that whether it's by putting some foam in there that the turbine will sit up sit on to it's probably my first attempt i will probably uh take some of that blue styro that blue house insulation foam and maybe glue it down there and then set this on to that now let's go ahead and hook up a meter here and see what we got okay i've got the rectifier set up here with my multimeter now this thing has a volts set to auto it's both dc and ac still working with 65 psi let's go ahead and open this up and see what voltage we get that's 199 200 volts very cool [Music] taking a look at the pressure down here let's see how consistent we are see can you see that looks like 60 psi i think that's called dynamic pressure i'm not seeing it dropping any so we may have uh we may be able to run at this speed here with the two nozzles 202 volts i'm gonna go ahead and shut it down because we're filling up with water in here [Music] okay yeah that spike got up a little bit above 75. we'll have to come back with some better waterproofing of this thing later i'm going to run the turbine one more time with the two nozzles open this one and that one but this time i'm going to close up the lid walk away a little bit and see how loud this is whenever it's running let's go ahead and get this open back in full [Applause] now it won't be quite as loud whenever it's running under a load so it's a constant steady kind of like a drill being run to be honest or a small vacuum cleaner not terribly loud [Music] nice so i definitely have to fix this issue where the housing fills up it may be that my three inch drain pipe is just not enough um so i will have to see what i can do about that uh yeah let's go ahead and get some of that blue foam cut a hole out of it and get it sized in here i can just set this down on it and maybe it'll prevent that from filling up i have some of this blue insulation board and the turbine housing the actual metal part is exactly nine inches so if i do if i come in at let's say oh gosh i don't know eight and a quarter maybe that'll give me enough room to set that turbine down on and it'll make a little indention there and keep the water straight down so i'll cut the box out of this anyway let me play around and see what i get a couple days have passed and i found another issue we have to work through so whenever i put the turbine in here there was water escaping around the edges and so i tried to put this blue foam under here and that worked the problem is it's now creating a vacuum and slowing the turbine down so let me show you what i mean here i also installed this 10 foot section of pipe here and let me show you what happens when we crank this up so it reaches its full speed here and water starts coming out over here as you can see but the problem is a short time after it's been going it will pull that suction and get stuck you can actually hear it whenever i push this down the motor goes faster when there's less water backed up in there so this entire micro hydro series has been filmed on tuesdays and sometimes it rains so i've got my hammock camping tarp up and i'm covering the turbine here and the reason for that is i want to do a little bit of work today so my wife ordered a desk for her office and it came with this styrofoam it's almost two inches thick so when i started up the turbine i walked back up to the house and realized this thing is loud enough to hear up there somebody cutting strips of this foam and placing along the walls here and then hopefully one piece that will cover the whole turbine from the top i'll have to see how well that's going to work but anyway i just want to make this kind of sound dampened here and then also i was realizing that my blue foam board doesn't quite have the seal that i'm looking for to keep the water from coming into the rest of the box so i've got this idea that i can use some all thread and these aluminum bars and i'm going to be drilling holes over here here and here and then taking that all thread in that bar to push this down more into that blue foam and i think it's going to be the answer to that problem so uh because of the rain situation i'm just going to go ahead and get this done real quick and i'll show you the final result of each step so the first thing i want to do is get these metal bars installed so basically what i'm going to be doing is use the drill to put a couple of holes down here in the bottom and i made it long enough so that i can go around these ball valves so anyway soon cut across here and then cut across here to uh put weight down on that so here is the general idea i've got these aluminum bars that cross over the housing and they just are tightened up to hopefully keep the housing into that blue foam down there and that hopefully will direct all the water into my three inch exit pipe so now that that's done i'm going to come back and line the box here with this styrofoam and i may have to cut out a hole here where the motor is to make sure it gets enough air flow so anyway let's just see what i can come up with here here's what i have so far i've got the styrofoam on all four sides and a couple little pieces down here in the bottom but let's go ahead and first of all turn on the turbine and see if we have any leaks down here where after i've put these aluminum bars probably could have used something a bit more uh rigid but that's what i had so let me move some tools real quick probably should clean up this popcorn mess that i've made let's go ahead and get this turned on i just have the single jet running right [Applause] now a little bit of water leaking right here on this side now and i think that's actually coming out of the connection not the bottom okay it's way quieter oh way better yeah i like that can you even hear that i only cover you up with my hat here i doubt we could even hear that let's see it's barely audible here about 25 feet away nice let's see how the outflow is over here very cool so that right there is about 12 to 12 and a half gallons a minute i didn't bring my multimeter down here to see what voltage we're running at i don't think it's necessary to cover the insulation here on the roof very cool i think what i'll do is just drill a single hole down here in the bottom for a drain so any water that does escape there it will just escape and go back out to just down here you see what our pressure's holding at 65 psi nice it was actually holding it uh 70 earlier when the water was off or a static psi so very cool i used a long drill bit to put a couple of holes down here in the bottom to drain any water that does get in the housing i also got the multimeter so i'm curious we had 196 volts before with one jet before i locked it down so let's go ahead and turn this on again and see what we get whenever we have this thing locked into place i wonder if it will produce more voltage see 173 174 [Music] 180. that continues to climb let's go over here and look at the output i added one more length of 10 foot pipe here to make sure this is heading straight back down to the creek like it should i think that's going to be just fine there because the creek is just right about another 15 feet or so 186 187 see what our pressure is here still holding around the 65 psi [Music] 188 18 189 the rain stops now that we're all finished so it finally got up to 200 volts here remember this is unloaded i don't have a wire run to the house yet so whenever i have the 250 foot of wire we should drop some voltage and whenever it has a load on it it should drop significantly so we may even be able to run two jets with the voltage drop from the load and the wire run if you haven't subscribed yet be sure to do that now and ring the notification bell there's going to be two more micro hydro series after i finish this one so you're going to want to stay tuned for that but definitely continue to the next video so you can see this full micro hydro install do check out now the langston alternative power he is the sponsor of this series and definitely has provided the information needed to go ahead and get everything installed here so that is langston alternative power link in the description down below so you can check out his uh turbines here alright thank you so much for watching hit that like button and i will see you in the next video bye you

Channel: Land to House

Views: 586,558

Rating: 4.8655653 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, hydro, micro, micro hydro, power, turbine, pelton, wheel, off grid, diy, green power, battery, alternator, system, motor, voltage, watts, amps, charge, micro hydro turbine

Id: pZ4z4qmYur8

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020