Micro Hydro Coanda Screen Intake

welcome to land of house i'm seth for the past year i have been working with micro hydro and i hope you have seen several of my videos if not links down below i've been working with spencer langston from langston's alternative power and he has provided a wealth of knowledge and also the pma that is down here in the creek he also works with a company called elgin and they make kowanda screens and that is what this box is right here so elgin this company actually makes screens that are massive we're talking like full river intake boxes but this one is their smallest unit it is roughly a foot in this direction and if you're not familiar with what a kiwanis screen is it is a bunch of slits that are shaped in a very specific angle that water basically the surface tension of water pulls the water into the box and debris sticks and stuff rocks will slide off the front there this box i believe has a rating of somewhere around 50 to 60 gallons a minute which is a lot so my hydro system only uses about 30 at max and so this is more than enough for my system so let me just go ahead and go over the box real quick the water this box right here will take water up to the height of these side fins so if it's this high this box will suck all of that in which is hard to believe air holes on this side it's got a two inch outlet so i have to reduce my current system from three pipes to a single two inch it's got four mounting places there you can take the screen off if you have to for some maintenance but hopefully it won't ever have to be opened up and then back here on the back it's just another stainless steel plate this thing is heavy and i think it will last for a very long time so in this video what i would like to do is okay so i've been using a rock as a little waterfall to go into my makeshift screen and i need to have this thing mounted very uh level because the water needs to fall over this right here consistently so no water on one side versus the other it just needs to have a nice sheet that just folds right in there so the eventual goal is to have a metal box up there that catches the water off the rock and then sends it down to this catchment intake at a very nice pace but i think first of all it'd be worth making this little box out of wood so the rock is kind of uh it's angled a bit and it's kind of got some wonky stuff to it so let's go ahead and take a tape measure up the mountain and see what kind of dimensions we need to have here for this initial little box that will catch the water that will then send water over into the elgin all right let's drive up top whenever the sun is out my hydro system spins at full force and it's been making about a hundred watts right now you can see the water is coming out because i haven't sealed it yet but this little clear box has worked so well down here anyway i'm going to turn it off so we can keep the water in the pen stock here with one nozzle open i'm making around 100 watts there's the water that we were dealing with this 55 gallon drum acts as a silt catchment and also an air diffuser so the pen stock comes out right here that's my overflow pipe that's all the water i've got right now coming into my screened intake i've got three inch and a quarter lines going on this little bridge up here to my screened intake let's see how much water we're losing here so we had a really big flood with hurricane fred oh yeah look something has broken a hole into my box that's letting all kinds of debris in there also a lot of water is going around my inner tube you can see it right here so we'll be able to capture all of this water whenever we have a better system so you can see my rock here my thoughts are i want to come out to about right here and go over to that side as well and that way even if the rain is up a little the box that i'm going to build out here will still capture a lot more water and i will probably bolt in some of this inner tube behind the box so it's going to be kind of like this one it's going to be up and flat and then on the front of it it's going to have the notches to let the water pour into that cowanda screen so let's just see what kind of distance we've got here to work with if i went from about right there where it currently is to over here looking at about 32 inches and i think that would be sufficient to capture most of the water throughout the year that i have here two hours later if i can get the new quanda screen in here by fall i think it'll be nice because this right here definitely causes a big issue some these little snails got down into the screen here went down the pipe and clogged up the turbine so anyway i've got uh my hammer drill here and the uh 30 inch board and let's go ahead and take this out and then hopefully we can use the hammer drill to get some holes in here and we'll actually get something attached to this wall it just occurred to me that i probably should have brought some more tools up here i didn't bring anything to under these hose clamps but we'll see if i can just move this whole box out of the way because i mostly just want to test out this hammer drill and see if it's even going to work in an ideal world i'd be able to capture all the water coming off of this rock i just want to see how close we can get to mounting this board flat here so i'm thinking if i go a little bit lower like that but the inner tube behind it would be good so let's try to do that right there so first step i'm just going to put some holes in here about two inches or so off of the end [Music] i'm going to use the holes that i just drilled to kind of place the board where i want it so something about right there i think the depth is good to make sure my placement's good over here i'm gonna go ahead and just screw this in real quick i was trying this thing where i forcefully push it in a bit and then pull it back out and try it back and forth until it would go in further it turns out it gets to a point where it just gets stuck so i think i've got a pair of pliers down in the four-wheeler i can hopefully get that out if not we'll have to saw it off and doing another hole but anyway uh holes are good and i may have to bring up uh one size bigger on that uh masonry bit to get this in here smoother okay nice so now we can build off of this the new place where it's going to fall into a little box and then spill over evenly off of that cowanda screen and that's a negative with just these regular pliers the lesson i'm learning is that hammer drills actually are quite strong at putting things into rock so anyway uh i may have to bring a socket set up here if that doesn't work i'll just cut it off and we will drill another hole but at least we know that hammer drill works well to put a hole into rock okay i'm back up here to try to get this out i've got the impact driver let's see if this is powerful enough to pull it out oh yeah nice so the drill is really good at putting drill bits into the rock and the impact driver is really good at getting screws in and out of there so i found a masonry bit that was a slight bit bigger so i'm going to go ahead and use that and then i think we'll be good and i can use the impact driver to put these in whenever it's time i enlarge the holes just enough i think it's going to do quite well now so the actual cowanda screen has these four mounting holes and i was looking at my material and i'm only going to be able to use two of them so here's what i've got going on we've got that 30 inch board with the holes that correspond with what we put into the rock up there then i'm going to use these two scrap pieces here to go on the end something like that and like this and so with those i can then uh use this piece right here as the bottom so that hopefully will fit in there however that will go okay and then lastly this uh 30 inch piece here will go up on the top go ahead and do that okay so something like that i may have to put something in here to keep the gaps down let's see because i think this board yeah i may have to cut these down just a hair so it lays flat against that but anyway my thoughts were this box will be mounted onto that rock and it may be a little bit off so what i can do is use a level like one of those up there and find on here where level is and then cut out the notch so i'm going to go from right here on this edge and cut down and over and then up here on this board and so it'll just go down however far it needs to and then back up and this is what i'll use to level out so this will be done up there on the actual rock but i'm going to keep this piece off for now so that we can actually get this mounted to the rock so anyway that's the plan so far let's go ahead and put this thing together [Music] the caulking now has had time to cure because it's been raining for about a week so i think it's time to get this installed up on the mountain i've got my holes here where it will attach to the rock and then this piece goes in the front here and let's see i've got all my tools i need in here with some inner tubes to make kind of a gasket we'll need this saw and also we'll need this up here use a level on that to see where it's going to be level because you want the water to flow over this portion right here as level as possible so then i can use a pin mark out where that's going to be use my saws to cut that and then we will go ahead and put the screws in here and i'm going to use some of this inner tube i think in this seam all the way around and that's going to allow it to hopefully be nice and water tight we'll see so let's go ahead and load this stuff up head up the mountain and hopefully i can take everything i need in one trip to get this installed and then we'll have to come back down to get the pvc pipe to go into here the sponsor of this video is langston's alternative power he has actually been the sponsor of all of my micro hydro and half of my solar projects here on land house so he is working with elgin to sell the small and medium-sized cowanda scream this one right here is the small one it's roughly a foot across and i believe 14 inches tall somewhere around there and this one i think will pull somewhere around 50 gallons a minute they say as long as the water is within this little fin the screen will pull it so if you are looking to have a a very well made high dollar intake screen for your hydro project then check out the link in the description below to langston's alternative power also if you're working with solar give him a shout and he will help you walk through stuff or get you some used solar panels whatever you're into he can definitely help you out with that but anyway just wanted to mention the channel sponsor for this video because it has rained all week we've got a really nice flow i'm gonna see if i can use a rock or two to maybe divert this water over to the side some yeah maybe nope i don't think so here's the idea i'm gonna use this tap con to go through my board and hopefully get this thing attached to the rock over here let's see how well it works i'm gonna try to get this back here and then get the box installed we'll see how well it works [Applause] [Applause] all right this is what i'm thinking if i increase the height of this right here just a little bit maybe about uh two or three inches on both sides it'll capture the water there and then if i take this board attach it to the side here like it was supposed to be before but then come out with one more board maybe two they could just drill into that one it would bring this out enough to get around this little piece of rock right here and we would have all this room to work with so i just need to basically bring this up a little bit and i may swap out with a taller board for here so it can be up to like this level and then come out with another board maybe even this one from that bigger board cut the same notch in and that'll allow it to be out here i think that's going to work so let me just kind of demonstrate here if this board goes where it's supposed to go right here that fills up and i get i think to be safe we better do two more boards to get it out far enough i cut a 2 by 12 or 14. i forget what that is i guess it's 2x12 and then i got some of these little pieces here i figured these to go right here i have to cut them down some but that'll at least give us an extra inch and a half of space right here and so then when that one is on the front i can then uh notch it down and then notch down one or three others if i need to to extend this out further and i can probably i don't know put a rock or something wedged in between one of those to kind of bring it out some so that this can be more uh level in uh this direction anyway i don't know if all that makes sense or not the first thing i want to do is uh put this board on here i guess um yeah i don't know if i'll put the inner tube in there or not since we're doing so many layers we'll just see if it's going to work [Applause] i'm gonna put these blocks in here and that'll bring it up another inch and a half roughly everything seems to be pretty good the problem is the angle that's back away from the rock it's pretty steep just matching up these upper little fins here put a pilot hole in with my drill [Applause] all of this has turned out to be more involved than i was anticipating but i think we're almost there so what i need to do is take this off and trim it down and i think what i'll do as long as i've got this much space right here below the water i should be good so i'm probably going to do a little bit lower than this one so probably down to about right here cut on over and that way um i can match this right here up to that notch and it should do pretty good so anyway um let's hold this up here real quick get an idea of where it needs to be the main thing is i want it to be below this low point right here which should be pretty easy to do i just remembered this is the part that needs to be level so let me go ahead and put my level on top of this board and we will draw this out where it's level well we've made it this far i've got the notch cut out on all three pieces of wood it seems to be flowing over pretty level so next i need to just get this attached to there with that angle out some so hopefully it will get the water in there maybe a bit of a stretch but we'll see that took about an hour longer than i was anticipating but i think i've got it let's take a look at it here let's remove these rocks and get the full flow [Music] very nice so my creek's probably running at 100 gallons a minute right now and so you can see how much water is being pulled in and how much water is being lost over the edge there it's quite a lot if i had this kind of flow all the time that would be so nice but yeah so the excess is supposed to be able to clean this screen and i think i will still put a piece of sheet metal in here on the inside the water will flow over hopefully but i'm seeing there's an air bubble in there and i think that's actually keeping a lot of the water going over the top anyway a lot of room to improve here but i think it's uh definitely flowing right now let's toss some debris on this thing and watch it roll off yeah that's super nice showing my other one what was happening you see that falls off of there on this one over here stuff will get stuck in this thing really bad and clog it up um and that rock came down and destroyed the screen and that's kind of game over some snails got in here went down to my turbine and clogged up the nozzles so this right here i think is going to do pretty good we'll have to see what it looks like in a low flow situation most of the low flow water is just going to come right down here and get in there i could probably keep some bigger rocks over here just to make sure it doesn't lose water but anyway it's pretty good for a first rendition i have several other videos to film today so i'm going to stop this video here right now i still have to add the two-inch pipe coming out of this that will then follow this same little bridge and go down to that barrel down there and that will be my air free source for the hydro that barrel also catches some debris and sediment so it doesn't go down to the turbine but for now i think that turned out okay definitely gonna have to make some adjustments to it later on but at least it is installed so i can get some more hydro power because uh hurricane fred is what damaged this box right here big rock came rolling down the creek and crushed that screen well i hope you've enjoyed this video it uh took a little bit longer for me to install than i was thinking and uh gives me an idea of what i need to do for the future probably going to have to make some kind of cut on a board to find the right angle and that way it will be totally upright because i can tell right now some of the water is coming out that should be going in and if this were up more it would settle in here longer and go out but it's still flowing enough to run my turbine alright that's it if you haven't subscribed already be sure to do that now leave me a comment down below i'm sure there are lots of good ideas to improve this design and i am always willing to listen and see what you've got to say i'll see you next video bye you

Channel: Land to House

Views: 5,087

Rating: 4.9370079 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, coanda screen, micro hydro, intake screen, water power, off the grid, renewable energy, langston alternative power, water intake, coanda, elgin, land to home, stainless steel filter, hydro power

Id: MoWNz_188Bs

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021