Rain Gutter POWER #1 - How to Harvest Free Energy From Your Roof with a Hydro Electric Generator!

now anybody who's been to origin knows it rains a lot here and I happen to have a very large section of roof that goes into one gutter and I'm gonna see if I can collect all this down one downspout and make hydroelectric power now in order to figure out the flow rate into the gutter and need to know how big my roof is so once I calculate the horizontal distance and the width I can multiply that times how much rain we're getting per hour now my roof is not a perfect rectangle but it's about 30 by 30 feet which is 900 square feet which is over a hundred thousand square inches now moderate rainfall is anywhere from 0.1 to 0.3 inches per hour which if we multiply times that area of the roof and convert to gallons it comes out to over a hundred gallons an hour of rain on that roof now if we want to break that down into minutes divided by 60 and it's almost two gallons of rain a minute coming off of this roof into that single gutter yeah let's be honest a gallon or so of water per minute is not a lot so while we could use a standard waterwheel that works on the weight of the water we're gonna try a special kind of turbine called a Pelton wheel to maximize the amount of energy we get from our water the cupped blades of a Pelton wheel force a jet of water to take a u-turn which converts almost all of its energy into motion here's how we demonstrate that when I spray the wood it's just bringing the water to a stop but when I move over to the bowl its stopping the water and sending it back at me which is double to change your momentum and that's why the pendulum is going higher with the bolt now Pelton wheels have been around for a very long time Lester Pelton invented them back in the late 1800s but they are still notoriously difficult to produce so rather than build them from scratch I'm just printing it on my 3d printer but when I test the Pelton wheel under a faucet it looks pretty much like any other waterwheel that kind of makes sense though since they're supposed to run on a jet of water but how do we make rainwater squirt like a jet hydroelectric dams get their water pressure from the height of the water behind the dam to try to replicate this effect I'm using my hose to pour a gallon a minute of water into the top of a vertical pipe as soon as I drill hold me to the bottom the water comes shooting out now I'm concerned I may have restricted the flow but when I time how long it takes to fill a gallon jug it's still good and when I position the Pelton wheel in the jet of water it spins three times faster than it did under the faucet that actually worked way better than I thought it would which I guess is an indicator of how important height is in hydroelectric power and think about it this jug by itself isn't all that impressive but if you had to lift it back up to the gutter where it came from that sounds like work and in fact in physics that's what we call it force in this case the weight of the jug times distance how far you lift it equals work and if we multiply that times how often we have to do it we get power and it's really important that I know how much power we can expect to get out of this because if it's not enough I'm not going to waste my time building it now to be able to calculate how much power is available I need four things the flow of water the height that we're working with the density of the water and the effects of gravity now we already figured out flow in gallons per minute but this is way easier in metric so I'm converting to liters per second I'm estimating the height in meters and of course density kilograms per liter and acceleration of gravity multiply them all together and the units work out to watts which we are now getting almost exactly two watts that's not a lot of power if you compare it to a 60 watt light bulb but hopefully it's enough to light some LEDs and maybe charge a phone if we can convert enough of it to electricity now most of us know electricity will make a motor turn but did you know we can reverse that and turn a motor to make electricity for example just flicking the shaft or this tiny motor is enough to light an LED but the conversion isn't perfect only some of the energy turning the shaft gets made into electricity this is because inside the motor are lots of moving parts that lose energy to friction this is the case with every device we use only some of the energy we put into it actually does what we wanted to do the rest is lost in a motor or generator this is due to mechanical friction in the shaft and brushes electrical resistance in the wires and even magnetic losses as the magnetic fields get flipped around now dividing the output power by the input power tells us how efficient our generator is I'm guessing we're only going to convert about 50% of our energy to electricity meaning we're only going to get about 1 watt from the 2 Watts we have available plus we still have to decide on a motor for this project one of these is built for ten times more current than the other but is still too small what we need is a much bigger one purpose-built as a generator for much larger current tada man I love the Internet now that generator is built for 12 volts at 3000 rpm I need to know exactly how does to spin it to get at least five volts so I've checked it up in my lathe and I have something called a strobe attack that flashes light at a very precise speed to make it look like the truck has stopped moving so you see I've got it running almost right at six bolts and if I turn the lights off Alexa lights off you can see it looks like the check has stopped moving but the readout shows 1900 rpm so I know in order to get six bolts I need 1900 rpm on this motor okay we've gotten to a point in the project where I can't do a lot more experimenting without building the actual setup so I've enlisted my son to help me and we're just gonna put it together mounting it to the fence I'm using a clear plastic piece of PVC so we can see if the water level is actually filling up the pipe or if it's getting clogged up with leaves or something honestly one of the things that kept me from doing this project was knowing I was going to have to rip a downspout off the house but hey there are sacrifices that must be made now that I'm ready to test this thing there's not a drop of rain in sight so we're just going to use a garden hose to give us about the right amount of flow another thing to be careful of if I drill too big of a hole at the bottom for the jet it could drain all the water out and never build up any pressure so I got to start super small and just work my way up measuring the flow to make sure we get that 1.7 1.8 gallons per minute okay now that we have a 2 watt jet of water we can try our Pelton wheel and see what kind of voltage this generator can produce and of course I just can't resist the urge to connect some kind of load and just verify that the math hasn't completely been lying to us all right first time power and a light with this thing check it out it's glowing bright alright this is what is this like 1.7 gallons a minute we're using a hose so we're not exactly generating power but we are converting of the Hydra I guess water power this is hydro electric we are using water to generate this power and turn on our little LED I can't wait to do this for real all right shut down the hose please okay that was awesome but there is an issue if you use the footage to measure the RPM of the impeller we're only at 923 rpm and that's a lot less than that 1900 or so that we figured out the generator needs so if we want to charge a phone with that 5 volts we're gonna have to speed up the generator with some kind of gears fortunately for the gears all you have to do is model them up 3d print them out and we've got gears that now fit together really well now we need a way to mount these things around the pipe and my plan is I'm going to take a piece of that diamond plate that I've got lying around cut out a chunk of it and mount it to the pipe with some pipe clamps once we got the diamond plate mounted on there we'll be able to position the Pelton wheel right in front of the jet bump it around get in exactly the right position once that's on there we'll be able to mount the generator on the backside to get the optimal mesh with the gears [Music] not too bad huh yep the piltan wheel lined up with the pipe I'm planning on just shimming these brackets in and out to get it directly on center with the Pelton wheel and now we have our little gear on the back and all we need to do is position this somehow to mesh as good as we can with that I'm thinking I'm going to use this piece of material cut off a little bracket sort of have a swing arm thing going hear that a little bit of the weight of this will help engage it and if I need to I can add a little spring with a tensioner [Music] that actually went together pretty well I am a little concerned though by doubling the speed on the generator we've also doubled the resistance for the Pelton wheel so I'm a little concerned that it's not going to spin as fast as it did and we may not get enough voltage out of the generator but there's only one way to find out okay we've got it mounted up I'm going to turn on our artificial rain and see how she does oh hey squirts back at me the Pelton wheels doing its job does it go on its own that's what I want to know we're not quite at the full pressure yet come on okay now we're at full pressure and it's it's coming back at me look familiar and if I give it a little help no okay we got to put reposition it as I might oh unclogged got pine needles in there fortunately I made a little clean-out trap that's gonna get messy oh did that clean out my needles that looks a little more like a nice jet doesn't it come on Pelton don't let me down okay nowhere near the speed we were getting so let's see that's uh barely over a volt so I asked you slow oh that's faster two and a half Oh what happened oh I get more debris in there it spit it out though whoa all sudden I'm getting two point seven two point eight what'd I do all right I'm going to try adding some lubrication to the my gears back here see what happens I actually spit it up a little bit oh that jumped over three see if I can get some on that another bearing is sealed but why not that actually worked it went up to three point two look how fast that sucker goes when I take the load off holy moly all right I don't want to strip my gears so I got a stop it okay when I lift a little bit on the I'm actually lifting the gender a little bit so as I'm pushing the gears it's hard together and it's speeding up quite a bit so I got a I'm gonna pause it for a second make some adjustments I saw it getting the four volts alright I've been playing with this all morning and I was hoping to get that one watt of power out of our two watt jet of water but it looks like maybe I'm only getting a quart of water less but there are a lot of improvements we could make this Pelton wheel has a couple of pieces broke off on it from when I came off the printer so we can improve it quite a bit with some with that and other printing techniques the gears are clearly and you can hear them so they're losing power just to the action of the gears it could get rid of those by going direct drive to the generator and go with a smaller diameter felt in the wheel to try to pick up the speed third we definitely are not creating a nice jet of water this is just a hole in a pipe so we can create an actual nozzle and get it as closest with Ken to the Pelton wheel like a more professional setup and forth the generator we're using is kind of overkill it's designed to be able to do 30 watts of power when we only want want so there's a lot of mechanical losses in there we don't have to put up with it so I could try a smaller generator that's the end of part 1 of generating power from your rain gutters in part 2 we'll be making all those improvements I talked about to see if we can get up for that full walk until then please like subscribe and I'll see you in the next video [Music] I think I lost an electron I'm positive I lost an electron

Channel: Quint BUILDs

Views: 3,245,664

Rating: 4.8792462 out of 5

Keywords: science, power, energy, fun, education, build, DIY, hydroelectric, diy, generate, home, rain, pelton, turbine, wind, solar

Id: S6oNxckjEiE

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 29 2019