The New Micro Hydro Housing

let's see what we get so far it's handling it welcome to the land of house youtube channel in 2020 i partnered with langston alternative power and i installed a micro hydro system it's a permanent magnet alternator that uses water to spin and it has sent a lot of power up to my house but it was my very first attempt at using hydro power and a lot of the things that i installed did not last very well so today i want to show you my first attempt at making a housing for this unit and this is going to be completely remade here today so what i did was simply used a piece of metal roof and a little wooden box and there are a couple things that definitely bad with this design so the metal roof itself worked well to keep things off of here but my exit for the water to leave the pim the permanent magnet alternator and go down this pipe was not good so i had a unisil which is a really good product but i mounted that just directly under this unit and it was producing more water than this three inch pipe could handle so i need to basically have a place for all that water to drop into before it goes off down to the creek over here so that's one of the first things we're going to do and you need to have a little bit better seal idea because well let me show you if i can get this ball valve to open here yeah hold on one second this thing is kind of a beast yeah i have to do something about this it's too much i guess it doesn't help that it's got 70 psi behind it [Music] i cracked it open just enough so you could see all this water skirting out and that is not good okay there we go so yeah you can see the housing is not airtight at all and needs to be reworked so let's go ahead and take some measurements here i believe my box is nine inches is that what it was ten inch let's see yeah so nine inch by uh nine inch there so i basically want to have all of that metal part right there drop down into a place that will keep it waterproof so let me show you what i have planned up here at the shop let's do one more look at my terrible design so i had a piece of foam around this little box and the pma would sit down on that and so all i had to capture the water was this unicel right here stuck in right there and then my pipe down here was in that so basically it was an inch and a half of catchment area and it would bog down the system because water would just clog this thing up real quick so this whole box is going and we're going to be working with something new also uh to note a subscriber of mine sent uh some electronics here uh ul lane is his name and so i'm gonna be uh basically taking this little box off here wiring up a shut off circuit and it won't be in here with the turbine with the pma it will be actually mounted off to the side so it should be good and waterproof so i brought the pma up here to get basically the dimensions that are needed for this housing and i was thinking the other housing will eventually rot made of that wood so why don't i try this really expensive pvc trim board and i can use my pocket hole jig to put this together and that will be the sides of this unit and then i have got all of this plexiglas over here and i thought that would make a really awesome lid so and probably even for the bottom too we'll see how well it works but my thoughts are let's go ahead and make this kind of a two-part build or two-part construction so the first part will be where this is located so basically this right here plus probably another one on top will be the actual housing and i'll put that plexi on top and then it's going to have a second piece that all of this rests on and that's where it's going to have that drop down into the reservoir or whatever you want to call it where it has the exit water going out and hopefully has plenty of volume that it will allow all this water to drop down and not bog up in here so let me do some figuring real quick and i will see what this is going to look like all right i just came up with a couple of sketches of what i think will work so using my pvc trim boards over here i'm going to cut two boards that are 20 and an eighth so they will go from right here and stretch across here and one of them over here as well and then i'm gonna cut a board in between those that will basically be nine and eight to connect that and that's gonna be this top portion or if you look on this design it's going to be this board right in here and that's where the turbine or the pma is going to sit down on and then i'm going to build walls up from that and also have a box down below it looks like this and that's where it's going to have the clear plexiglas you can see what's going on and hopefully we'll be able to get some nice visuals of how the water is falling out of that box and then i'm going to see about doing a clear top as well see anyway so that's the plan let's go ahead and cut those first four boards that's what the first portion of the box looks like i've cut this side long and then this side short so they will fit together and there is approximately a quarter inch or a little less underneath the box in all sides so i need to get that connected i'll probably use some of this star bond adhesive to get that connected i've got a thick and a medium to try out and i'm also going to use the pocket hole jig so i'll put some holes in it with this and then we'll be able to use some of these pocket hole screws to get that fastened down and this portion here won't worry too much about it being waterproof the main thing is that the underside is waterproof but i'm also thinking that in order to keep splash out from happening in here i will use some of this thin trim like this one right here and that can be just cut into strips to go right down in here and it will make sure that this doesn't slosh around and also will be the water hopefully won't hit that come out come up come out so anyway we'll see how well that's going to work okay it's been a couple of days i feel like i should apologize for the beginning of this video i worked a 115 hour stretch of third shift and i tried to film this video it did not work out very well i was pretty well done so this is what we have so far i have glued and screwed this portion and this is where the pma is just going to rest on and then i've got these strips here which i'm going to glue or i guess caulk down and then screw those into this portion and that is where the actual i guess prevention of water splashing is going to be so it'll have just a tiny little rim around here for the water to fall into and everything else will be up here and now i was looking at this box of plexiglas that i have let me move this out real quick here's what i was thinking i can cut this at a certain height and then put one of the side pieces in here and that or on this side whichever one and that'll make a little plexiglass box and it's about a foot and a half or well i guess 14 inches tall and that will go up under here in the same kind of manner i'll cut the little strips out and then have it so that that whole box will sit under here and it'll essentially let us see what's happening watch the water fall down and then i'll have enough room here to attach my exit pipes to take the water back down to the creek i think it'll look really cool to have the clear base on it so that is that and then so we still have to build the box that this uh i guess we'll have up above here to be the housing and i was kind of thinking what if i could find a way to make this part of the plexiglas the lid so all we have to do to see the turbine spinning is walk up to it and it'll be uh spinning inside of there and hopefully keep enough of the sound down i don't know we'll find out but anyway so our next step is to bring this back up here set it into place and then caulk and screw these little strips down here okay there's the base platform that the pma is going to sit down into here like that it's decently tight i could have done a little better on a couple of spots here but we know it's flat so i'm really hoping that prevents any water from splashing out if it does we will work with that as it arises but there we go cool so the next step is to use this big hunk of plexiglas here to uh create what's going to be up under this so we can pull this off for now and what we can do is i guess set this aside but basically i want just bring it up here real quick so yeah this box will be here so i need to find a good spot to cut this down and then glue another piece on it to finish up that side and so in the previous version of this whole housing there wasn't enough area for everything to drop down into and this will definitely fix that issue so and it's a little bit tall i guess i could no this is the best way i think unless the other side i cut down like a bit more anyway let me look at real quick and see what the best option is here okay here's what i'm thinking i can use the base here and if i do 10 inches across all the sides then i will have basically a 10 inch box to work with and then i can cut another piece out from up here to cap this open side over here and that way my three i'm gonna use two three inch of those unisil one here one here and that will allow two three inch pipes to pull the water out of this unit hopefully we don't ever have more water than two three inch pipes can handle if we do i guess we could always add another over on the side to take even more water out but that's a lot of water so i think to use the angle grinder would be the best way to cut this in half anything that has teeth on it i'm fearful we'll um we'll break this and we'll lose our clear box so anyway i'm going to mark 10 inches all the way around here and then cut this out to have our box okay hopefully the angle grinder is the right tool for this job i've got the box marked out at 10 inches here so we're going to cut all three sides of this and then i will mark out enough space up here to get one more panel and we'll put that over here it's a nice clean edge so it should glue up pretty good so all right let's go ahead and cut this down here i've got my mask and my goggles and my earplugs so hopefully we are safe enough for this job [Music] yeah it's kind of a yucky mess isn't it anyway i think it's working i'll just continue down the line here and hopefully get that first side cut i got that piece cut out the process wasn't very pretty but the end result looks pretty good so i'm going to be using some of this star bond adhesive this is the thick version and hopefully this will keep us together here pretty good on this housing and i think i'm going to make a bigger hole here so we can use a lot of this real quick there we go all right so like any good adhesive just going to apply a good portion of this i'm not sure what they used to put the rest of this podium together but it is really good stuff okay looking pretty good there may have to come back and put a little bit more filler in here because some of my edges weren't quite perfect with that angle grinder uh so now i've got a couple of clamps i'm going to use to uh hopefully keep this together while it's curing i don't always use a clamp that's too big for a job but when i do i use one that's way too big anyway i'll let that box sit probably overnight to be honest with you and then we'll come back and finish up the rest of this lower portion basically well i don't know maybe to go ahead and work on it some but i'm going to do the same thing we did up here except it's going to be on the bottom side and it'll have to be out some to make sure that this box is going to fit into here and not slide around i'm actually working with starbond they reached out and asked if i would show this in a few of my videos and i've used it with wood so far it's worked really well we're gonna try it here with this plexiglass and see how well it holds it's an instant adhesive but i'm gonna go ahead and give this several hours to make sure it is really nice and cured but if you want to check out star bond i have a link in the description down below and there is a coupon code that will help you to save a little bit of money we can get one more thing done here while that is curing and that would be to get the little trim pieces up under here so this will always stay in a consistent spot so let's see what we got around the edges that's two and a half that's three so we can make this way a little over here we got three and a quarter four so come this way some all right let me center this up and then i will just cut the strips and once again we'll just use some little screws to hold this into place up under here and that way if i need to get into this for some reason to like clean out silt or something i can simply just plop this off and it will be i guess compartmentalized so i can adjust things as needed i just finished up putting these little trim pieces up under here which will allow the i guess top pvc trim portion to connect to here nice and firmly so it won't slide around and if i need to clean that out i can just pull this whole thing off and hopefully it will be good so my thoughts are i can actually put a gopro inside of that and watch the pelton wheel spin up should be really fun so that's looking really good we'll let this have overnight to cure and then we need to pick a side to put those two holes in for the unisil that's going to be frightening because if it cracks it will possibly ruin everything and then after that we will go ahead and start working on the other top part so i have lots of the trim boards my thoughts are i will come back out here with another piece and then from that i can basically have a a top that will just rest down on here and so uh i'm doing that because when these are closed it's just too close to the edge there and it won't work so i'll have to just come out a little bit and then that box just rest on top of that it also gives a little extra room that i can use some of the closed cell foam over here in this corner that i've got in the top of this so my thoughts are if i you know come out this far with the box i can have one full layer of that foam going up and maybe it will help dampen the sound some i am going to have the plexiglass lid over here so it will still have some sound i don't know we'll just figure it out as we go along but it is turning out pretty good so far it's actually been about three days i want to see how our box is doing here gonna remove the clamps all right let's see how we did here seems to be pretty good you need some help after three days the caulking is done and the adhesive seems to have worked quite well there was a slight gap that i filled let's see if we can find it here uh yeah just right there is the main part that needed that caulking but it seems to be attached nice and secure so nice the base of our box is done let's go ahead and put some of those unisil in here and hopefully this thing doesn't crack whenever i am using that hole saw now that the box is totally done i have some three inch pipe sections and a couple of these unisil and that's going to be where the water leaves the box and goes back to the creek so i'm thinking two of them and i guess i'll put them right here on this side together and let's see if i only need one i can cap the other one off we'll give that a test but anyway let's go ahead and use a hole saw and see what we can do here with uh getting these in if it cracks our box it's going to be super sad and we'll have to find something else some good stuff it's going to take a while didn't take too long let's see if i can break free edge here nice very good so i was thinking i could put a small piece of pipe in here and then use a coupling to get that longer piece connected so if i ever need to disconnect it i can just pull this one off from the coupling so let's see if i can get that to seat down in there it took way more effort than i anticipated i actually had to use the heat gun to warm this up before i could get this slid in there but there we go that is our exit water pipe there hopefully that's enough to get the water that'll be coming in here i figure even if it fills up to like that it'll flush out so anyway okay so let's move on we've got this portion here and i put some marker right there so we can look under here and say okay that's the spot where yeah that is going to meet up and it looks pretty good and so the next thing is to put the pma back on there and then i'm thinking that these wider boards here can be cut to basically come out here and that will be what allows us to have the lid that rests on there so hopefully we have enough of this material to get that lid done as well i don't know i have to see maybe i should make it out of this and then use this for the lid too because it has to basically go up high enough and over enough to cover that whole thing so anyway we'll just mess around with it i've also got one more right there i can use i flipped it over and i have three sides done so far i'm gonna get this last one done here this is 28 and a half so i'm going to cut that and i'm actually i made a mistake so instead of going straight across i'm having to cut out little notches to go around here and here but anyway 28 and a half is my next cut [Applause] yes it would have been easier if i hadn't made the mistake but i don't have enough of this pvc trim to just cut again so i'm basically just making my way around that okay i got this done let's go ahead and put this up here and see what it looks like very cool uh so you can definitely see to the bottom and i think that gives plenty of room here on the sides for the lid to just set down on messed up on one little spot right here i may just put a little bit of caulking in there because i think uh enough spiders and bugs will get in there to be an issue but anyway so now i'm kind of excited to see how well this thing drains let's take this down to the creek even though the lid's not done yet hook up the water and get some float in here and just see it work i just hiked the lid and the plexiglass down to the water and realize that one of the connectors for the pin stock has come loose and 30 gallons a minute is flowing down the trail so anyway i'm back up here uh we'll fix all that later so for now let's go ahead and build the lid here so my thoughts are i've got this piece here which is uh seven and a half inch and then the other boards would get us up to uh right about here so basically we'd have i don't know two inches or so above that where we can see this spinning inside and so i just want to make sure that i have plenty of room around here that i can stick some of that foam insulation to hopefully keep this not too loud i don't know all that may be pointless but for now and also the inlet pipe here i'm going to just use a hole saw to cut out the two inch plus what uh a quarter inch anyway whatever it comes out to be i'm going to use that to cut out the hole and then probably cut down a little bit so basically the lid will just set down on this and not have to worry about mice getting in there anyway we'll retrofit something and it'll work out pretty good several months have passed while i have been working on the housing for the micro hydro system it's uh june middle of june so let me show you what i've been doing without you so i've got the hydro turbine is down here i have managed to get it down in here it fits really well and then i have built this box that steps up a couple of times and then i've got the plexiglas lid that will be able to show us the turbine spinning in here and all of this sits on this plexiglass box over here so i can't remember where i was three months ago or more whenever i started filming this but here's where we are today i've been using this star bond glue which has been really awesome if you've never tried this you may want to go pick up some so i was trying to get the plexiglas attached to here and i used some hinges and it was cracking and it's just not going to work well on that so the plan is to use more of this adhesive with this strip here i'm going to glue that right there on the edge and that will allow me to get my hinges attached to that and then down here to get that installed but anyway i just want to show you this step here because i'm using the star bond and the accelerator so basically i'm going to put the glue on here and then i'm going to spray the accelerator on the plexi and it will allow me to just stick it up there and within seconds this thing will be cured and ready to go so i'm so close i'm going to do that with the hinges and then i'm going to cut some more little strips of this pvc trim to go along here and make sure that the box fits into it and doesn't slide around so it's almost time for us to go up to the water and see how well this box is going to drain water from the turbine so that is a much much bigger basin than we had before i did enter into the affiliate program with this star bond company they'll give me a couple of pennies if you buy one of these so let's just see how well this works on this high intensity application because this thing is kind of heavy and it will be using the hinges on there so i'm going to make sure i put a good bit of this stuff here let's pop the cap on this accelerator [Music] there we go put that right up against the edge i can already feel that it is really making a good tight seal there put some clamps up here pro tip open your clamps before you start gluing [Music] okay check this out i didn't move fast enough and it only glued every other little blip you can see right in here so all this up here is not glued but starbond gives you options so i've got the thin glue and you put one of these tops on and then on top of that you put one of these itsy bitsy little cone things and that allows you to squeeze in glue into the cracks that you may have missed the housing is 99 done there's one last thing that i have to do and that is cut the hole in here i think on this side for the exit or entrance pipe of the water so basically i'll do that once i have the turbine situated spoiler alert for the next video i'm going to have to rework all of this pvc because i did not get my jets in the right spot i'm going to have to take my jets i've got everything i need in this box over here i'm going to lock the jets down first and then plumb everything else around it so we'll get that situated but for now this thing is looking pretty good i got the hinges on there i'll probably add a kickstand to this thing to keep it from resting solely on the pvc trim there but anyway that'll allow us to access the inside and then we can close it up and we can see what's going on in there and then hopefully we'll be able to see the water spill out into the lower portion as well i brought the base down here it's made out of plexiglass and the first section of the top and luckily everything matched up really well here just like the previous wooden box so the turbine is not rewire re-plumbed yet but i'm going to go ahead and test it out just to see if this three inch pipe is enough to drain the amount of water that's coming in here i think it's going to be somewhere around 30 gallons a minute max so we'll see how well it goes out i didn't have a 45 to connect these two so we may have to get that and try this again here in a day or two but that pipe will head off back to the creek and we're just going to see how this thing operates now i don't remember turning it off up top but it's at no pressure so we will have to go up there on the foiler and see what's going on i must have just left off the uh the supply up there i'm up here at the top of the creek where my intake box is it seems to be doing really well now my neighbor's system is pulling air so it's not turning as well as it should but let's see if we can clean out this debris real quick this screen idea i had is self cleaning pretty good my inner tube needs to be stuffed back in there but i'm not sure i can do that without pulling everything apart okay so let's go ahead and open up this valve that i had turned off and hadn't remembered so we're not dealing with a lot of water this time of year we've got whatever that is coming out and this little bit that's overflowing so we'll have to uh use the jets sparingly that should pull that water all out of there all right we are in business let's walk back down to the four-wheeler back down here at the turbine looks like the pressure is starting to go back up slowly we're at like five right now so this thing is super hard to turn on i don't know why yeah what i've been doing is grabbing one of these pieces of unistrut so i was worried about that right there it's definitely going to be an issue so we'll have to put some foam in there it is cool though down there to be able to see it accumulate so if i open up more oh nice as soon as that starts spinning it stops squirting out the water there [Applause] cool i brought the lid down here and then a drill with hole saw so my plan is now to make a hole big enough for this to fit through and i think it fits right in there close so anyway i may try to keep this piece locked down and remove the turbine to make sure that i can drill the proper hole so hopefully we can do that real quick i didn't bring a tripod so let me do all that i'll just show you what it looks like so here's what i've done i drilled a hole big enough just for the back side of this union to fit through i think there is still enough room down there that a mouse could find its way through right there so what i will do is just put some foam in there make a little moon shaped phone put it right in there maybe even put a piece of tape over it and that should make this whole housing pretty well mouse resistant i think that there's no way that one's going to be getting in there how cool does that look well we should do a couple of tests we're up at the full pressure now so i'm thinking that we will do an audio test here and then see if we can open all the valves for a short time just to see if this one exit pipe is enough to drain all that water so here we go [Music] okay there's one nozzle it's filling up over here really quick [Music] i think i know what happened [Music] ah one of my wires over here when it gets wet it's got a short a subscriber named workbench z has sent me a re-soldering kit that i will be using soon to get that wire fixed so you see it's locked down there yeah anyway that's a mess well with that wire touching i'm unable to do a proper test of sound but we can at least open up all the valves and get a flow test so i think we had three at 3 16 and one at a quarter so that should produce a lot of water down here let's see what we get [Music] so far it's handling it now it's filling up some in here i think we've made success with that extra large box there nice all right let's shut it down [Music] well now we know that our box is big enough to drain all the water that we can throw at it i purchased a 45 and that fits well here on the pipe that will take the water back down to the creek had to move it over just a little bit but it's doing pretty good this video has been a long time in the making for me hopefully you've enjoyed what i've built here i think it's turned out pretty good so in the next video on this unit i'm going to be taking it up to the shop i'm going to pull things apart and see if i can't re-solder the wire that is loose so before it gets wet it spins fine until so i found it's this end wire over here so it's all locked down but i've if i can get this touched in the right spot it will work properly so if i can get this off or at least remove the housing down here i can get to those wires and re-solder everything and put some of that shrink wrap around to hopefully prevent it from getting wet anyway thank you so much for watching if you have some ideas about my box here that i could improve leave those in the comments down below be sure to subscribe for more hydro content i've got some foam that i was considering putting around this box if it's too loud but it seemed quite quiet on that first jet for the couple of seconds that it ran so hopefully we'll have a nice quiet system here thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Land to House

Views: 34,350

Rating: 4.8942919 out of 5

Keywords: land to house, land two house, micro hydro, starbond, water power, turbine power, hydro electric

Id: Egk2dnAXSMA

Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021