Lister Engine Forum
How to / DIY => Everything else => Topic started by: dieselspanner on August 17, 2018, 05:56:58 PM
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Hi Guys
I posted a few months back about buying an off grid barn, still not mine yet, French Bureaucracy has to be seen to be believed!
Anyway, I'm doing my research a bit at a time, so.......
Anyone had any dealings with this system, or similar?
https://www.currentgeneration.co.nz/shop/alternativeenergy/MICRO+HYDRO.html
Cheers
Stef
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G'day Stef
I'm in New Zealand, of course - but in the wrong island from these guys
But if I can do anything that's easier to do locally, I'd be happy to help
Maybe if you approached them for contact details of previous customers who might have feedback on their product I could talk to them or go look at something if it was nearby-ish
I would guess they are well-made if they are locally built as we don't tend to build crap as it's such a small country that reputation is important. But if the components are Chinese . . .
Get back to me if you like - or email me on mnash@waterforce.co.nz if you want
Cheers, Mike
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Hi Mike
Sorry for the slow reply, it's the last week of our summer season, as well as being busy we're knackered too, running a B&B would be a lot easier without people staying in your house!
Some detail from a 'live' site would be great, if you let me know which area you're in I'll chase up the suppliers for a few details.
Hi Glort
As to building my own, I've got my hands on a Pelton wheel, ex USA, and once the aforementioned season slows down and I've caught up on my to do list I'll have a play.
We live in a fairly steep valley so the water pressure here is pretty good, so much so that we have a reducer on the inlet, my first effort will probably be driving a 12v vehicle alternator.
As for head, there's around 40 meters vertical to the barn, and I keep the cable run short, or if I remote the plant to the bottom of the property, 40 m away I'd get nearer 50m.
Cheers
Stef
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I've got a three inch pipe with 10 feet of drop. Should I be paying closer attention to this thread?
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before you get too excited,
try this out
http://www.rockyhydro.com/Free_Micro-Hydro_Calculator.php
adn http://www.nooutage.com/hydroele.htm#How%20much%20power
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Hi Mike
Sorry for the slow reply, it's the last week of our summer season, as well as being busy we're knackered too, running a B&B would be a lot easier without people staying in your house!
Some detail from a 'live' site would be great, if you let me know which area you're in I'll chase up the suppliers for a few details.
Hi Glort
As to building my own, I've got my hands on a Pelton wheel, ex USA, and once the aforementioned season slows down and I've caught up on my to do list I'll have a play.
We live in a fairly steep valley so the water pressure here is pretty good, so much so that we have a reducer on the inlet, my first effort will probably be driving a 12v vehicle alternator.
As for head, there's around 40 meters vertical to the barn, and I keep the cable run short, or if I remote the plant to the bottom of the property, 40 m away I'd get nearer 50m.
Cheers
Stef
G'day Stef
I live in the Central North Island near Palmerston north and I travel routinely in an area from Wellington in the south to Hawkes Bay in the north from my base near Palmerston North.
I travel regularly to the Bay of Plenty and that trip takes me from my home area through the Taupo/Rotorua region
I am occasionally further afield as well
As it happens I have a property with a spring up a hill and something like 25 metres of head over quite a small horizontal distance - so I emailed back-and-forth to Mike at Current Generation to see if those units could make a contribution at my property but, alas, they cannot (I have water coming down the hill in a pipeline not "free"). He says a single PowerSpout unit is around $NZ3000
If you want to have a look on Google Maps you'll see the regions where I am or where I travel - I go other places as well, but less regularly
If Mike at Current Generation had a customer or two who would be prepared to show me around their site, I'd be interested to have a look for my own interest. If he had suggested locations, I'd soon be able to say to you "yes" I can go see or "no" I can't
They look & sound like simple, robust bits of kit. But they wouldn't be maintenance-free. I would guess they need wearing bits replaced from time to time and his website suggests this is easy
Those 6205 bearings he mentions suggest a 25mm shaft and I guess there will be lip seals somewhere maybe? But those 25mm SKF Explorer bearings are at the consumer end of SKF's product range so they won't be expensive
With a 270mm and 235mm rotor on a 25mm shaft I wouldn't think bearings would last forever? However, metric bearings & seals are "off the shelf" anywhere in the world, and you could always keep a spare shaft "in stock"
I'll be interested to have a look at one myself if there is one suitably-located
Cheers, Mike
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Hi Mike
Sorry for the slow reply, it's the last week of our summer season, as well as being busy we're knackered too, running a B&B would be a lot easier without people staying in your house!
Some detail from a 'live' site would be great, if you let me know which area you're in I'll chase up the suppliers for a few details.
Hi Glort
As to building my own, I've got my hands on a Pelton wheel, ex USA, and once the aforementioned season slows down and I've caught up on my to do list I'll have a play.
We live in a fairly steep valley so the water pressure here is pretty good, so much so that we have a reducer on the inlet, my first effort will probably be driving a 12v vehicle alternator.
As for head, there's around 40 meters vertical to the barn, and I keep the cable run short, or if I remote the plant to the bottom of the property, 40 m away I'd get nearer 50m.
Cheers
Stef
Stef also check out this guy:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/latest/105877285/converted-washing-machine-provides-free-power-to-angry-ram-blogger?cid=facebook.post.105877285
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLaSf_YY7Xs
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y_Na5L0qko
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ieFZI4-6K8
You can follow his links and videos around
His approach is low tech but the principles are there and easily understood and could be re-engineered for reliability and ease of service
Cheers, Mike
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Hi Mike
Sorry for the slow reply, it's the last week of our summer season, as well as being busy we're knackered too, running a B&B would be a lot easier without people staying in your house!
Some detail from a 'live' site would be great, if you let me know which area you're in I'll chase up the suppliers for a few details.
Hi Glort
As to building my own, I've got my hands on a Pelton wheel, ex USA, and once the aforementioned season slows down and I've caught up on my to do list I'll have a play.
We live in a fairly steep valley so the water pressure here is pretty good, so much so that we have a reducer on the inlet, my first effort will probably be driving a 12v vehicle alternator.
As for head, there's around 40 meters vertical to the barn, and I keep the cable run short, or if I remote the plant to the bottom of the property, 40 m away I'd get nearer 50m.
Cheers
Stef
Stef, yes, I often think how good my work would be if not for the customers . . .
Excuse me if you have seen all this, but . . . .
Down here at the Bottom of the World we often have a different take on Intellectual Property - and thus it is with the Micro Hydro Power Spout chap . . .
See videos/links? IMHO they are very interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLzHr0Qntgo
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVR6UBCIRFs
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z61EakCymsY
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2EtEVdAQUY
An once you get to looking he has a heap more: ones about the shaft, and bearing replacement . . .
Cheers
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Stef these are just F&P washing machine motors. They are permanent magnet and very popular as wind and MH generators.
they would be easy for a man of your skills to set up. I have done a couple, one was a 7 phase and the other one was just a straight High voltage setup that I rectified and ran through a controller. I have one the neighbour gave me the other week sitting up the back now.
There is lots of info on them on the net, just google F&P generator and go from there. You can re configure the winding's for different outputs and do a lot with them. I notice power spout sell all their parts from the housings to the motors and controllers even the pelton wheels separately so you could always just get the parts you need and do the rest yourself. Pretty sure you wouldn't need any parts, these things would not be hard to put together and there is endless clever examples of what people have done on YT.
What sort of Flow and head do you have at the new place? I would love to have somewhere to play around with MH. With a constant water source it seems like the ultimate Alternative energy source to me.
Be interesting to see what you come up with for this.
If you look at these guys' website they're a bit smarter than that . . . .
They have a smart algorithm calculator, and if you enter your data into its fields - head, flow, conduit diameter, friction loss etc etc - they take those variables and match them with the one constant - nominal rotational speed - and "custom match" generated voltage etc to get the most out of what water you have . . . . or so they say
IMHO their blurb is worth a read
And the fact that they're not precious about their IP - everything's on YT - makes me feel confident they have at least serviceable quality in their gear
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Casey,
Take a look at this......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv3ugqjSqfM
It depends on what you hope to achieve, but this guy has raided the 'come in handy' pile and knocked up something useful with little head and minimum cost. Gotta be a great start point.
Mike,
Thanks for that, that's whole lot of information, I'll be a while soaking it up (and all the other Youtube vids it leads one on to!)
As mentioned in previous posts, I'm not all about with power generation and even worse with electronics, however.....
I think the idea is to 'gang up' the coils in threes - and 'star' rather than 'delta'? to drop the voltage to something less dangerous and more usable. Presumably this give a corresponding increase in amp and the power output remains the same.
I'll be off down the local tip next week with a load of crap, so I'll chat up Patrice - the head tip rat, he's been on our side since my OH sorted out his accommodation in Cardiff for the last France / Wales match.
I've never seen a washing machine with a smart motor, maybe they're not a prolific in Europe but there's got to be one somewhere near here.
Cheers Stef
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Hi Glort
You're on the nail with the route I fancy taking, Charger, Battery, Inverter, you missed the last step - Lister!
I've had shiploads - pun intended! of experience with 12 volt boat stuff and know that most of the kit I (eventually!) plan on using is readily available, here's how I see it........
The barn has potable mains water, big step forward, it's the one thing that's bloody hard to make!
The nearest mains electric is 250m and €8000 away, for that sort of budget I can do a lot of playing.
I intend live more in the style of Bob (Ajaffa) and Starfire than feeding power hungry aircon and so on, as it will be a summer residence, at least for the start. so I'll fancy splitting the 12v system into 3.
300 amp hr battery for kitchen and hair dryer duty, with a 5000 w inverter, 150 ah battery for the 12v led lights and 150 ah battery for the 'media', tv, radio, internet ect. Both the small banks to have their own, smaller inverters.
The charging I'm happy to split, 8/12 hrs in the daytime for the kitchen, lights 6 / 8 hours or so in the evening, the rest to the media in the dark hours. all timer controlled to allow for balancing the charging time and add / subtract batteries as 'real time' usage dictates.
Anything left and it can go to hot water preheat.
When SHMBO dictates the need for 220v ac Lister should cover the washing machine, dishwasher,ect. and allow for power in the workshop. any left over 'Lister Power' to the battery banks and / or hot water preheat.
I've got a decent supply of WVO as well, having read most of your posts on the subject I never turn it down and ahve quite stash now, I'm storing more than my old tractor and Landrover are burning!
Wood burning stove, with back boiler, for cooking, domestic hot water, the rest to under floor heating, spring and autumn (we've good good quality beech for fuel up to the eyeballs) propane cooker and 'fridge freezer.
Having done the calc's to the best of my abillty I reckon 500w 24/7 is just about doable, 750 gives a little margin and 1000 will be Rolls Royce, should I be wrong I'll start the Lister early.
As it's all going to be modular any errors, increase or breakdowns can be covered from another part of the system, also, as you suggested I'm going to go with a large pipe to start with, which will help keep the pressure up at the the hydro plant and allow for more generation to be added without extra plumbing.
All I have to do is buy it, put in a road, re roof it, put in some windows and a concrete floor ans before I fit out the internals first!!
Cheers Stef
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A couple of good points there, Glort
I'm liking the use of the stream water for running red neck air con, and the dish washer, not too sure how the washing machine will fare with the lacy French underwear.......
The idea behind the three banks was to keep it all simple, no more than two batteries per bank with a dedicated (cheap Chinese) charger from the Lister as back up, and plenty of redundancy
The 'kitchen bank' would only be used for blenders, mixers ect. and the hair dryer, I'd rather have a bigger inverter running easy than a small one that struggles with the start up of a particular appliance. I can't see anything being run for more that a few minutes, and that would most likely be during the day when it's on charge.
I had a pair of 130 ah deep cycle batteries on my barge and they, with a 6000w inverter would run the whole boat with a standard 22v domestic under the counter 'fridge (and the hairdryer) for a day and a half.
I don't want to use too much water as the stream in question supplies the top half of our valley with potable water and if I bandit the lot the local Marie (council) will have a hissy fit, you can do more or less what you like up here, until you piss the neighbours off, then they bubble you to the Mayor and he has to do something or he won't get voted in next time.
Hence the plan to use a 4" pipe, to keep the losses to friction down but have as high a pressure with a correspondingly lower flow down below. If, in practice, there's no problem I can 'big' things up later. It would be nice to pull 5Kw and back feed the grid, but A, there's no grid and B, electricity here is cheaper, most of it is hydro or nuclear, and the feed in tarriffs are correspondingly low
The inverter on the barge was a Chinese inverter / charger, 6000w , cost around £600 and was running for 4 years before I sold up. Went a bit against the then perceived wisdom that nothing would do but a couple of grands worth of kit from the big boys.
A good tip on checking the fuse ratings too.
Cheers
Stef
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Hi Stef, I think Glort may have a point, perhaps you have spent too much time at sea if you have taken to wearing women`s underwear, has SWMBO taken to wearing men`s underwear?
We live in troubled times, thank god for our sense of humor! :laugh:
Bob
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SWMBO doesn't wear Male undies, she wears the trousers.............
I did go through a spell of wearing pink lacy French knickers, the lads found out when I turned up for practice at the rugby club having forgotten I was still had them on, when the tight head prop said
'How long have you been wearing them, Stef?'
I said 'Since the Mrs found a pair in the back of my Landrover'
Cheers Stef
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Rugby, Land rovers and lace underwear, SHMBO wears the trousers? Things are worse than I thought. When you move into your place in the Pyrenees we`ll have to get Trump to build a wall around it, to prevent the spread of dangerous, subversive French liberalism.
Bob
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Hi mike90045,
The calculator came up with 1.11 KW a day. The rush is over. It'd take one hell of a pump to duplicate the flow but even fudging the flow up to 100 GPM I only got $1.90 per day.
Thanks,
Casey
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Bob,
I want, no I need the wall. So much so that I'll chip in a few shillings, i see it as defence rather than exclusion.............
Cheers
Stef
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SWMBO doesn't wear Male undies, she wears the trousers.............
I did go through a spell of wearing pink lacy French knickers, the lads found out when I turned up for practice at the rugby club having forgotten I was still had them on, when the tight head prop said
'How long have you been wearing them, Stef?'
I said 'Since the Mrs found a pair in the back of my Landrover'
Cheers Stef
LMFAO
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If only building a wall could protect us from the greed of capitalism and the stupidity of governments that rely on it for income.
I suspect the only way to protect yourself from their influence is to build a rocket and f*ck off to another planet. Sadly every billionaire on earth has already come to the same conclusion. Musk, Branson, Bezos and all the rest of them would make lousy neighbors. The Pyrenees is probably as safe as you can get.
Bob
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Like wot I said, don't piss anyone off and it's great.......
Cheers
Stef
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Hi All
So yesterday a mate and myself climbed up to the steam at the top of the plot with the test equipment, well a four foot length of three inch pipe and a ten liter bucket.
I had no idea what 10 liters a second looks like so we had a play. The stream splits into two just above the ideal point to collect the water, with the larger part on the south side, this means that even if I use all the flow on the smaller side, around one third of the total, I'll not bugger up the valleys fresh water supply.
We made a small dam and got around a third of the smaller flow through the 3" pipe, it filled the bucket in less than 3 seconds, the flow was filling about a quarter of the pipe. I was well surprised, I reckon with some playing around 10 liters a second will be easy, and 15 likely.
This is the driest time of year, so I should thing the project has some legs.
Cheers
Stef
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That's sweet, Stef. There's nothing like a 24/7 power source to minimize your battery bank size and ongoing battery replacement cost!
Passive filtering of power to the home plus EMT conduit and compression fitting for the home wiring to minimize emissions and you will save a fortune in medical costs/misery.
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Batteries may not be required at all, with good design. 3KW seems a perfectly luxurious home power service to me. I've lived comfortably with far less for many years. A backup generator should be all you need for some exceptional power need.
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3kw is fantastic. I can live with a 1500w inverter generator, and 4, 12V 100ah deep cycle batteries wired for 48V. That gives the inverter some surge capacity, otherwise loads are running off the solar or generator
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It's certainly looking good, apart from the humongous list of things to do and the three years or so it's going to take to do it all finding a Fisher Paykel motor will probably take most of that time.
In much the same way that the CS motors are thin on the ground in the US, F&P (and whirlpool, ect,) stuff is rare in Europe,
Perhaps the answer is international trade............
Cheers Stef
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It's certainly looking good, apart from the humongous list of things to do and the three years or so it's going to take to do it all finding a Fisher Paykel motor will probably take most of that time.
In much the same way that the CS motors are thin on the ground in the US, F&P (and whirlpool, ect,) stuff is rare in Europe,
Perhaps the answer is international trade............
Cheers Stef
https://www.trademe.co.nz/home-living/laundry/washing-machines/parts-accessories/listing-1752234960.htm?rsqid=9bee560dfeb54160960f4ba0005341d6
and
https://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=1752234960
and
https://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=1746605740
or just search TradeMe under the listing number if the links don't work
or just go to www.trademe.co.nz and search for Fisher and paykel or maybe "fisher and paykel AND motor"
If you find the one you want (research the PowerSpout videos to see which is best maybe?) and get in touch with me
Surely I can just buy one and mail it to la Belle France?
How hard can it be?
Cheers
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I'll bet there's a self-speed regulating single phase AC power head for that level of flow and pressure. Screw all the conversions and their losses.
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You don' t NEED to go to a F&P motor Stef.
With the Hydro energy you have available, you could use a regular gen head if you wanted or any other low Voltage generator/ alternator.
The power you have available is way more than an F*P motor can produce anyway. If I were you, I'd be looking for a 24v Truck alternator.
Anything from about 120 to 150A would match your generation capacity very well. The benefit of being able to do say 3+ Kw with a truck alt as against 1 kw with an F&P Motor is when you are running the bigger loads the generator will be supplying the power and your battery bank will remain at 100% capacity.
As Bruce Pointed out, you may not even need batteries at all or to make it simple and cheap, you could just have a couple of Deep Cycle marine/ Automotive type. Pretty sure in Europe these alts are quite cheap and would obviously be widely available.
Quick look on fleabay UK Found this:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Alternator-Prestolite-24v-180A-Wright-Bus-Routemaster/283123421364?hash=item41eb7890b4:g:FxoAAOSwR4hbgZJg
180A @ 28V is equal to 5kw! For 99 quid, that's real cheap power. Other thing is you can just bolt it up and it would work. That would give you power at the sire and you could then find the f&p and play round with re wiring that..... At night if you liked by the light you would already have. :laugh:
If you needed to conserve water a bit, You could go to a multi Nozzle system in the turbine housing. Have 2 or 4 Nozzles and open as many as you need for the power required. I'm sure someone would have done an arduino program for that to make it automatic.
An F&P might be good for battery floating or low level loads but unless you ganged a few up, you'd be cutting yourself short of the full power production opportunity you have.
Leece-Neville truck/bus alternator . . .
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Glort's comment about regulating generator speed by a shunt load woke up my shoddy memory a little.
I saw a website of an engineer years ago who had something like 7KW via water power, and used a single phase generator head. He used load shunting to regulate power frequency, with home resistive heating as the base load.
3KW of 24/7 of resistive heating could cut Stef's winter wood use down dramatically, so that suggestion by Glort is right on the mark. A water heating element in the water stream could be used to dissipate waste power when home heating is unneeded. You could prioritize the shunt load- house hot water, heat house, waste heat. Use it or loose it!
Boy, would I love to have Stef's water power!
Shunt loading would likely be way easier than dynamic water flow regulation, though either is certainly viable.
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Hi All
Mike.
Thanks for the offer of posting parts out, I'll let you know..........
Glort.
This had sort of gone around in a circle, or maybe a spiral, I'm liking the 24 volt alternator option, a lot.
It appeals to my idea of simplicity, connecting straight to the battery and controlling it's own output, which is where I started.
With the output from a 24 v alternator I'd be prepared to run the whole place on a single battery bank knowing that the 'catch up time would be vastly reduced.
Bruce.
I read all your posts, in the hope I might learn something, all I ever get is reassurance that I know sod all about electronics, this time you've come up with something I can understand!
Whilst I don't think I could manage a set up as clever as the one you've just described, I like the idea of house heating with the surplus power.
I envisage a back boiler on the wood stove looping round through a hot water tank, radiators upstairs and finally through underfloor heating downstairs, putting a second set of underfloor heating pipes in before concreting the slab will be easy and peanuts.
In Kazakhstan I saw a system with a 3Kw water heating element in a 3" pipe running a thermo siphon system in a small building, electricity was cheap. If I had power to spare at night diverting it to a similar set up with it's own dedicated pump would be fantastic and bloody easy for the electrically challenged!.
So, the next question, I started to try and find out what size of Pelton wheel I'd need to drive said 24v alternator, found a site with various calculations and then glazed over when I got to the word 'abscissa'
Given the 40 meter head and a 3" (or 75mm) plpe, would anyone like to hazard a guess what size wheel would be best?
I don't need the answer to 6 decimal places, somewhere close on a cigarette packet will do!
Cheers
Stef
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With hydro, you have to be aware of intake screens getting plugged up and loosing flow. Daily checks are the norm, till you learn how well it's going. When raining, windy or leaf fall season, much more frequent checks are needed.
Any danger of icing up and loosing all flow, or nozzle being split from ice ?
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the older power spout site, used to have a calculator for head/flow wattage
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With hydro, you have to be aware of intake screens getting plugged up and loosing flow. Daily checks are the norm, till you learn how well it's going. When raining, windy or leaf fall season, much more frequent checks are needed.
Any danger of icing up and loosing all flow, or nozzle being split from ice ?
Depending on the site and the flow you can always build a sluiceway and a water-wheel?
Then there are no issue around ice, leaves, stones, dirt or any of that stuff
The price of that simplicity is that the efficiency is half that of a well-designed pelton-wheel . . . .
But the maintenance and fragility is about 1% of what it would be with a pelton, screens, water pipes, adjustable nozzles . . . .
Just a thought
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Hi Glort.
Nice to know that we could plot a course to Mars, well if we got Bruce to run the calcs!
Mike.
I'd dearly love a big ol' overshot grinding away on the SW side of the barn, there's even a case for it, when the barn was built it would have had a small man made canal to it, there are dozens of kilometers of them in our valley and there must be thousands of k in the Pyrenees as a whole, to provide water for the stock. There is a provision in the local agrarian bylaws to the effect that it's incumbent on a land owner to maintain them. Sadly, since mechanisation loads have been lost, and one of them served the barn I'm after.
The other problem is that a water wheel would want way more water than I'd be happy redirecting around the point where they pick up the valleys water supply. provided I don't ruffle the Mayors feathers I'll get away with quoting historic rights for just a fraction of the supply, in the unlikely event that someone notices and cops the hump.
Cheers
Stef
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I did some checking and direct AC generation with frequency regulation via load is common and popular; it seems Glort nailed it.
http://www.homepower.ca/ac_hydro.htm
I think with some diligence you should be able to find a completely tried and tested system to do what you need, Stef.
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Hi Glort.
Nice to know that we could plot a course to Mars, well if we got Bruce to run the calcs!
Mike.
I'd dearly love a big ol' overshot grinding away on the SW side of the barn, there's even a case for it, when the barn was built it would have had a small man made canal to it, there are dozens of kilometers of them in our valley and there must be thousands of k in the Pyrenees as a whole, to provide water for the stock. There is a provision in the local agrarian bylaws to the effect that it's incumbent on a land owner to maintain them. Sadly, since mechanisation loads have been lost, and one of them served the barn I'm after.
The other problem is that a water wheel would want way more water than I'd be happy redirecting around the point where they pick up the valleys water supply. provided I don't ruffle the Mayors feathers I'll get away with quoting historic rights for just a fraction of the supply, in the unlikely event that someone notices and cops the hump.
Cheers
Stef
Yep, you're right Stef
Probably the first question is "how many watts do I need to generate?" And, of course, the answer is different if you have direct generation-to-house or if you have batteries and inverter(s)
If the latter, then a kW or so is probably fine 24/7 - which is the benefit of hydro, of course
Obviously I don't have a picture of your setup - but if there is steady flow, then there are many ways to build a channel and an undershot arrangement (if there is no fall but if there is flow) or an overshot if there is fall as well
Would it be possible to retain the flow of water to other users with an undershot something?
There are many youtube videos of wheels in the one-metre-diameter range; usually very poorly engineered by uninformed optimists but which demonstrate an ability to generate rotary motion from not-very-much
this sort of thing but better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZAVBaGryPA
Something like 300 watts 24/7 is probably equal to a solar array with a peak of 1500W when the sun shines, nothing at all in darkness, almost nothing when overcast and running at 15% output on winter days
Cheers
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On Alibaba there were seems to be plenty of turbines with generator in the 3K region.
What I haven't seen is load management/regulators but I didn't spend much time looking for that. It could be just an Arduino Uno, a frequency detect circuit and some solid state relays.
I'd be glad to help if need be, Steff.
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Hi All
No Glort, I'm not confused, overwhelmed, maybe!
This is exactly the type of thread I was looking for, it's a bit like a bunch of like minded engineers sat in the tea hut (or coffee hut in the US) working their way around some naval architects idea of a bilge and ballast system more suited to the Starship Enterprise, in order to get a practical design to suit the job in hand and still keep it under budget without pissing the management off.
And I get to cherry pick from the brains of people who's opinions I value before I cock it up all on my own!
It's going to be simple and hopefully inexpensive. Sure there's 5Kw of power to be had but I'm happy to use what's there inefficiently, as it's 'free' and live a relatively 'low wattage' off grid life. The barn will be a second home and if it's bloody hard work to live there in the winter months, we won't be there.
What ever happens it'll be fun, please keep the ideas coming..........
Cheers Stef
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The economics of infrastructure cost (pipe run) would be the only thing that might steer me into batteries and the puny 1000W battery charger. If the pipe run is not too long, then direct AC generation is hands down winner in my mind. The simplicity and power of the direct AC generation and value of the substantial heat from the regulation system are very tempting, and the savings on batteries (the replacement cost goes on forever) is the clincher.
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Thanks both,
Here's where I'm at so far,
1000w will be great, and, given what I've learned so far the 24 volt alternator is favourite, along with a couple of 150 ah deep cycle batteries. the idea of a 220v system without batteries is very tempting, especially with the offer of help with the design of the control panel.
I'll start scrounging up stuff and see where it all leads. As it's a 'project' rather than the next full time home, the funds are limited
It's going to be a 3 year project, minimum, we've had a mate staying with us this week and he's talked me into doing a 'Frank Sinatra' and coming out of (semi) retirement for a self propelled hover barge project, with a build in Scotland and trials on the Caspian next year. There's the advantage of some decent money against that of having to work in Kazakhstan on a four week rotation.
Keep the ideas coming, I still don't own the barn yet!
Cheers Stef
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If the place is to be a vacation cabin, you may find that a modest PV system with generator backup is far less costly. The infrastructure cost for microhydro can be a substantial compared to screwing a few panels on your roof.
The hover barge project sounds awesome!
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Hi Bruce.
The idea is for something like a summer residence, initially. we will only be 2k from our B&B. Which we'd like to let it out as a 'gite', a self catering holiday home, by the week, in the summer. That way we'll only have to come down once a week to sort the place out for the next guests, rather than be tied up 24/7 with breakfast, evening meals and people coming and going every couple of days. less money, but less work, we're not getting any younger!
The rules for conversion won't allow solar panels - don't tell Glort, he'll be mounting an attack on our local planning office! - and the water source is just on the other side of my boundary, so what ever I do has to be a bit discrete.
From what I've learned so far, a truck alternator, a couple of batteries and a home brewed hydro plant will be less than €500, I can pick up a couple of hundred meters of irrigation pipe for around €300, second hand, allow €300 for an inverter and another $200 for some cabling ect. and Robert is your mum's sister's live in lover......
If life unfolds anywhere near where I'd like it to, once the project is livable, going down the load controlled genny route, with a slightly larger pipe would be the way into the future.
Google 'hover barge at Fergusons shipyard' for some images of the last one I worked on, 'The Siberian'
There's not been many built, but they've been about for years, try this for awesome....
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/52tleq/columbia_helicopters_vertol_107ii_towing_a_hover/
Cheers Stef
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I wondered why a hover barge until I saw the ice. Awesome machines.
No PV sucks, I can see why a small discrete microhydro is appealing.
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Hi Glort,
Yep, that's exactly what it is, whilst we're not quite in the Pyrenees National Park we're close enough that the local authorities want to keep it pretty for the tourists, sheep and tourists are the two staples industries here.
As I said I'm liking the 24v route, so I think that's what I'll start scrounging for first.
If I end up in Scotland it'll be like a free pass to Aladin's spare gear store and workshop, if it's anything like last time I was there..........
Cheers Stef