500 Watt Hydro Power System in Virginia (Overview)

we have a high water situation, our creek is running three or four inches above normal, a little murky, but we are here, there are sandbags and rocks controlling our volume for our six inch inlet line right here, I have a little two inch thing that wobbles on a half inch rod which is the main entrance, the water flows from here to an elbow down here, here we have to clean the gravel trap at the bottom that comes out the bottom and we have our elbow on our six inch line which then goes to the inlet grate, so a little further down here we have our rotating grate which is running at capacity, the debris flows through the spreader and is distributed evenly on top of the rotating grate.

The screen is on bearings. I have golf ball bearings on this end and a pin on the end. At the other end I can stop and maybe you can see the holes in the top of the six inch pipe. Those are inch and a half holes. On the other side, water flows through the grate into the eight inch pipe, we have an overflow here, okay, turn off the water at the entrance to the stream to show you how the spinner we have at the end works well, well, let me take it apart for you, we just a can we have a bolt and a set screw and at that end we have our bearings our ball bearing the bearings of your golf ball this is nothing more than a screen where the squirrel cage explodes by the unit An air conditioning unit should make an effort to keep it round for stability.

I plugged the end of the pipe with a piece of PVC board. It had a couple of two-inch fittings, two ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene brackets basically and a stainless steel bolt that you just rotate on. that bearing, so this rotates with the cage, actually, the water passes through the screen into this basically open place here, the water flowing over this section here engages with the wheel, the squirrel cage wheel, which provides enough force to keep them rolling and then the debris rolls out the top, all the water goes in and then goes down into the reservoir.

This is a thin gauge stainless steel to divert water down to the proper level. This is a corrugated tube that we wanted with a nice, even distribution. This is a spreader with a nice even distribution. water here to avoid having high and low spots but this works pretty well today after the big rain it was overloaded and if there is too much water flowing into this it will come out and stop the Spinner and that's a problem so I'm trying to do that, that's what it's about, but it's actually not big enough, so in normal situations it works fine, you can't overload it and then from here the clean water comes in. a reserve tank here now here because we have a high water level.

I have an overflow here that limits the amount of water that overflows. The rotating screen at the bottom here is two four inch lines that you can't see because the water is so turbine, but from there they go 500 feet downstream to the turbine nozzles. That's right, they're going to the wheel that's going to put out about 500

watt

s of capacity right now, we've got the valves turned down a little bit, but I'll show you downstream what it looks like. Downstream here we have the 2 4 inch PVC lines that I have spray painted to camouflage, they go, they have to cross the stream.

Kiss, we have about a hundred foot stretch where I need to hold them in the air. a 3/8 cable table anchored to a rock back there we use poplars for our towers and they are on the tree supports they are on vertical chains initially to allow the trees to move and not with the wind and not move the pipes in the top, we ran this cheaper schedule 20 green pipe uphill to keep it level and the pressure down, those things are not pressure rated, we ran it from there down, we ran it there, this is more expensive schedule 40 PVC where the pressure it increases as we go down the hill to about 16 pounds on the turbo wheel here by the stream again we have another small cream colored stream crossing right here use the same

system

with the wire in the trees and the zig zag small lines holding the pipeline.

The 24-inch lines are split into twin two-inch lines, so we have four two-inch lines going to a four-nozzle housing that feeds a Harlington Grinspoon 22 wheel in the middle of the housing. I think this is Emmy 1603 to generate electricity and from here we have three phase AC, then we run a small hotter pair through the wire where the electronics change it to two phase DC, we have our batteries and our inverter, here we have the electrical components. Right now we are running at 24.8 at 17 amps. I have a little bit low valve right now because I had some problems with the input, it will go up to 20 just over 20 amps, we have our overflow, our emergency. bypass heater right here, the rectifier under the cover, is converting AC to DC, which then

power

s the batteries and inverters.

Right now I have the 400

watt

inverter which is generating voltage into the battery which is holding up slightly well even actually the 600. The watt inverter will turn on when it wants to use more

power

and when I turn off my other nozzle they will all get more amperage and will power the larger inverter. From here we have 500 feet of dual 12 to 12.2 gauge and a signal wire going to the house which gives me control over the inverters and the voltage reading in the house and that is so far what we have and it is an imperfect

system

but it is working well at the moment.