Homebrewed Electricity > Hydro

Building a ~40W Waterwheel.

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slopecarver:
I'm partways through my waterwheel project so I thought I'd share what I've gotten done so far. It's more of a tinkering project than to do anything useful with the power as I have no other existing system to contribute AH to.

Stats:
Head ~3ft
Flow 50-200GPM in winter, Min 10GPM Summer, Max 1000GPM after sustained downpour.
Goal 12V

The overall plan is to re-dam a "pond" that has existed on my property but had been drained about 30 years ago. The "pond" before I dammed it was/is filled with a swampy soupy brush-overgrown mess. I built a dam with a footer 7' long x 2'wide x 8" tall then laid 4 courses of filled concrete blocks with a channel left in the middle of the top 2 rows for height control. I also inserted a 6" PVC pipe at the bottom of the block wall but above the foundation to drain the pond for service/when not in use.

I've build but not yet installed 4x 8' long flume sections from PT plywood and 2x6 which I plan to mount on 4x4s sunken into holes on each bank.

The waterhweel will be an overshot waterwheel with a 55gal plastic barrel section 8" wide as the core of the waterwheel with paddles made from sections of PVC pipe as the buckets.

I've got a 72 tooth #35 sprocket for the drive side and a 10 tooth driven sprocket that will drive a Permenant Magnet DC motor hopefully somewhere near 12V.

I've compiled the dam building process in a 21 minute youtube video to begin with, I haven't finished the other components yet. https://youtu.be/p8pdCOLzO74

slopecarver:
I finished this project, 5W was all I could make before removing the wheel due to sale of the property. I'm sure there will be comments by users here and I welcome them.

SparWeb:
Have you moved the waterwheel to a new water source?

Rainwulf:

--- Quote from: slopecarver on January 28, 2018, 10:06:45 PM ---I finished this project, 5W was all I could make before removing the wheel due to sale of the property. I'm sure there will be comments by users here and I welcome them.

--- End quote ---

I think i saw your videos on youtube. dual chain reduction for the generator? flume kept filling with leaves and ice?

slopecarver:
SparWeb
The waterwheel has no new home besides in my garage for now.

Rainwulf:
The double chain reduction was necessary to get sufficient RPMs to get high enough volts. In operation I had no problems with sticks/leaves but I can't say much about the ice, I never ran it in freezing weather.

Now I'm halfheartedly playing around in a small portion of another water source, check it out on my youtube channel.

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