Wind to Water Resurected alternator

[Dave B]

Here's a photo of Dave's neighbor's water wheel. It's 7' diameter about 7' head. I'm not certain of all the specs. but I think the buckets are about 3 gallons each and this runs about 30 RPM unloaded. The allternator was my original single phase single rotor with silicon steel laminates which I fried on my 12' wind machine at about 800 RPM. It's got tripled up round neos, I think 18 @ 1 1/8 diameter and now 18 Ga single wind coils. I don't remember the turns count but we figured about 300 watts at 300 rpm. He's getting about 100 watts with continuous normal flow from his pond supply. If we had started from scratch this alternator would have been much different to match the wheel and flow and much less gearing up etc. I slapped some new bearings in the hub and put an original test stator on it and there you go.  Dave B.

[Harold in CR]

 Nice set up. Any idea on the amount of water flow ??

[gizmoguy]

It's probably just the angle of the picture that makes me think it, but does that sluice run uphill towards the wheel?

Gizmoguy

[jlt]

What is the step up ratio . I seen a direct drive  one at craftskills renewable energy. site . The 100 watts that your getting now  should go a long ways to powering a cabin.

[Dave B]

Thanks for the comments. First of all I'm not certain of the flow and other details other than Dave here said they crunched the numbers before we "donated" my alternator and the potential power I guess is around 300 watts on paper. By the way, the angle of the photo makes it look like it's defying gravity, sorry, not true. We knew my alternator would not be ideal but better seeing it run than not and this is a cool little project. There can be a lot of tweaking yet and my suggestion is to lower the gearing and adjust the load, a more direct drive and better matched load will improve the efficiency. By the looks of the set up I believe he is trying to hit well over 300 RPM at the alternator. If I remember this alternator put out about 100 VAC (single phase) @ 300 RPM so trying to hit 120 VAC for light bulbs or other AC loads would make sense as to the very high gear up. Even with this arrangement (and he reports it really slows down the wheel, as it would) I guess he see's about 100 watts. Not sure yet how the power will be used and I think there is a plan for a small shed type enclosure to make a neat looking power shack. I'll post updates, the only time I saw this project was before the wheel was even mounted. I'm certain the owner took the attached photo that I got from Dave to scan. Fun stuff for sure.  Dave B.