Big creak, no experience, please help!

[fusiongary]

I've got a piece of property that has a big creek running through it. The property is nearly worthless to build a residence on as it is an abandoned basalt Quarry, but has great potential for a Greenhouse location.  I'd like to use the potential energy from the creek to power some grow lights and water heaters.  The fastest part of the creek is about 9 feet wide, and 2-3 feet deep, flowing quite quickly. 
I don't have any experience with this, but I'm a fast learner and a hard worker. 
I'm an optimist, so I'd like this to be economic, efficient and easy.  Feel free to crush my dreams, I'll just come up with more.
Thanks in advance,
Gary

[hydrosun]

Check out other hydro posts especially the one about a large instillation in Utah and the cost and structure needed. There is nothing cheap and easy when dealing with low head hydro. The volume of water and size of components needed to produce large amounts of power is much greater than with high head hydro. The basic formula of gallons per minute times feet head divided by 10 to determine the watts output.  If you have one foot head you need to deal with 10 gallons every minute to produce 1 watt.  Your creek has a cross section of around 20 square feet. You need to see how fast the water is moving to see how many cubic feet pass a point every minute. Throw in a stick and time how long it takes to travel between two measured points on land.There are 450 gpm in a cubic feet per second. Then you would need to figure how much head you can use. Either a dam across the creek to create drop or a diversion pipe or canal to gain head.  Once you have those numbers then you can look at what type of turbine and generator would work for your site.  If you can't make any addition head you might be able to use an in stream turbine like the one from althydrosolutions.com Your site may be able to produce 200 watts with their standard turbine. Not exactly a huge output for a large investment.  Good luck.
Chris

[fusiongary]

Thanks for the link and the advise.  I'll try and make those measurements.  Making a dam shouldn't be a big problem, I've got no shortage of Rock, remember, the property is an old Quarry. 
Gary

[WoodWaterWheel]

Gary,       Chris is right,       Flowing water has potential energy but if you can get the water (or at least some of the water) up in the air 3' or more you'll get a lot more electricity for the money.        Maybe even use a low dam and some pipe to get the water up to 6'  --- or even 8' 
Spencer

[fusiongary]

I've been doing some surveying of the site, and there isn't much potential for increasing head. There is one spot on the creek that might produce around 1.5' of head with some simple modification.   I think that during the rainy season, I've got between 6 and 12 gallons per SECOND.  I put on some waders and hopped in upstream from the potential wheel/turbine site. The water is 2' deep and 12' wide, flowing at a speed safe enough to stand in. The fast spot is around 7' wide and too forceful to stand in.
  I've been thinking about using a wheel 3'' wide, with "paddles" around 10" deep.  Wheel diameter at the inside of the paddle would be around 2' making the outside diameter around 44".  I would most likely gear this up to gain rpm.   I pretty much made these dimensions up, with no specific science behind the design. Let me know what you think.
Gary

[fusiongary]

So I was able to take some measurements today.
Easter egg traveled an average of 6.8 seconds over 25 feet, approx 3.5fps.  I read that in order to compensate for differences in depth fps should be multiplied by.85, is that correct?  That would make it around 3fps.
Cross section of creek near potential site was 10feet across and 2.25feet deep.

3.06 x 22.5 = 68.85 CFS
68.85 x 7.4805 = 515.03
515.03 x 60seconds = 30901.9gpm. Is this possible?

Any input would be appreciated.

[WoodWaterWheel]

Chris and Gary,         This turbine may be the lower cost unit you need.
Spencer

[fusiongary]

What is that? I'd like to check it out.

[wpowokal]

http://www.waterwheelplace.com/

[roosaw]

So I was able to take some measurements today.
Easter egg traveled an average of 6.8 seconds over 25 feet, approx 3.5fps.  I read that in order to compensate for differences in depth fps should be multiplied by.85, is that correct?  That would make it around 3fps.
Cross section of creek near potential site was 10feet across and 2.25feet deep.

3.06 x 22.5 = 68.85 CFS
68.85 x 7.4805 = 515.03
515.03 x 60seconds = 30901.9gpm. Is this possible?

Any input would be appreciated.

Hey Fusiongary
typically the stream bed is not rectangular so you are getting something more than actually avalable with your simplified math.  Back in Civil engineering school they told us that in the lack of any info to the contray assume that the stream bead is triangular.  That would mean you (more reasonably) would have (1/2*width*depth) 11.25 ft^2 of stream.  That would recaclulate to 15500 GPM flow.  A much better approximation of the area can be had if you can measure several depths at regular spacing across the width of the stream.  If your stream is "wide and deep" then your 0.85 factor on speed is good, if however there is a "deep channel with wide shallow spots on both sides you would want to measure the speed in those spots and account for it.  Basicly break the stream in to parts and calculate the flows individually then add them back together.