I hadnt heard about the ECMs till reading it in your reply Ghurd , so I searched on it and found a lot of posts about it so i been learning up on it.
WE have beavers , but the problem is getting them to do what you want.. And of course them stopping up your penstock. Ive been testing a mini "beaver deceiver" on my penstock and they havent touched it yet, it seems to be working, sure saved me a lot of work of building a big one. Ill post details of that later along with my penstock info.
I cant really tell what the beavers are up to now, they work a lot . and are doing a lot of good things like cutting down trees in the area we are flooding and keeping a low leak in the center of the earth dam filled. But i cant figure out what there doing with all that wood there cutting down.
Yes Thirteen, i can stop up the penstock but theres about 12 gpm at least seeping thru the bottem of our sandbag dam so its nearly impossible to fill that sump hole at the bottem in, its very deep too, However back where im gonna put the turbine, its on a good slabe of granite and the creek runs around it. and i can anchor to some good trees. I do like the idea of a floating pontoon style thing like you mentioned . Im gonna think on that one, seems like a good way to save the turbine in a flood. but working out a flexible section on 6 inch pipe might be a problem that would take the dif in hights of the floating unit and fixed top penstock location.
Were suppose to have unusually warm weather monday and tue (high 60s) so i hope to get the rest of the pipe run down then, cause ill surely get very wet tinkering with it.