Weekend Project #308 - Hydroelectric Power (Part 2)

Here's the latest update:

It's time to mix electricity and water!!!  Good times!

Not our wiring, but close

We got the wiring sorted out, and a new charge controller for the setup, and away we went.  System hooked

up, pipes in place, and raring to charge up some batteries!!!   Here's what happened:

Very very cool.  400+ watts.

Sadly, between the leaks and the low-ish stream level, it'd only run like this for about half an hour, and then start sucking air and drop to less than 50 watts.  Usually closer to 30.  Unacceptable.

Our next step was to line the box with plastic to eliminate any in-box leaks.  That initially worked great, except my poor box structural design couldn't handle it, and the front popped open.  

My bad.

I put the thing back together, added some extra support to the front of the box, and continued testing.  

Know what happened then?

The back popped open.  And part of the bottom fell out. (picture not included because of shame.)

The next day, it was kind of drizzly - oddly opposite our current weather - and I decided to give it another go.  I yanked all of the plastic out, I shored up the back and bottom, added a lot of structural support, and put in all new plastic.  All of that brought the in-box leaks down to almost zero.  That work, plus our one day of light rain, had the thing running at about 350 watts for over an hour.

It finally started to drop off, so I figured that it would run out sooner or later, but that it wouldn't hurt to leave it running overnight.  The next morning I saw that it had been putting out between 200 and 300 watts all night long.  It covered all of our asleep time loads (fridges, modem, and routers, plus whatever other light odds and ends), the power to run our power system/controllers (50± watts) and still put another 30 amp hours into the batteries.  I was stoked!

That day, despite the rain being gone, the hydro generated 6 KWh of power, averaging 250 watts for 24 hours.  A person can't ask for more than that. (Well...a person could, and will, once rainy season starts.)

The rainy day was on a Tuesday.  I heard from Gary the Neighbor that we got about an inch of rain that day.  The 6 KWh day was Wednesday.  The hydro continued to continually produce power until 10:30 am on Saturday.  The lesson from this is that it doesn't take much rain at all to bump the stream up to production level.

Of course, we haven't had any rain worth speaking of since, but you know Hilo....it's only a matter of time.  Although in the interim, we've had several of what I'm now calling "Angry Weather Days" - not because the weather is angry, but because it makes me angry.  If there are heavy clouds giving no sun and no rain....that's an angry weather day.

In the meantime, I'd say this box design (just the shape, not the construction) has proved itself, and it's time to start plans for a permanent structure.

And when that starts, I'll let you know.  Until then....