aidg.org — Pico Hydroelectric Generator in 5 gallon bucket developed by Sam Redfield and tested at La Florida in Guatemala. The generator is meant to be a very small, cheap, low impact generator designed to be used with existing gravity fed irrigation, fresh water, or waste water systems.
Jun 29, 2008 View in Crawl 4
timknabJun 30, 2008
Why did you assume only a 1 meter drop in elevation. From the comment above it seems that they had a vertical drop of almost 30 meters. I'm too lazy to do the calculations but it seems that would substantially reduce the required flow rate. You could also use a pipe with a larger diameter provided the creek was large enough and flowing fast enough to reduce the required drop in height.
Closed AccountJun 30, 2008
It's a small Hydroelectric Generator using the power of falling water. Think Hoover dam in a 10 gallon can.
gn0stikJun 30, 2008
sounds great, I'll keep an eye out. I'm most interested in how he modified the alternator.
shortyjacobsJun 30, 2008
@unknownpoltroon: Yup, I was thinking this too......just came to an awful conclusion:Say you installed one of these on the gray water pipe in your basement. Assume you use 100 gallons per capita per day, (national average for domestic use is around 101 right now, but keep it simple). Also assume that all water usage in the house outflows as gray water. In a family household of 4, that's 400 gallons per day. That's 1.51 m^3. Also, assume this thing is in the basement, and take all the water to fall from the second floor, (optimistic). Call it 20 feet, or about 6 meters. 1510 kg of water falling 6 meters gives 1510*6*9.81=88,878 joules. 88,878 joules = 88,878 W*s (watt seconds), or 24.68 watt-hours, or 0.02468 kilowatt-hours. Oh, it's not even close to 100% efficient, but we'll assume it is. 0.02468 kW-h at a conservative $0.20/kW-h is a savings of $0.005 per day, or a whopping $0.15 per month. At a cost of $5 for the bucket, $50 for the alternator, and $20 for all the PVC, you're looking at only a 42 year repayment interval. After that, that $0.15 is pure profit.
Closed AccountJul 1, 2008
I'm involved with Engineers Without Borders Canada, and this is really cool! Dugg.Always good to see great technology given to great communities
willwork4foodJul 1, 2008
Rebuilding car alternators is commonly done for larger homebrew wind turbines, but for a 60 watt hydro-bucket it's overkill.There are plenty of micro wind turbine projects out there that use stepper motors from old dot matrix printers or motors from electric treadmill exercise machines, etc. Either is a permanent magnet solution that is low cost, requires no modifications, and would easily handle the low output this bucket produces.Search Ebay for "wind turbine motor" and you'll find many alternatives. Not all are truly suitable because not all Ebay sellers are competent/trustworthy, but there are plenty of cheap permanent magnet motors out there that will do the job.