Small-scale hydroelectric power

Oooohhhh, I'm soooo jealous.

Water wheel has the cheap simple reliable repairable stuff going for it...

Can you make a turbine look so cool?

Can you make a modern turbine with old fashioned waterwheel type technology?...that could be huge fun.

Blimey you could charge people to come and play...can I book a weekend? What is your 'full English' like?

Presumably you've seen that 'It's hard being Green' or some such series where that fat geezer who needs a haircut built a waterwheel....shouldn't be hard to do it better than him...... make a film...sell the story.... Harry Potter and the Giant Waterwheel...sorry getting silly now..must eat.

Del (hmmm sort of 'off topic'-ish ?)

Hmm, if it is a former mill and if you still have all the hardware from the original mill in place the solution would be easy and cheap.

Just locate your generator so that it can get its power transfer from an appropriate section of the power transfer mechanism already in place. You can disconnect everything else further down the line.

I am talking mechanical power here, not electrical. This is a definite - must document in text and video - project if ever I saw one.

Good luck

Thanks for the enthusiasm! As it happens a there is 'overnight' available but strictly on a cook-your-own breakfast basis! From the ground works it was pretty obviously an overshot wheel but nothing of it remains now. We all agreed that a wheel would be infinitely more charming than a turbine but at a cost in capital terms as well as in extraction efficiency. Actually I was thinking that a wheel could be made very economically and also accurately using laser-cut segments botled/rivetted together. I became quite enthusiastic about a big architectural or artistic statement using stainless or maybe copper. It could be a thing of great beauty provided it took it's cues from the surroundings.

I then began pondering using the wheel itself as the armature, fixing magnets or coils around its periphery such as to produce 50Hz and having a stator on the support structure. I wasn't' convinced it could be made to work and envisaged difficulty with noise as the whole structure would be excited at 50Hz.

I became quite enthusiastic about a big architectural or artistic statement using stainless or maybe copper.

Yeh, brilliant, There used to be a big Gilbey's Gin Still in Harlow... huge copper thing in a 3 storey sized glass fronted building...looked gorgeous at night.... I know a bloke who used to work there as their taster... (tough job but someone had to do it I guess ).

Keep us informed of your ideas/progress etc. I'm sure the project calls for plenty of armchair and pub based planning!

Del

Exactly, being called upon to make decision so very long and arduous meeting to be convened in such a place next week!

There is a great link to overshot waterwheels on the Canyon Turbines website. Good luck