Posted by: hansum
In reply to: Bob Zumbrunnen who wrote msg# 73267 Date:9/11/2006 7:12:26 PM
Post #of 73313
Bob... There's supposed to be some relationship between the size of your feet and, well, your watchamacallit. Size 11 wide isn't bad. LOL
On a less\more serious note... I, and I'm sure a few others at IHub would be interested in your progress with generating your own electricity. I'm off-grid at the cottage with a combination of deep-cell batteries (Wal-Mart), a 5000 watt inverter (e-Bay) and a solar panel and controller, to keep the batteries charged when we're not there. At home I haven't done anything yet, but we have a creek in a ravine behind the house that I'd like to tap into. Good luck with your damn dam project! LOL
P.S. Hope you got your back-hoe out.
"Sadly, artificial intelligence will probably never be a match for natural stupidity."
- Rocketboy
"They got Pluto. Uranus is next!"
- Bumper sticker
Got the backhoe out a few days ago. By myself, which was a heckuva extra challenge. I'll soon be buying "the power washer from hell" to have at it then fix what I can on it before shipping it off to the dealership for the rest.
Why haven't I started power-washing it yet? Well, ummmm... The excavator that Churak or someone said they wanted to see pictures of stuck. It's, ummm... Well, it's stuck!
I was doing so well with it, too! Spent about two half-days clearing trees from the back side of the dam (not easy to get to until this thing made the path) and digging as much channel as it could reach (I didn't want to open the dam up more than necessary to drain the water out of the muck), then went to the other side, crawled up the side, noticed the tracks had sunk pretty deep on the way, so used any dry rocky spoil I was digging out to fill in the track ruts and pack them down, finished my work and was driving it back out, and learned the hard way that they stay on top of such a surface really well UNLESS you turn! As soon as the iffy soil's surface tension was broken, I was in trouble. Tried to dig out and crawl my way toward the ramp up which I dragged the backhoe. No joy. By then I was probably about 100 feet away from the dam.
Spent the whole weekend working it slowly toward the dam. Worst part is the muck behind the machine. Running out of places to dump it and it just fills right back in, meaning the machine eventually won't swing much until I slowly swing it as far as it'll go, dig out a bunch of muck, and keep repeating for about an hour.
Where it's at right now is the fronts of the tracks are on hard rock/clay at the edge of the dam, and the machine is tilted up at one helluva steep angle. The muck behind it has so much vacuum, the muck below it is somewhat keeping it propped up off the tracks, and the muck on the tracks are preventing it getting enough bite where it's at. The tracks are churning and I can hear them running against rocks, but that's about it.
It has amazing breaking power at the bucket, but when I get a good bite into the dam (which is getting lower and lower because of how many bites I've taken) and dig in and pull with it, it can't move itself even an inch now. Previously it was slow but steady progress.
Now it's immobile. And I've refueled it twice and it needs it again. Having to haul fuel down to it 2 five-gallon jugs at a time. 25 gallons is good for maybe 4 hours right now.
The solution is pretty obvious, though. Well, two possible solutions.
I've called a local excavation company who should be able to get out here tomorrow or the next day and first we're going to try chaining his track loader (a 963 or similar size machine) to my front bucket with him running down the other side of the dam and pulling the front of the machine down (horizontal, actually) while pulling forward. Hopefully this will break the muck vacuum and get the fronts of the tracks biting the rocky dam better.
Whether that works or not to at least get the excavator onto the level footing I've made for it that it's only about 10 feet from being on completely, then he and I will knock out a tractor-width hole through the dam. First, low enough for the excavator to drive through and get onto more solid footing, then deep enough to drain the water out of the muck. Then it'll be my turn again. Starting from the dug-out dam and working my way up the creek, I'll dig out the muck (I don't want it getting washed out -- need it later) and pile it up until there's a big channel.
Then I'll basically be waiting until next year for the most part before I can do serious work on it again.
The end result I'm looking for is 8 feet more dam (which'll put at least 7 acres under water) and a pair of 8-inch pipes through it with shutoff valves (eventually under servo control remotely), a home-made water-wheel (about 10 feet in diameter) and enough gearing to spin an old genny up to 3600 RPM or thereabouts. Good 5K generator but a blowed-up motor. I don't have anywhere near the head height and flow to get 5KwH out of it but the idea (my son says he can make the controlling circuit board) is to gear the setup to be good for 4k rpm when freewheeling, and put only as much load on it as will take it down to 3600 rpm, and have it self-adjust to always be doing 3600 rpm or if the batteries are full, shut off the water flow.
Going this route because 12/24/48-volt Pelton turbines are so expensive and the workshop it'll be feeding is far enough away that we'd be a lot better off sending 240VAC to it than 12VDC. There a charge controller will store the juice in batteries and I should be able to easily run everything but the welder, air compressor, and lift off a pair of inverters. Might put the air compressor on the free juice if it turns out we've got enough. A computer will store the in/out-flow data and hopefully show me if more batteries are needed, or if I can afford to put more load on the system (excess off time).
It's a rather ideal micro-hydro scenario because the power requirements of the workshop when it's in use are very high. About 3Kw just for the lights. And maybe 1KwH at most for other items used in the workshop. But the workshop probably gets used less than 12 hours per week. If that.
And aside from droughts like we're currently having, the inflow into the lake is pretty high. Last year or the year before, I had a 4 inch pipe wide open year-round yet the dam still got breached twice. And I think it would've gotten breached once had a pair of 8's been wide open. But another 8 feet of dam would've not only contained it all, it would've given enough extra head height to make a serious difference in power output.
I haven't done any of the math involved for years. And haven't done it at all for a pair of 8's and 8 more feet of head. Total head height when I'm done should be right at 20 feet at max. A rough estimate is the average head will be about 15 feet. And normal inflow should let me run the pipes wide open (though with slowly decreasing head height) year-round. The lake wouldn't be dry now were it not for my intentionally draining it once I saw the 4-inch pipe wasn't keeping up, so I dug a channel through the dam to drain it. I'll need to look up the formulas to see how many watt-hours can be expected from both the average of 15 feet of head and the max of 20 though a pair of 8-inch pipes.
So it's pretty much a thing of making just as much juice as I possibly can and monitoring things like off-time, the rate of head height loss, power usage, etc to determine just how much free juice I can get. And making adjustments along the way. If there's too much, adding batteries as needed and/or finding extra loads for it like a water heater and a pump to keep water flowing into the upper ponds. Maybe even electric heat in the winter, though I seriously doubt it'll have that much extra capacity.
And if I'm not making enough juice, then add wind power and possibly solar to the equation.
I think I've been asked before "If you're going to use a 240VAC generator, then why bother with a charge controller, batteries, and inverters? Why not just close the pipes when you're not using the shop, then open them when you're using it?" 2 reasons. First, I seriously doubt this setup will make the power the shop uses when it's in use, so I need to cache a bunch of energy in batteries. Second, a secondary purpose of this whole excercise is to stop the dam from being breached. Lots of freeboard for heavy rains.
In your particular situation, have you measured the flow of the stream? Are you considering damming it to make a lake? Have you checked into those generators that you just anchor in a stream and they give you juice from the normal flow of the stream? They don't make much, but as you know, every little bit sure does help!
I'm eagerly awaiting Honda's first solar panels hitting the market and the Chinese shortly afterward, if they produce enough to have some available for export. Then we'll finally see those things come down from the ridiculous $4.25 per watt they were last I checked. And I've heard they've gone up quite a bit since then.
$2.00 per watt is my price point. Get them to that price or lower, and I'll be getting a bunch of them. For one thing, my car hauler has about 400 sq ft of roof I'd dearly love to cover in solar panels not only to power lights, water heater, AC and the like inside the trailer, but I'd also love to replace the front axle of the trailer with one from a truck so it'd have a differential I could connect an electric motor/generator to and fiddle around until I find the battery/motor (in addition to the truck's 2.5KwH worth of alternators) combo that'll give me the best fuel economy on the 3 1/2 hour trip to Omaha. I was getting about 6.8 MPG hauling both cars, but on the last trip I left the Mustang at home (3600 lbs) and got nearly 10 mpg.
