DIY Electro-Waterwheel

Not without permission, I'm afraid:

Youtube is full of such designs, mainly from the USA, which usually require extensive modification to the river (dams, weirs) to channel the water to the wheel in a controlled way. Many of the size shown in the article don't seem to produce much usable power.

There a couple of water based generators on the River Teme in Shropshire both are situated by weirs. Information on one is:-

The short summary with D-i-Y or run-of-the-river hydro is 'If it were any good, everybody would be doing it'.

The green and wet behind the ears persist in trying stuff that's been done before and rejected because it didn't work, and a few minutes with a calculator shows why.

There is f*ck all energy in a river to begin with.

I think it is a fundamental mental condition: ArtStudents™ don't think in terms of size, quantity, maths etc and can'tDoSums™. So the *idea* that rivers contain energy is accessible to them, but they have no idea

Same as with batteries for grid storage. A battery keeps their phone going 14 hours, why can't the *same battery* keep their car, or the grid, going 14 hours? It lasts 14 hours!

Stan's ter raisin, dunnit?

The world is now run by ArtStudents™ and we can only wait for them to destroy it before we can gently prise their sticky fingers off the levers of power...

There's a very early one here. Kipling had it put in for electric light. His advisor was a guy who had worked on the Aswan Dam!

Here's another Archimedean screw at Settle in the Yorkshire Dales

Cragside, another National Trust property has a history of water powered electricity generation:

An Archimedian Screw, installed in 2014:

And despite all this, it isn't widely used at all. I wonder why?

Possibly the same reason why mills powered by waterwheels upgraded to relatively low power steam engines.

Indeed.

I lived for many years on the Cambridgeshire Fens. Drained mostly in the

All because city people think wind energy is free.

The Domesday book is claimed to have recorded 4 mills near me. There is certainly a leat cut parallel to the Lea. Google Earth gives a fall of less than 2m over the length. I suppose an under fed wheel might have turned a modest grinder. I once quietly reburied a damaged stone wheel which might have had some connection.

Perhaps better to extract river water for thermal energy as the Lea never freezes downstream of the Luton sewage outfall!

Most I have seen are less than a meter. And yes, they could grind corn a bit faster than a couple of donkeys, and for less pay!

I cant be arsed to calculate the energy in a given flow rate falling a metre. I'd guess a couple of horsepower. This seems to be in agreement with a quick google

More reliable than windmills, but less powerful in general...unless you had hills and so on.

The northern mill towns ran on water power initially.

And of course if you have a serious drop, serious power!

Lol!

Hot s*it and fermenting pee.

I get tired of trying to teach ArtStudents™ BasicSums™. They simply don't think of the world in a quantitative way at all.

A water wheel produces power. Therefore many water wheels can power the country! Simples!

Well, that and the fact the steam power removed the need to be near to

Water management is one of the engineering practices that transforms mud hut dwellers into civilised people. And it's a fearsomely complex set if highly interconnected subject disciplines.

A casual stroll through history will show that the rise of great civilisations is directly related to their ability to engineer where, when and how water moves around the landscape. From the Egyptians 5,000 years ago, through the Romans 2,500 years ago, through the marvels of the Arabs in Moorish Spain to the medieval monks who established fish farms and cisterns and flood management ...

All forgotten now. Ironically as if it had been flushed away.

Now "water management" simply equates to how much an executive bonus is from a captive ratepaying population.

Exactly, The race to common sense solutions has been completely reversed by 'renewables' .

The first project of this nature in the highlands was established at the Benedictine Abbey at Fort Augustus on the southern banks of Loch Ness. The monks used a hydro-electric turbine to power their electric organ and the surplus energy was used to power homes in the nearby village.

My wife who lived there told me about it. I think it was DC.

An 18kW water turbine delivered power at 130 volts and this served first the Abbey and then the local community. Later, an 18kW oil engine was added as a standby. The monks were certainly not unwordly, for in the mid thirties they charged 10d (4.2p) a unit for lighting and 7d (2.94p) a unit for power.

Legend has it that when the monks played their electric organ, the lights in the village went dim.

Brian

Have you worked this out, or is this just your prejudice.

The River Severn at Gloucester has an average flow rate of 100 m^3/s

So if you have a fall at a weir of say 1m, than makes the drop with this quantity of water have the energy of 100kW.

If you think that's f*ck all then I can see where you're coming from.

The last art student here expressed the quantity "f*ck all energy" with power generation. A real engineer wouldn't have confused energy with power.

Only an art student would put forward a silly and incoherent argument.

Better than a failed engineer. We need more Clive Sinclairs.

Many rivers have weirs for navigation and so it would seem a sensible approach to replace these with generating plants along side these weirs. BY way of example the Avon or Tewkesbury Lock has a fall of 7-8 ft.

I'm not sure about that. I remember my Sinclair Scientific calculator which was far less accurate than a slide rule in some circumstances. I also remember the IC10 audio amplifier chip which was a rebadged Plessey device with massively inflated specifications.

John

I thought that the whole point of such a leat? You intercept the river at a point higher up, and try to deliver water from that point to your mill without expending any more of its potential energy than necessary to get the water to flow from A to B. You then 'expend' the residual potential energy in turning your wheel.