I am from Wau, in Papua New Guinea. I can obtain professional plans for a 3meter steel water wheel from https://www.waterwheelfactory.com in the US. Is there anyone in Australia who can supply such plans. I have a feeling that such technology will be very suitable for coffee pulping, rice hulling, oil expellers and flour milling in the PNG villages that do not have good road access. There are plenty of streams in this area and no roads. Some are only accessable by air and the planes will not carry kero or fuels, thus no lamps at night fot thousands of villagers.
I can give you a possible lead anyway. Years ago in Earth Garden magazine a woman called Jill Redwood (please correct me guys if I am remembering here name incorrectly) had an article done on her place that covered a waterwheel she had. She is down in the East Gippsland area of Victoria in Australia. It was made from wood though. Can't remember her applications for it either. Let us know what you come up with, eh? Sounds awesome!
Aflynn, I found these plans for free on line, but they are from 1972, so you might be able to find somethin newer: https://www.motherearthnews.com/library/ ... ower_Plant Also, in Home Power Magazine number 71, they have two excellent articles on hydro. One is about induction motors operating at high voltage, very interesting, but the other, further into the magazine is about a "watermotor" in Bolivia, which can be a hydro electric plant or a saw, or a tool sharpener, mill, whatever as it can be rebuilt to be any and all of these. This sounds like your speed, and it is smaller than a big wheel. The URL for that : https://www.renewablepower.com/files/homepower.pdf more on the watermotor, with contact info: https://www.watermotor.net/motor.htm Anyone interested in renewable energy needs to subscribe to Home Power. It is a fantastic resource. Let mw know (post here) if you use the watermotor, Christopher
Hey, can someone tell me how these waterwheels work. Also, are they expensive to buy, build, install, run? I've got a fast flowing stream at the bottom of my block. How deep does the water need to be to run one? I think 3m might be too big. Tam
Tam, These wheels work by having a long intake, like a canal, leading up to a fall, typically 3 meters or a bit more, and having the water fall into a series of large buckets, or water bins, which weight down the front edge of the wheel and spin the wheel. They are excellent in terms of raw power. Mills used them for milling flour and lumber until the advent of steam plants in the 19th century. While they are the best source of power you could ever hope to have, there are a few problems with them. First, you need a very good spot for it, with specific qualities, or you need to engineer a spot by making a weir and a long elevated waterway, until the drop at the wheel. Second, you need an awful lot of water, and to make it work full time you need that water to flow at heavy rates, full time, year round. We are talking hundreds or thousands of gallons per minute! If you have the right spot, they are without a doubt the greatest source of power. A per kw cost of hydro is so much less than wind, and, especially, solar. This is not to say they are cheap, but the amount of power you can get is incredible in temr os the money spent. Cheaper for you than a wheel if you have less flow and more drop is a microhydro generator, which will cost less than USD2000 installed (some of them MUCH, MUCH less), and is my personal power fantasy. Living with solar is wonderful, but we are such power mizers, watching the batteries.... can we do laundry today? If we do laundry, can we go online tonight? If we go online, can Dawn sew? Etc. Saturday is movie night, when we invite the Woofers, volunteers or interns up intom our house and watch a DVD on my laptop. We make pocorn and tea. I make sure we have enough power by being uptight about energy usage. With an appropriate hydroset up, you don't really have to worry, or, if you have the right set up, you can burn al the elctricity you want. I have a friend in Oregon who has so much power he uses a hot air popcorn popper, an electric espresso machine, electric toater (all heat making loads are super energy hogs), and his neighbors up on the ridge on solar power limp through the winter, nursing their poor overtaxed and under powered batteries. You can put in an intake a kilometer or more up the creek, run pipe, and the outlet goes right back into the creek. This is the Rolls Royce of home power generating. Even a very small hydro plant, producing 100 watts, makes 2.4 kwh a day, which in a mostly DC battery based system is a lot of power. A 1000 watt generator, which is still a very small generator, produces 24 kwh a day! The watermotor in Bolivia made by Ron Davis not only can make electricity, but also mechanical power. A formula to consider, and borrowed from the hallowed pages of Home Power Magazine, (you are getting sleeepy, you don't want to send your money to Permaworld pyramid scheme... your eyes are heavy... subscibe, subscibe, subscribe to Home Power Magazine,... today....) "P=HxFxE÷100 Where P is power in watts (stream watts net), H is gross head in meters, F is flow in cubic meters per second, and E is overall efficiency. A number that can be used for the efficiency of small stand alone systems of less than 5 kw is 0.4 (%40). For battery charging configurations, 0.3 (%30) is appropriate." My advice to anyone considering making their own power is to look up https://www.homepower.com and look into back issues about hydro. Home Power is a fantastic resource! Good luck! Christopher
That homepower site looks interesting Christopher. Another useful resource is "alternative technology association", the publish the Re-new magazine, a fantastic magazine with all sorts of articles and information to do with alternative power. https://www.ata.org.au/ If you go to their website, click 'ReNew magazine' halfway down the left hand side, the "Check out some articles from previous issues of ReNew". Now scan down to Issue 65: A waterwheel powered pump or Issue 51: The waterwheel-powered house
Earthbound, Wow! What a great site! How cool! All those great articles. Thanks for posting such a great resource. I am goint to look closely at it. There have ben a whole bunch of articles over the years about renewable energy in Australia in Home Power. I remember reading about a huydro site in a remote area... that was very interesting. If I can find the article, I can find it on line and send the url. best, Christopher
Thanks for all that info Christopher and Earthbound. I need a bit of time to look through those sites as now I'm very very sleepy. :lol: My stream's no where near sufficient but it's great to consider other possibities. Has anyone here had any experience with the Turon Pump? They don't have a website but I've managed to get a pamphlet from them which I could scan and email if anyone's interested. I don't think I'd get very good definition for the text if I tried to post the url but I could try. We've been trying to track down the mob for a while having seen an add in Earth's Gardener or something like that, but the phone number had changed. They retail for just over $1200 and require .5m drop over 6 meters (I think) and you can achieve this by building a little dam off the creek. I'm interested in feedback before I invest so much money in something I've never seen the results of. You can email me on [email protected] Tam
Waterwheels Thanks Christopher Thanks to all the others who took an interest in the query, there seems quite an interest in the subject. The water motor is a great idea and I have passed it on to a manufacturer of small machinery at https://www.psspng.com.. We do not have enough fall on our site and will be forced to install a 10ft waterwheel. The West has left such technology behind because it is time inefficient. The undeveloped countries have populations with time on their hands or time which is very cheap. This makes early industrial technology useful. I would like to see the villager in PNG enter the 18th century, leave the 21st century to the townfolk for the time being. Regards.
Has anyone ever heard of the Rainbow Power company thereover east Nimbim i think they been around a fair time i think to Love to go solar/wind/hydro but cant in suburbia Tezza