Small Waterwheel Produces Cheap Electricity for Your Home.

Posted by yayo in Gadget, Home & Garden, Science & Tech on January 11, 2007 at 3:57 pm


small waterwheel produces electricity

If you’ve got a small stream (as little as 20cm wide) near your house and hate to pay the electric bill, just wait for this new invention:

The prototype has now been working successfully at St Catherine’s, a National Trust site near Windermere, opening up previously untapped energy. The waterwheel produces one to two kilowatts of power and generates at least 24 kilowatt hours of sustainable green energy in a day, just under the average household’s daily consumption of around 28 kilowatt hours. [...]

A ‘high head’ like a traditional water-wheel, is large, expensive and needs civil engineering. But with ‘low heads’ – under a 18 inches, no one had yet invented a method of successfully recovering the energy generated.

Link – via Gadget Reporter


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COMMENT

5 comments to "Small Waterwheel Produces Cheap Electricity for Your Home."

  1. Bob
    January 11th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

    Neat, but sadly in many places here in the US you cannot alter, deface, or divert a stream that is on your own property. It's illegal to do so.

  2. Gomez
    January 11th, 2007 at 5:21 pm

    Foo. Nothing new. Google "Crossflow turbine" such as the Mitchell, Banki, and Ossberger designs.

  3. yayo
    January 11th, 2007 at 6:18 pm

    It's ilegal up here too... But you maybe it's got something to do with allow the same quantity of water to leave your land through the same stream and that's not a problem with this I think... Donno! ^^

  4. Moon
    January 11th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

    24kw hours is a lot of kw hours!

  5. HH McDonald PE, BSME
    January 13th, 2007 at 11:28 am

    It would seem to me that a decimal, or perhaps two has been misplaced as to the power production. To generate just 1 KW at 18" of head will require roughly 1 horsepower which is 33,000 ft-lbs/minute.
    That equals about 4,000 gallons/min.....This stream looks like 200/gpm at best. Certainly not 4,000.

    HH McDonald PE, BSME


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