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July 22, 2008

Energy

Calculating Possible Energy From A Stream

A Typical MicroHydo Power System
A Typical MH set-up on a river.
If you have a stream, you have a renewable, natural source of energy that, if done right, can have little to no impact on the environment around you. Using water as a power source goes back to ancient times. Roman was known to power their empire on it. There is abundant supply of streams and rivers that criss cross the US making micro-hydro power feasible. That is especially true in remote wooded areas where other natural energy, such as solar or wind, would be harder to integrate into the existing environment.

A micro-hydro power system needs a sufficient amount of falling water to be available in order to be feasible. Mountainous and hilly sites are best suited for this type of renewable energy. To figure out the amount of power that is possible from your water source you need to know the head and flow of your stream. The head is the vertical distance of the falling water. While the flow is the speed the water flows at.

A micro-hydro power site usually falls into either a low or high head category. A higher head is better due to needing less water to produce energy as well as the equipment being cheaper than those with a low head. A change in elevation that is less then 10ft (3 meters) is categorized as low head. Anything with a vertical drop less than 2ft (.6 meters) will make a micro-hydro power system not possible. Though if you have as little as 13” of water depth you are able to utilize a submersible turbine, which was originally designed to power scientific instruments being towed behind exploration ships.

There is both a gross and net head that needs to be calculated. The gross head is the vertical distance between where the water enters the penstock, pipes that convey the water under pressure, to where the water exits the turbine. You calculate your net head by subtracting the friction that is caused by the piping and the turbine itself.

While the best way to get an accurate gross head is to have a professional survey of your desired site, you can do a rough estimate yourself. You can use the hose-tube method by taking stream-depth measurements across the width of the water supply you intend to use. Once you know where you intend to place the beginning of the penstock and the turbine you can follow the direction below.

The Hose-Tube Method is done by:

  1. Make sure you have all supplies needed: Someone to help, 20ft to 30ft (6 to 9 meters) small diameter garden hose, Funnel, Measuring tape or yardstick
  2. Stretch the hose down the water channel from desired entrance to the penstock (usually the highest elevation)
  3. One person place the funnel into the hose upstream as close to the surface as possible
  4. At the downstream position

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Community

More Stuff Added… Comments

Ok, another “improvement” I just made on the blog, I went back and added each and every comment made to the main page, in other words, you do not need to click on the comments link to READ the comments, they are all right there, well more or less, it is not automatic, I have to manually go in and edit the message and add the comment to the main message, so if you leave a comment, it will appear (on the main page) as soon as I copy it over.

You will still need to actually click on “comments” to

LEAVE A COMMENT

, hmmm, leave comments, can you tell that I LIKE comments??? LOL

Another thing, I added some fun stuff, check out the post below

Hair, Shrimp & Crab Legs

I will be adding more like this, in small quantities, to make the messages look better, more like reading a magazine, that particular effect is called “pull quotes”, I got the inspiration (and the code) from this site: https://www.mandarindesign.com/troops.html#magazinelayout

If you want to add this to your blog, you will need to do it through https://draft.blogger.com
it will give you the choice to make that your default Dashboard, I would recommend not doing it, but bookmark the draft blogger page, that way you can use both, use the regular one for the majority of your editing and posting, and use the draft.blogger one for editing specialized things like this.

Wretha

2 Comments

b16-rounded-4008479 Kenneth H. said…

I think I found this blog through ‘mayberry’s Keep It Simple Survival! blog’. Anyways, I’m glad to have come across this blog. The posts are different with talk of html, css, hair and shrimp lol

Keep sane! Thanks!!!

July 22, 2008 1:11 PM

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wretha1-6956521

b16-rounded-4008479 Wretha said…

Thanks Kenneth! I suppose my blog is a bit eclectic, but then again, so am I… :) Glad you enjoy it.

Wretha

July 22, 2008 2:42 PM

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Lucy, you got some splaining to do…

It has been brought to my attention that I have been neglecting my on line family, ie not posting much on my blog. Well, as you might or might not know, I have been spending a lot of my internet time learning about editing, customizing and generally tearing up my test blogs, I already knew how to make web pages, HTML is fairly straight forward, when I was learning HTML and DHTML, I chose to ignore CSS (cascading style sheets) because I preferred doing everything myself, I didn’t want to have to learn a new code that would basically do the same thing I could do in HTML, that being said, it turns out that Blogger relies heavily on CSS, I can’t ignore it any more if I want to really customize the look and feel of my blogs. So these last couple of weeks, I have been learning, researching, head scratching, testing, making mistakes and trying to figure out what happened… all about CSS, fortunately I am smart enough to make test blogs, several in fact, to play with and learn on, otherwise, this blog would have been changing (sometimes for the good, sometimes not…) over and over again, not a good thing. I have greatly enjoyed learning how all of this works, I guess I truly have a bit of geek inside somewhere…

Excuses aside…

So, now on to what has been going on the outside… The garden is doing great, it’s been raining pretty much every day, sometimes once a day, sometimes 3-4 times a day (and night), so I haven’t had to water the garden much, but I do have to go out once a week (or so) and dust with diatomaceous earth, the bugs aren’t really too bad, but I don’t want them to get a foothold, the biggest problem I have had is cutworms, so when I first plant something, I have to watch it closely, the first sign that something is breaking ground, I start dusting liberally, once the plant is 5 or 6 inches tall, and has more than the original 2 leaves that start, then it’s pretty well safe from the cutworms. I planted more things for the fall, they haven’t sprouted yet, but I expect to see something happening soon.

Right now, Bob is outside, improving the north deck, that is where we go in and out of the house, he put a roof over it, and is now working on making it stronger and better, I’m not sure exactly what he is doing, I hear the drill going and occasional words I can’t repeat here (grin!!!), whatever it is, I am sure it will be just fine, it usually is.

We ran out of propane last week, or was it 2 weeks ago? Anyhoo, I got 2 small canisters from the country store to hold us over, I haven’t …

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