Welcome Scott Davis author of Serious Microhydro

Source: New Society

This week Scott Davis will be joining us to answer our questions about microhydro.

There are up to four copies of his book Serious Microhydro up for grabs.

Scott himself will be popping into the forum over the next few days answering questions and joining in discussions.

From now through this Friday, any posts in this forum, ie the hydro forum, could be selected to win.

To win, you must use a name that follows our naming policy and you must have your email set up in Paul's daily-ish email..

The winner will be notified by email and must respond within 24 hours.

Posts in this thread won't count, but please feel free to say hi to Scott and make him feel at home!

Nice ! Welcome Scott, looking forward to reading your posts.

Welcome!
I first thought it was about irrigation, but no! This is about energy!
Great, I will ask a question I have been keeping for 2 years...
... at the right place, not here, hehe, so that Adrien can be thankful to me!
no post to move!

Hey Scott,
I've used the power of gravity and ponds to move water to livestock before- but the potential to do that along with using that energy to say, charge a portable livestock fence, is really exciting. Is that a realistic thought/idea?

Dan, we cannot post questions in THIS post, you have to make one, or just go to the one I have made about using my irrigation water with gravity. It depends on your flow of water and the hight of the water between the reservoir and and turbine.

Dan Solberg wrote:Hey Scott,
I've used the power of gravity and ponds to move water to livestock before- but the potential to do that along with using that energy to say, charge a portable livestock fence, is really exciting. Is that a realistic thought/idea?

There's certainly a significant amount of power in an irrigation line, and there may very well be extra potential there from which to generate power. Sometimes, irrigation systems are operating near their capacity but sometimes additional flow doesn't create so much friction as to affect the irrigation.

Every site is unique.

We had a big irrigation system at our family ranch in a remote area of BC. Each sprinkler used about 5 US gallons per minute at 40 psi. If you used 5 USGPM at 40 psi in a turbine, you could get something like three dozen watts, which is more than many of the case studies in Serious Microhydro: Water Power Solutions from the Experts.

So there would be lots of potential power there. However, a decent small turbine might cost a couple or three thousand dollars. Plus the water from the turbine needs to be dealt with so as not to erode or whatever...

That's probably why they use solar panels to power electric fences: No moving parts, does not use water or water pressure (in case one or the other is scarce).

Water power is great, but often at the very smallest scales, a PV panel offers important advantages too.

Every bloody site is unique, as I keep saying...

Cheers,

Scotty

Welcome and thanks for stopping by !!! I appreciate your time in trying to help out.

Thanks Scott, your answers are helpful, I think I will buy your book.
I also really liked the Canadian pamphlet you linked to.
Thanks

Ack! Adrien asked me to pick the winners on friday and now it's sunday! I dropped the ball!

So I ran the pick winners program and picked the two winners. One of them was not in the daily-ish email, so that left:


Austin Shackles


Congratulations Austin! I sent you an email asking for your snail mail address and the email address of the person who initially referred you to permies.com (they might get a book too).