Integrating micro hydro into beaver dams?

Anyone ever try it?

Hi Grey;
It should work for a day or two.
I suspect the beavers might want to plug up the leak... like, every night...

If you have the equipment and a long enough pipe to keep your alternator safely away from damage, give it a go.
It's a fun project for sure, but it's not likely to supply a reliable power source.  

The property I grew up on had a beaver dam that has been there at least 25 years.  It had about a 4 foot drop from the water level on one side to the  water on the other side.  We would break it open almost daily to keep our fields from  flooding.  And every night the beavers would re build it.  

There was probably a 10 acre pond and 60 acres of flooded swamp behind the  dam so no mater how much we opened up the dam we couldn't do much to lower the water level much, just prevent it from rising.

That would have been a great spot for a small water wheel.  It had very dependable flow, even in the worst droughts.  And you could open up the dam as much as you need power during the day and to charge batteries for the night.  I would guess when we had it opened up it was flowing 20-30 gallons a second.  In a perfect world that would be about 1000 watts of available power.

The beavers dammed it up every night, so once the batteries needed power a person would have to open it back up to charge them again.

No.   but I have researched how to install dam drains that they don't plug off.  So if you are going to try suggest deeply researching that as it is more complicated and expensive than you would think.

Basically it breaks into a number of strategies for defeating  beavers' natural instincts to plug leaks

1.  Get the pipe out into the middle and in deep water as they check the dams for leaks and tend not to check deep water away from the dam for leaks.  Since they check by sound and by feeling for currents both must be defeated.

2.  A perf pipe with lots of holes creates a bunch of small holes reducing current and spreading it over a larger area.  This pipe needs to be larger and in deep water so it makes no noise.  Then around the outside of this is some sort of wire screen a solid distance away from the perf pipe to keep the beavers from getting close enough to feel any currents.

3.  The pipe necks down a ways away following the perf pipe section. If this is far enough away the beaver is potentially looking for hearing water moving here but it is inside solid pipe.  But if correctly implemented it has slowed the water in the perf pipe section down enough that nothing is heard there.

4.  Another part of this is to do and elbow to the surface inside another one so you have a pipe inside a pipe that the beaver can't reach necking back up so the water can be heard but not reached.  The purpose is to provide cover noise so he can't find other over it.  And since he can't get to it to plug it because it is a pipe inside a pipe he simply builds it into the dam.  Usually the riser pipe inside can be changed in length to adjust water levels.  The riser pipe is set up so the water can be heard falling inside the outer pipe.

You would probably have to lose a couple of feet of head to properly implement this but then could go to the hydro.  Some sort of undershot wheel maybe?