Waterwheels and power generation

My wife and I are looking at a piece of property in GA that has some riverfrontage. It's a smaller river, but I don't know what sort of velocity it has year-round. I was wondering if anyone has experience utilising an undershot waterwheel to produce electricity.

What information do I need to figure out whether it's both feasible and viable? Given Europe's recent "come to Jesus" moment, I'm not confident about relying on solar alone, but only as a secondary source. The area and the lot are heavily treed with old, tall timber, so wind power would be wasted money unless I could put in a seriously tall tower! So, I'm stuck with hydro and solar, unless there's some other source I hadn't considered. Open to suggestions.

What sort of drop, difference in height from one point to another do you have. Not sure, seems as though you will have some sort of issue with .gov regulations pertaining to putting something in the river, or diverting water from the river.

How many watts do you want from a design?

Here's an introduction video to the engineering:

Hi Ian;
I have been 100% off-grid since 1983.
I use solar and micro hydro.
When I started, solar was very new to the public. Home power systems were almost exclusively 12 volt.
Inverters used large amounts of power just to be turned on.
The 110 V power was square wave, and most electronics did NOT like using it.
Slowly, things improved. Inverters now make pure sine wave power that is cleaner than what the electric company can provide.
Solar systems began increasing in voltage. 24V became common, and 48V was also used.
The higher the voltage, the easier it is to transmit power.
Now, let's discuss charge controls.  PWM controllers are lower cost, but are old technology.
MPPT charge controllers are now the preferred controllers to use. They allow high-voltage panels to be located where the sun is most abundant.
High-voltage power can be transmitted over long distances without significant line loss.
The MPPT control then reduces the voltage to the system voltage, utilizing the excess voltage to supply additional amps at the lower system voltage.

Having said all that, Solar is now a very viable option.  

Hydro power)
I installed my Pelton wheel hydro in 1996.
It produces power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
It requires a different charge control known as a constant diversion control.
You need a way to divert almost the entire output of your hydro when your battery bank is full.
This can be accomplished in several ways, such as through lighting, heating, and fans, as long as the power generated has a place to go, all is well.

To control solar power, the system is turned on and off by the controller with no adverse effects.
A hydro can never be disconnected while spinning.

Bottom line.
Go big on higher-voltage solar and steer clear of hydro.
Alternatively, opt for large-scale hydro (if possible) and steer clear of solar.

After watching the video, I believe that I used "undershot" incorrectly. Ours would need to be a stream wheel, which I now understand to be the least useful. The river is pretty flat, as much as I can see, so the velocity would be low. I haven't seen a legal survey of the property, and I haven't yet visited it. So, it may well be that the lot doesn't extend into the river any way at all, which makes the idea of hydro null and void. We're heading there in the next few weeks to look at it, and there seems to be a survey available, but I just have not seen it.

The downside of solar on this lot will be it's narrowness at 89') and it being heavily treed. We'd prefer not to roof mount  as they will be very visible (proposed design is a mono-pitch shed roof sloping down from south to north, meaning high relative angle of panels to the roof). This would mean ground mounting behind the house (viewed from the road) with the degradation of available sunlight hours.

Don't get discouraged, Ian. You could go with vertical bifacial panels and as a bonus, you would get better morning and afternoon generation. Take a look at how this company in Norway does it:

Over Easy Solar

I'm seriously considering this sort of setup here as an expansion of my existing solar rig. But first I have to either upgrade to 3-phase service, because we're already at the maximum voltage rise back to the network, or a install a battery to take the excess. Either way it's a five-figure investment so it won't be happening just yet.