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Post by biggkidd on Aug 3, 2022 11:00:13 GMT -6
We have been off grid for almost 15 years using solar and generators for power. Batteries are an ongoing issue. Not that we have had a lot of problems but batteries need replacing every 5+ years. All the batteries we have used here were used when we got them so not overly expensive but moving a ton of batteries every few years is getting harder and harder on me as I get older. Plus my battery connection is no more. Recently we started using LifePO4 batteries in a golf cart and I love them. BUT I can NOT afford to replace our entire household battery bank with them. It's taking me a year to pay for the very small set for the GC. They should last 10+ years, possibly even 20 or more years. I seriously doubt I will be around that long due to poor health.
A year or two ago I got the bright idea of trying to mix solar and hydro in a pumped storage system. Using a pond as a battery of sorts. Plus I always wanted a pond anyway. lol On sunny days solar could pump a pond full and bleed it off for power at night and on cloudy days. A ram pump is also a slight possibility from one of our two creeks but our creeks have little fall and are nearly a 1/4 mile from the creek to where the house is and where the new house will one day go both. I will grant I did not research this idea before jumping in with both feet because as I said I wanted a pond anyway so if it doesn't work I still got my pond it just won't have the bonus of making power for us.
I started on the pond build a little while back, actually it started off as a simple berm to put a fence across and the more I worked and the more I looked and noticed things the more the idea started taking form. I still have no idea if it will work but I do know the area has about 40 inches of water sitting in it caught from runoff of the last storm. When I started leaning toward doing the pond and not just a berm I still wasn't really thinking of making power from it. I was just thinking of a small pond maybe encompassing a total area of an eighth acre or so but fairly deep for the surface area size. Anyway the project has grown and now it may end up being closer to a half acre than an eighth. With the size / volume increase I got to thinking more and more about the possibility of using it as a battery of sorts for power storage. I will have to do tons of research before I can even consider trying to set it up as a power source. But at this point I decided to go ahead and tell folks what I was thinking to see what kinds of feed back and ideas I might get from you folks. I would really like to hear from anyone who has any experience with micro hydro power and or pumping water without power.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 3, 2022 16:12:39 GMT -6
Lots of math in using water power. I was disappointed when I found how much water is needed for serious power :-( Some links that might get you started: www.quora.com/How-can-I-calculate-the-horsepower-for-a-water-wheel-with-a-flow-rate-of-33-kg-s-and-a-height-of-2-meterswww.altestore.com/howto/determine-the-flow-of-your-stream-with-simple-float-a24/www.waterwheelfactory.com/hptable.htmWatts are based on flow. A waterwheel might be 60% efficient. Turbines can do much better. Off-grid pumped storage needs to have a lot of excess solar power because water is heavy: 8.3lbs/gallon. There are some online formulas for horsepower needed to pump XX gallons of water up YY feet. Search for horsepower needed to pump water uphill. From horsepower you can get watts (1HP = 746 watts) and from the pump power needed and the amount of water to be moved, you can get watt hours. Remember that you will need two ponds for pumped storage: the supply pond above the waterwheel or turbine and the catch pond below it so you can recover most of the used water. To determine how much power your water source can provide, multiply the head in feet times the flow rate in cubic feet per second times the conversion factor of 84.6 to calculate hydro power in watts. It's probably easier to measure gallons/minute with what you have on hand than cubic feet/second because a stopwatch and a five gallon bucket will give you how long for five gallons and you can work out gallons/minute from that and cubic feet/second from that. This online calculator can convert gallons to cubic feet and vice versa: www.onlineconversion.com/volume.htmMore drop or more flow will provide more power but more flow depletes your stored water faster. I don't have a place to do real world testing (although there is a farm in northern Alabama I'd like to explore - large stream-fed pond and a waterwheel turning from the outflow) but I did research for a couple of stories. Metal waterwheels are more efficient than wooden waterwheels - easier to have properly curved buckets and proportionally more expensive unless you can build your own - and hydro turbines are more efficient than waterwheels. If your pond doesn't hold water well, you need to line it with bentonite: shop.naturalwaterscapes.com/sodium-bentonite-clay-for-ponds/A Pelton Wheel is one way to drive a hydro generator. There are some videos on YouTube, including one on 3D printing your Pelton wheel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2scoi0Gqxkowww.thingiverse.com/thing:33720 3D print for pelton wheel www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KfHji41fDAwww.youtube.com/watch?v=bzHYtA5LbAAwww.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmHY9DkD1HwThere's probably more but I'm only partially here while waiting for my next Rx pain killer.
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 3, 2022 19:28:33 GMT -6
Thanks for the links. I will be checking them out. Hope you feel better soon.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 3, 2022 20:30:48 GMT -6
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 3, 2022 20:52:25 GMT -6
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 4, 2022 14:52:52 GMT -6
Papa you certainly handed me some material to checkout, THANKS! So I been spending some time going to the youtube school of learning! LMAO This guy does some decent videos on ram pumps and has taught me enough to be fairly certain I can pump water up from the small creek to the pond site. www.youtube.com/c/LandtoHouseFurther googling tells me ram pumps basically have a 1:7 lift ratio. For every foot of head pressure the pump has it can lift 7 feet. Which might just be enough to get water pumping 24/7. Looks like I need to break out the transit here pretty soon. It's raining here so a good day for water research... lol As you all already know or should by now I am about half crazy but answer me this. Why couldn't a person setup a series of pumps at intervals to pump water higher and higher? Granted you would have to have multiple pumps and tanks but tell me why it couldn't be done! Yes it would lose water at each pump but so what as long as the results are achieved.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 4, 2022 15:41:11 GMT -6
IF you have enough water flow, you could have Pump 1 feeding a pool for Pump 2 feeding a pool for Pump 3 BUT a ram pump is maybe 10% efficient so Pump 2 is moving 1% of the flow into Pump 1 and Pump 3 is moving 0.1% of the water flow into Pump 1. If Pump 1 is BIG - say 100GPM, then Pump 2 moves 10GPM and Pump 3 moves 1 GPM. Does that level of flow work for your needs, assuming it works? Here's a video of a guy putting two identical ram pumps in series with minimal success. He mentions trying a larger pump driving a smaller pump, a suggestion you'll also find in the comments: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoQnnxT7Wns
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 4, 2022 18:26:40 GMT -6
Yep I saw that one too.
Right now I'm just bouncing ideas around trying to see what might have the best chance of working. But you do bring up a good point. I do wonder just how much of the total water used by a ram pump is actually pumped. None of the flow rates so far have impressed me. The only parts that impress me so far is that it works without outside power and continuously or until freezing weather hits.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 4, 2022 19:29:49 GMT -6
10% through-put appears to be about as good as it gets: 100 gallons of flow to get 10 gallons up Y feet. The bigger the pipe and the greater the flow, the more GPM you get, up to the limits of the pump and the piping being used. On the bright side, a pump made using a brass valve should last for years. Remember that the lakes used for commercial hydropower are measured in acre-feet of water - one acre-foot is the water needed to cover one acre to a depth of one foot which is 325,853.32 gallons. A lake measured in hundreds of acre-feet stores millions of gallons of water - partly to have long term power in drought conditions and partly to have water deep enough to provide adequate pressure to drive the turbines. 100 acre-feet (20 acres 5 feet deep or 5 acres 20 feet deep) is 32,585,332 gallons. The smaller, deeper lake can provide more power for the turbine. There's an online reference that says you can get better efficiency from a ram pump: lgpress.clemson.edu/publication/homemade-hydraulic-ram-pump-for-livestock-water/Lots of charts, diagrams and formulas and this excerpt that works out to 12.5% efficient: Hydraulic ram pumps are very inefficient, generally pumping only one gallon of water for every eight gallons of water passing through the ram. They will, however, pump water up ten feet (or more in some cases) of vertical elevation for every foot of elevation drop from the water source to the hydraulic ram.Ten feet up for each foot of drop from the water source says that a single well-designed pump could easily do 30-60 feet of rise, if the placement is correct.
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 6, 2022 16:57:04 GMT -6
We have had a lot of rain in the last few days. It's a terrible shame this project is isn't completed yet because it would probably be full. I don't know how full it is because it's muddier than I want to deal with to go see. I may try to ride down close enough to get a look tonight when I go feed the critters. If I can get close enough to see it without getting stuck or off the cart. I'm not up for knee deep mud just to see.
Thanks for all the links I've seen some of them but I am watching the others as I have time.
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 6, 2022 18:35:57 GMT -6
Just back from feeding the critters and checking the pond. Yikes! If we get another day of rain like yesterday I'm going to have to get a pump going or it might top the dam and cut it away. There's around 10 feet of water in there now! I never dreamed it would or could fill up this fast!!!!!!!!!!! I may need to come up with a larger overflow than the 12 inch pipe I have for it now.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 6, 2022 21:28:51 GMT -6
There's an art - or several years' training as an engineer - in knowing how fast a pond/lake will fill up from local rainfall. I tracked local rainfall for several years and I found 30 year records for the nearest general aviation airport so I have some idea of how much water we get at our location. I have a 275 gallon IBC tote that's fed by one downspout (using two 55 gallon barrels as a "pre-filter" for the biggest stuff) and we get enough rainfall to have two gallons/person/day with typical rainfall and one gallon/person/day during the 'drought' years (less than half average rainfall). If the tank were 10,000 gallons and I added another downspout to the collection, we'd have 5 gallons/person/day and the tank would be at 6600 gallons at the end of the first year with normal rainfall. In a year with half normal rainfall, we'd still have all the water we needed - just need a good place for that tank ;-) If you know the average monthly/yearly rainfall and the area of the pond, you can find those rain records on the NOAA site. From www.tcid.org/support/water-factoidsOne acre-inch is the volume of water necessary to cover an acre 1 inch deep or the amount of water falling on an acre in a 1-inch rain. One acre-inch equals 3,630 cubic feet or 27,154 gallons. Do the math: how big is the pond and how much rain did you get?
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 7, 2022 8:27:35 GMT -6
I never even put my rain gage up this year. Checking the local weather is useless here, they are ALWAYS wrong. Last night I was thinking it probably has about 30,000 gallons in it now. I am likely wrong about that! I haven't opened up the second side or included the second drainage ditch to it yet. Thank the lord because if I had it would surely have overrun the dam. The second drainage ditch looks to carry 2 to 4 times as much water as the one I am currently using.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 7, 2022 13:46:07 GMT -6
You need a bigger pond ;-)
But that means you could have more hydro power ;-)
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 7, 2022 20:27:16 GMT -6
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 8, 2022 12:46:09 GMT -6
Looks like the water's down 2 -3 inches today. Gonna take a lot longer to drain off than it took to fill. I was looking farther down slope today getting ideas for the second pond. Can't really tell much until I remove a lot of brush.
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 8, 2022 19:08:22 GMT -6
Got over on the other side of the second drainage ditch today and made some decent progress. Pretty sure one of the oak trees I took down today was the largest tree I've taken out with the dozer. A pretty big double trunk. The small side was about one foot and the large side near twice that! I think I've got the dam area cleared off now I just need to get it down to the clay so I can start building it up. The water in the pond is still draining ever so slowly. It's a good 5/8 - 3/4" stream coming out of the hose but that's slow when it comes to tens of thousands of gallons..
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 8, 2022 20:04:44 GMT -6
Use a 5 gallon bucket and a stopwatch - or a watch with a second hand/display - to measure how long for 5 gallons and work out the GPM from that. Surplua 12 volt pumps are fairly reasonable ($20 + ship) for a Rule IL200P 200GPH/3.33GPM pump - that should run from one 100 watt solar panel. It's rated at 32 ft of head (11PSI) so it should do even better pumping water downhill ;-) The IL280P 280GPH/4.8GPM at 14PSI is $25 + ship. Both these pumps are submersible so they can be left out in the weather. More at Goldmine Electronics: www.goldmine-elec-products.com/products.asp?dept=1215Their stock changes almost monthly so you never know what you might find - other than the two pumps I mentioned which always seem to be in stock.
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 9, 2022 10:21:46 GMT -6
Got a few more hours moving dirt this morning before the heat ran me inside again. Thinking I had room enough for the second side of the dam last night turned out to be wishful thinking. Ran in to tons more sandy / loamy soil this morning back over on the first side, got most of that moved out of the way. I'm about to the point where I need to get the through drain in for while I'm working. Kind of caught in a conundrum here. I only have 28 feet total of 12 inch drainage pipe I also have 24 or 28 feet of 4 inch drainage pipe. The 12 inch might be okay for the overflow and the four inch might be okay as a feed for any future hydro. The problem is I don't think the 4 inch will be large enough to drain the work area until I finish and the 12 inch probably would but then I won't have it to use for the overflow.............. Although I wonder if the 12 inch is even large enough for the overflow when we get crazy rain like we get several times a year. Back when the wooden bridge washed out we had 9 inches of rain in less than 24 hours! IIRC That's a lot of gallons of water to move.
Papa I've got pumps but I'd rather not put all that mud though them.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 9, 2022 16:17:35 GMT -6
I've not seen any good deals on trash pumps - the ones with enough clearance to pass sand and very small gravel without major wear :-(
One possibility would be to have the pump or its intake in a float collar and having a screened intake that only draws from within an inch or two of the surface where there is less mud - and the mud in the water decreases over time as it settles out. Might or might not work for you. But the siphon hose is less work ;-)
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 9, 2022 20:43:13 GMT -6
Got all I can done with the dozer for the lower pipe. Decided to go ahead with the 4 inch turned out I had another half stick so it was the longer of the two. Longer is better because it allows the base of the dam to be wider. It will also work the best if I do try and add hydro power. Plus it leaves the 12 inch for the overflow. I just hope that's big enough. Started on hand digging the last bit to get the 4 inch pipe in the way I want it. I expect that's going to take awhile. Looks like I'll need to dig a trench from nothing to about 2 foot deep to get it just how I want it. I must love hard work with all these projects I take on..
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 9, 2022 21:31:23 GMT -6
From a chart I found online: 3" schedule 40 pipe delivers 140GPM/8,400GPH by gravity flow 4" schedule 40 pipe delivers 240GPM/14,400GPH by gravity flow
3/4" schedule 40 delivers 11GPM/660GPH by gravity flow.
The pipe you have is probably somewhere between 3" and 4" schedule 40. How big is the pond and what's the average depth so you'll know how much water it contains and how long it will take to fill or empty it.
The weight of the water will apply pressure to the water at 0.433PSI per foot of head, so 8 feet of water will apply a little over 3PSI to the water at the bottom of the pond. Not enough to make the almost double difference in flow that 20+PSI can make but it will increase the flow a little.
1 acre-foot is 325,851.43 gallons and that 4" schedule 40 pipe could handle that much water in 325,851.43/14,400 = 22.63 hours or less than one day. How big is the pond?
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 10, 2022 6:00:53 GMT -6
It's 4 inch schedule 20 IIRC, sewer pipe. It will not have much pressure on it as you stated. Now I will have to manage to couple some other pipe to it after it leaves the dam. Depending on how things workout I might end up with up to 50 feet of fall...
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Post by biggkidd on Aug 10, 2022 9:18:47 GMT -6
Well that didn't work or maybe I didn't work. Ran in to some grey substance that's almost rock hard and that stopped my digging by hand. So I took the dozer and opened up the north / shallow end. Pulled one big old stump and smoothed it out hopefully enough to get the tractor with the backhoe attachment in there to try and finish the drain trench. Eventually I will be digging out all the dirt to the left side of the pipe before the dam. It needs to stay until the drain pipe is in and covered and the dam is across it. Then all that gets dug out to be part of the dam.
At this point I honestly have no idea how big the pond is going to be. It depends on a lot of individual factors. If every single thing happens to fall just right it could possibly go a little over a half acre I believe. When I started this project I was thinking more like an eighth acre. But like I said every little teeny tiny detail would have to fall just right to even get close to that 1/2 acre mark.
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Post by papaof2 on Aug 10, 2022 14:41:43 GMT -6
A quarter-acre pond 8 feet deep is 2 acre-feet or 651,702 gallons of water which weighs 5,409,126 lbs. You need a sturdy dam ;-)
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