Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

i agree. ball park of 50% loss though the pump it self

probably to 50% loss through the turbine and generator

10% to 20% loss though the cabling and charging mechs.

gives you a total of 20% return..........if you're lucky

and then you would have to have a turbine designed specifically for the flow and head. paddle wheel would be LUCKY to light a few LEDS

TO answer the question of where does the spare power go..............it gets converted into other forms of energy. Predominately heat. even stray AC magnetic fields end up being converted into heat in the laminations of the coil.

F&F and Steve have pointed out the difficulties. A micro hydro is not going to generate any useful power unless the system is specially configured to do so, ie create a large fall to power the the micro hydro. This of course would be self defeating since you would have to put a LOT of extra energy in to get any out via the hydro.

Having said that there is a way.

I've been trying to design my system to minimise the pumping head required but almost every system will have some fall. In an efficient system this fall may still be enough to power a hydraulic ram for some of the time during a cycle. If it were then the hydrualic ram could pump a tiny amount of water up to a header tank which would open during a blackout and then power the microhydro.

Such a system would also have to have a resivoir to store the extra water that the ram would be taking out of the system and storing in the header tank and would later capture the water after it had run through the microhydro.

This wouldn't be efficient but it would work.

Having said that since the purpose is to provide a backup to your AP system (not power) I'd remove the microhydro and just run the water from the header tank through the system and into the resivoir. If both are bigenough that would work on its own some.

LOL
unless you live beside a raging torrent, that thing is going to be as efficent as pissing into the wind.
there's a LOT of scam artists out to cash in on the eco friendly caze, be very careful before any money over to anyone.
for my money i'd be waiting for the rudd government proposed $10,000 loan @ 2% interest. that's below inflation, and 10k is actually a useful amount of money capable of setting up a solar system that will pay back that 10k over it's life time. best thing is you only need to pay interest. $200 a year for 25 years then just pay it outright, it's like free money.

Hydraulic rams are only 10% efficient under ideal conditions so to get them to work you would need 15 ft fall then with a 60 litre drop you would get 6 litre .By putting a tee in the pump line you could get that with out even trying with out the extra pluming also to make it efficiant you would need to store 2000 litres up the hill then you would have to aerate it, keep it covered [algi]
ect

There is a different (modern) design of ram that works quite (relative to the 1890's something design that is the one that most people are familar with) efficiently with a small fall and low volume flow called the "plat y pus" pump.

Very expensive to buy but I've got the make your own specs. Can't post becuase of copy right (I think, better safe than sorry) but I'm happy to show them to people at the next meet.

I was thinking of one to feed the NFT component of a system.

The consensus of opinion would appear to be it is not worth the effort. Looks like it is back to solar. Thanks for everyones input.

A while ago I read an article that talked about incorporating Hydro generatos as part of a grid system.

The basic idea was that you use excess energy from where ever you are producing it (solar, wind, wave, coal) to pump water to a resivoir that acts as a battery. When the power was needed let the water flow down through hydro generators for power.

The application the article was talking about was the combined wind power generation of europe and possible solar power stations in N Africa connected to the Hydro scheme of Norway. It was purely theoretical but was not possible unless the transmission lines were changed from AC to DC.

Sounded feasible and could be applied to Australia utilising the Snowy and Tasman Hydro schemes with future solar/wind power generation in the future.

It was in the Financial Review last year some time.