Posted: 7/31/2009 5:51:03 AM EDT
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I was talking to a fellow electrician about backup generators and he told me about something he saw many years ago on an old farm. It was a generator powered by the tap water delivered from the city.
Now I could only assume this is illegal and not advisable, but it's definitely something that I am curious about. The second he told me about it I thought of this forum, if it's been done you guy probably know about it or have tried it yourself. I'd assume the most efficient way would be to spin a car alternator to charge a bank of 12V batteries and use an inverter? Any info on this? I tried Googling it but came up with nothing. Again, I have no plans on doing this, but I am very interested in the subject. |
| Sounds very interesting, I'm curious about that myself. I doubt you could really get THAT much power out of it in terms of steady output, but if you weren't looking for a lot at once, just enough to power a light or two or charge something up the battery storage system would work great. |
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Check this page out: http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan/nepal/ghatta/index.html
A Ghatta as I understand it from those pages is a water powered mill. This was an MIT project to try to connect an alternator to the mill shaft to charge batteries. There is a lot of theory and solutions to issues on those pages. The big trick is getting enough RPMs to get enough energy to get a good charge (2000rpm is a minimum). Still, interesting pages and something that might be fun to try! The problem with using city water is you pay the bill. Water well you expend more energy then you get so what you need is water with a natural flow. If you had a fast flowing stream or waterfall you may well be able to do something like this. I can not imagine a farm running off city water 
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Might have been the old farmer had Hydrogen power figured out....or was your friend talking about the flow of the water being the power source? The flow of water. Quoted:
I can not imagine a farm running off city water It was a backup emergency system to give him some power when all else was dead. |
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here, the City utility dept charges for you twice for the water you use. Once for the water, and about an equal amount for 'waste'. I don't think running a generator that way would save you any money. It wasn't to save monyey in any way. It was a last ditch effort to make power, the last step before using pedal power 
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In the next town over there was a plumbing supply/commercial hardware/industrial supply joint that had a huge old 4 story brick warehouse with commercial store on the first floor and warehouse space in the basement and 2-4 floors.
They had a weird homebuilt freight elevator that ran off city water. The guy who originally built the unit was also the civil engineer who built the city waterworks and sewer systems along with half of the infrastructure in this small city. I first met the guy (who was about 90 at the time) when I was a 20 year old pup buying stuff for the construction company I worked for back in the early 1970's. I never realised who he was untill I started working land survey and engineering and found out that half of the surveys and plans in the town hall had his name on them going back 60 years |
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i have seen micro turbines, but they needed a large volume of water and considerable pressure to produce power equivalent to a gas generator.
running off residential water service, will not yield much power, in terms of cost. many years back solar panels were not as cost effective as they are today, back then a micro turbine may have been a novel solution. |