Nice. Has anyone successfully moved off grid with these micro domestoc generator type setups? Maybe not a single unit, but a series of water, wind, solar etc...?
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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If you are already connected to the grid it does not usually make sense to move off grid.
However you can easily have a setup that cover most of you electricity use. You can also install batteries so you are virtually off-grid with the grid just there as a backup for the bad days.
Solar is the main option because it's cheap, very low maintenance and predictable.
Wind and water turbines requires regular maintenance and really depends on your configuration. With solar I can give you an reliable estimate of your annual production and how many time a year you will completely empty your batteries within 5 minutes with only your home address
For wind I need expensive specialized software if you have weathers station close to where you live, if not I need to have sensor on your land to get close to the same result.
In practice for home use you'll never really know in advance how much your wind turbine will produce.
Honestly for 99% of the cases I would recommend solar first before thinking about wind or water turbines.
I can't speak for the one in the video--although that inventor is a Scottish guy who seems to work in impoverished areas in Africa, Panema, Tibet, etc. so I presume his design works as he keeps using it--but Kris Harbour (https://www.youtube.com/@KrisHarbour) is a homesteading guy in the UK who is running his homestead on a combo of solar, water generation, and wind power.
Kris Harbour's latest video is him installing a waterwheel for a client, although he himself uses a little water turbine on his own property. He has videos of both up.
That's the thing. I'm thinking of small omnidirectio al wind turbines, drain flow turbines (like the one in the article) or waterwheels for rivers or drain flow, maybe a small solar installation... would love to give it a shot it if it's viable for a modern suburban household.
I would say of all of that, solar is probably the easiest to do for a suburban household. For hydro you'd need land with access to a stream or something, and for wind you might run into local ordinances about noise or the height of the structure or the like, in a suburban area at least.
Speaking of ordinances, given that solar has taken off so much, depending on where you live I have heard you might have to obey local laws about installation of that too?
I am in NO WAY an expert, but as I understand it (assuming I wasn't misled by my reading), when households are feeding into the electrical grid (instead of just the utility company), an electrical utility worker who is working on something and has turned off power from the power plant coming down their particular line can be surprised/hurt by electricity coming from the residential side of things if it's feeding into the grid and isn't supposed to be.
So that's why areas where solar power on residential homes are regulating solar installs if the electricity from the solar power feeds into the larger grid, so folks working on the lines have a clear idea of what's being fed into them.
MrHydrohead has a series of videos on their multi-year renovation project for their off grid domestic micro hydro power system. While not taking an existing on grid system off grid they renovate their failing off grid hydro system from 1996.
There are 3 short project summary videos the have notes that show which project video covers the topic they are discussing so you can find more information. One Two and Three
I think if they did, I'm not super sure they'd be the type of person posting on social media, but 🤷
That looks like way more than $50 worth of parts.
I thought this was super-cool--full build video to make a little water turbine to generate electricity.
This is cool, and really like the idea behind the channel. The concept and design of this particular method of using water as a gravity to spin a turbine via fan seems less efficient than a water wheel though, no? Horizontal spin vs vertical. Maybe I'm missing something.
The guy's channel revolves around solutions that are super-cheap so that someone handy in a poor country can easily source the materials to build the thing. So I imagine some of his design decisions are based on his knowledge of what materials are locally available to relatively poor people in various places in Africa, or Panema, or Tibet, or wherever.
I was watching another one of his videos, and he was trying to get a bike chain to act as a belt for his wind turbine, and his rationale was that bike chains are easily accessible in poor countries, but he had to fall back on a car drive belt that was cut down and modified because he couldn't get his first option to work.
Oh, for sure. I watched quite a few of his videos after seeing this one. They had a lot of problems getting the fan in this type of layout to stay in one piece, so that's why I thought it was maybe not quite the most efficient way to spin something with water. I guess the vertical shaft and fan design has a faster spin potential than a horizontal force applied.
in the end summary he talks about adding a vectorizer to start the flow swirling in the pipe before it hits the blades.. that's a great idea, and it seems like there would be other efficiencies like that to be gained before and after that fan element.. also i think i would want to try a fan design that resembled the prop on a boat motor.. seems like those would already have the best water displacement efficiency worked out..
For a given rpm and loading