"free" electricity

[swamp creek farms]

Well i know nothing is free. But if it pays for itself in time than it is a great investment. I've been poking about the net on water turbines and water wheels to produce electricity. Wondering if any one else has the same idea? Running an AP system and using the flow from the GB to power the pump.

Also I found something new to me, magnetic generators that use "perpetual motion" to create energy. Kind of like water turbines or windmills but instead using magnetic force to run the motor. Look it up on youtube and let me know what ya think.

There are plenty of videos about all three ideas. Anything that is cheaper than solar panels and all the stuff along with it.

Thinking that a water wheel/turbine will also aerate the water enough to discard the air pump. So you wouldn't need much electricity to run a small water pump. If your familiar with Murray's forum, i also have a post there. Since the guy i heard about the magnetic generator is from Australia, figured one of them might know something about it.

[badflash]

Any so called "over unity" generators are a hoax. You'll lose money big time on these every time. These hoaxes come and go all the time. About 10 years ago they ran the same scam in the US. Until they can tap into "vacuum energy" these will continue to be ways to rip people off. You can't get more out than you put in.

While it may be theoretically possible to recover part of the energy you put in from a water turbine from a grow bed, a drop of a couple of feet is quite hard to get anything out of. The cost of the turbine and generator would never pay for the cost. You would be better served putting up a windmill. There are several windmills designed to pump air. You can use this to aerate or even pump water using air powered lift pumps.

[LFCummins]

"Scams" are real on this topic - 4 sure. Perpetitual motion has been the crutch to free energy studies for years as has several wave generation projects ranging from light, micro, to sound wave. Some other types of wave generation theories proved to be too costly, non productive, in some cases nothing exits to create the theory or deadly to humans. I am speaking of the studies done by NASA to consider power production alternatives, as to how far these ideas went, one never knows, there were several teams that looked into for a short time the "wave" theories.

The best application of your idea that I have ever seen was in California. The guy had raceways 2' x 1.5' as long as the area, running from one end to the other, some 50 feet long. He had them side by side all the way to the floor (I believe there were 6 of them on each side of the room). Course each one drained into the one below, with the sump in the ground and a single pump to the 2 sides. He had no air pumps on that grid nor the climate controls or filtration, just the one pump. Each drop he funneled the water threw a small generator, as it passed to the raceway below. His claim was that it was ZERO cost to run the pump and tho it appeared to be true I am to this day skeptical. His study of the raidbow trout (some type of parasite study) earned him a grant.

I digress, I have used this method of a "water wheel generation" for air pump power as well as the BBU system chargeing. It wont run the whole system but will supply some power, reducing some costs .....

Recently the trend to Air-lift water systems is getting to be the craze here, reducing your need for sump and fish tank pumps. With just the requirement of power for the air pump, then possiably this might (in theroy) be plauseable. It should be noted that some of these air pumps are pretty large due to the volume of air as its not pressure, most that I am seeing are using the ones attached to the top of tanks on wheels / like what painters may use, or garages for their pneumatic tools.


Good luck, I will be watchin to see how this goes.

[badflash]

Here is how science sees this. In order to move water you need energy. Flow will increase until friction overcomes what ever power you put it. Friction turns that work to heat. If you drop water from one level to another, you can recover potential energy, but the friction loss is gone as heat and can't be recovered directly. The most energy you can recover from the drop is what ever it takes to lift it back up.

Water generators are not 100% efficient, and neither are pumps. About the best you could hope for is about 40% recovery if you were really clever. Look at it like this. Suppose you put a water wheel at both ends of a fish raceway. Connect the two by a common shaft and a return flow between the wheels. One gets power as the water flows into it using gravity to turn the wheel. At the other end the second wheel picks the water up and returns it to the raceway using the power gained by the other wheel. I think it is pretty obvious that this wouldn't work, yet that is exactly what we are talking about with any of these systems.

You can certainly reduce your pumping costs by using raceways and air lift pumps. This has been done for years, but it isn't cheaper to recover power from a small drop than it is to buy the extra power for your air pumps.

What you can do is use waste streams that no one else is using and make power from them. Wood, Methane, etc.

[immanuel7069]

excuse me badflash, ahh what you mean by waste streams? and so you mean using /building your own generator is not efficient?

[badflash]

Waste streams are things that other people throw out like waste oil, coffee grounds, left over food, etc. All can be converted to fuel and some to fish food.

No generator or engine is very efficient. A car engine is only about 20% efficient, and a high efficiency power plant is only 40% efficient. An electric motor is about 95% efficient, but couple that to a pump and you lose most of that. It is just the way things work.

[jackalope]

There is a way of using an electric motor as an electric Generator, but I've forgotten exactly how to do all of that .... Old electric motors are usually a dime a dozen at thrift stores in the As-Is dept. If you could use an old electric motor to experiment with, you could either prove or disprove your theory

Just my 2 centavos ..........

[badflash]

Not a theory, but not independent. If you drive an electric motor that is powered by the grid slightly over 60 cycles, it becomes a generator. No good in a blackout, but for generating power to the grid, it is hard to beat.

[Hotrodmike]

Not a theory, but not independent. If you drive an electric motor that is powered by the grid slightly over 60 cycles, it becomes a generator. No good in a blackout, but for generating power to the grid, it is hard to beat.

Yup that works had a friend with a sheetmetal shop and a real old Top Hat type welder .They could not figure how they had as low of an electric bill so they called the electric co . No one could figure it out till some one fired up the welder and the meter started running backwards
I think I may have just kept my mouth shut and become a full time welding shop
Have A Kind Day
Mike

[swamp creek farms]

Here is my idea now. I have a few IBC tanks sitting around doing nothing. I'm thinking of putting one in the ground, and another about 5' off the ground. Run a pvc pipe down to my water wheel (pelton wheel). Have a micro hydro generator there that will probably get about 40 V DC, to power a 12 volt batter, or two. Hopefully with that i can have enough to power my water pump.

I'll try to draw it up.

I don't know if you can understand this chicken scratch.