Over on his YouTube channel [Construction General] shows us how to convert a drain into a hydropower facility. This type of hydroelectric facility is known as a gravitation water vortex power plant. The central structure is a round basin which includes a central drain. The water feeds into the basin through a series of pipes which help to create the vortex which drives the water turbine before flowing out the drain.
To make the facility [Construction General] starts by laying some slabs as the foundation. One of the slabs has a hole to which the central drain pipe is attached. Bricks and mortar are then used to build the basin around the drain. A temporary central pipe is used for scaffolding along with some strings with hooks attached to hold the bricks and mortar in place for the basin. Integrated into the top half of the basin are fifteen inlet pipes which feed in water at an angle.
The next step is to build the dam wall. This is a bricks and mortar affair which includes the drain in the bottom of the wall and two spillways at the top. The spillways are for letting water flow out of the dam if it gets too full. Around the drainage in the dam wall a valve is installed. This valve is called the low-level outlet or the bottom outlet, and in this case it is a sluice, also known as a slide gate, which can be raised or lowered to control the rate of flow through the turbine.
Once the basin is complete and the low-level outlet is in place the scaffolding is removed. The basin is then painted, pink on the inside and white around the top. A turbine is constructed from various metal pieces and installed into the basin. The turbine is attached to a generator which is fixed atop the basin. The apparatus for operating the low-level outlet is installed and the dam is left to fill.
Hydropower is a topic we’ve covered here at Hackaday before, if you’re interested in the topic you might like to check out A Modest But Well-Assembled Home Hydropower Setup, Hydropower From A Washing Mashine, or Bicycle Hub Hydropower.
Now it’s YoutubeShorts-a-day?
FFS, what’s next? TikTok? Most of us here are not brainrotten zombies looking for another clickbaity dopamine shot.
RP2040 and RP2350 projects give me the largest dopamine shots. I wish there was a hacker website where people post ideas that you can bookmark, vote for and realize. Lack of ideas is my biggest filter from growth.
Many recent projects that impressed me deeply were the BLE nRF projects running off 37µF caps powered by a photodiode. But that’s the category “built it just way better”. PCBs using SMD elements and stencils is out of my scope.
I hate being that guy, but creating dams and blocking of natural springs and rivers is probably illegal in the western world, so whilst the “brainrotten” hack is cool, there is no way I can build it either. And to be fair, the summer heat kills my creative drive completely. Winter is the best season to tinker.
The second link in gives the right idea why it might be illegal, but this type (if built as in the wiki article however) can be legitimate: Migration of fish is influenced. My personal feel was build up of algae and other water pests and disease vectors like mosquitos.
Isn’t that pretty much just hackaday.io?
I was thinking more of Project Euler, but for hardware and software. Other people post an idea/a challenge and you solve it because it resonated with your own needs. If you are on 3D printing websites many have a feature where you can share that you printed someone else’s project (maybe even as reiteration) and it’s like a feedback.
I feel the frontpage is more like an inspiration source, the io site is more for WIPs and “I built this”.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2picMQC-9E
(I second that)^T
Everyone beware of VVS, the Vertical Video Syndrome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2picMQC-9E
CR-LF or just LF?
Won’t be long for a government agency to say that u can’t do that cause ur saving money and power company is losing money…that’s world n country we live in,,good idea, but be careful,and try not to mention it too much,,,
I like this video because they showed the construction from start to finish, showed how everything worked and didn’t waste a lot of time but instead just showed how it worked. A lot of video makers could learn a few lessons from how to present things with this video. That said, I’m not a real fan of youtube shorts and wish people would just post them as actual videos instead. I’m also curious of the power generation capabilities of this. This could also be useful in man made waterways instead of damming up streams. Things like irrigation ditches or storm drains.
The overflow is going like crazy. So none ever gave any thought about the amount of water that is available and how to size the turbines.
What I don’t like is the use of plastic pipes, though.
Let’s think of miccro plastic issue here, it doesn’t belong into water.
Especially in third-world countries, plastic is so popular and used for things it’s not meant to be.
Most ‘micro plastic’ is from the fashion industry.
Synthetic fibers, not pipes easily become microplastics.
And they suck.
Wear cotton.
printer toner anyone? microfiber cleaning pads, the small strip disolving in water on razor blades.
Small mass compared to synthetic clothing fiber.
What’s the ratio of microfiber cleaning pads to disposable fashion?
Those two are the same problem.
I don’t think you get plastics if you think they’re water soluble.
The issue of microplastics is highly overstated; the smaller the particle, the faster it bio-degrades, and most plastics do biodegrade. Microscopic particles that shed from the surface of a solid piece of plastic do not stick around for very long.
The fudge factor is in the naming: particles up to 3 mm are considered “microplastic”, which means that particles that are clearly visible – macroscopic particles – are counted in. It’s these particles that are eaten up by animals including fish and birds, and which do not readily bio-degrade because they’re still above the size which can be effectively attacked by bacteria and fungi. These are a result of irresponsible waste management: leaving plastic items laying around in the open where they photo-degrade and break into fragments, which are then carried off by rain and wind, and deposited in waterways.
For plastics that are buried in the soil, those remain as solid pieces and pose hardly any risk to anything because they’re essentially inert. For the truly microscopic particles like tire dust or lint that comes off of fabrics, or tiny flecks of plastic that abrade away from a PVC pipe, the environmental risk is overstated in terms of accumulation, because it doesn’t. Unless it gets sedimented down, where it poses no risk to anything, the truly microscopic pieces of plastic get consumed by organisms in a matter of months to couple years.
i’m not sure the underlying facts about size and duration and so on but
it seems to me like even if we produce a lot of something constantly, then it doesn’t much matter if it degrades quickly…we’re still surrounded by it. just like methane as a global warming gas — it’s not going to be responsible for reshaping climate over centuries but it is certainly a big impact today when we release so much of it.
so i’m not eager to discount the many dangers of microplastics just because they probably degrade relatively quickly
I wish he had put a little curvature in that wall. I’d worry about the downstream consequences of a collapse.
Also I think it would be fun to turn it over to Grady from Youtube’s Practical Engineering for an analysis :-) (no association)
Please, please be careful with this kind of YouTube channel in the future.
I know it seems interesting, but these channels almost always just churn out fake “homemade” builds for internet views.
For comparison, here’s an extreme example of one of those fake channels:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4E1gPBh0_eJ5oftWVsewZA
And here’s a channel doing the real thing:
https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
(sidenote: you can turn on captions while watching his stuff, he talks about his process and it’s pretty interesting)
Do you think bandwidth is free?
Who TF are you to mess with HackaDay’s ‘drive traffic to clickbait for pay’ business model.
Had this before! Eroding the area around… this is just a nice video with no practical use. For is not adapted to available water supply, dam will not last, no efficiency given. This is not a hack but build for a video. BORING!!! If I want to see this, I surf YouTube!
That’s racist 👍
Okay, and? These videos still suck.
Why is nothing written about power output (watts) vs water flow? (and, no: I’m not going to watch any video just to get information which should be in the basic article).
My guess–based on other small-ish turbines (that’s exactly what this is)–is that there’s not enough power generated to justify all the effort expended.
Simple solution: if I’m wrong, print the data.
Nothing about power output because the entire “article” is an AI description of the video with the hackaday boilerplate on the end. No humans were involved in this post.
Hi dcnpat and jawnhenry. I can assure you I am a real human being and no AI was used in the generation of this Hackaday article. I watched the video through two times before writing it up and did a bunch of research so I could explain about gravitation water vortex power plants and such. I wrote this up because it meets our definition of a hack. In this case we converted a drain into a power supply. The reason I didn’t give you any hard numbers about flow rates and power output is because those numbers weren’t made available in the source material.
For all these projects, you only need to remember 1 formula:
1/2 mgh
Calculate it, and be shocked how little power you can (maximally, theoretically) get from this. Hydropower is great, but it’s only functional on immense scales.
Just grab a solar panel.
I do not see a generator. Hence no power out yet. It spins yipee!.
Totally illegal in NYS to build a dam on a stream. Titles suggests its a Drain but it looks like a creek to me.