Building And Testing A Turbine Driven Hydro Generator

December 18, 2025 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

The theory behind hydropower is very simple: water obeys gravity and imparts the gained kinetic energy onto a turbine, which subsequently drives a generator. The devil here is, of course, in all the details, as [FarmCraft101] on YouTube is in the process of finding out as he adds a small hydro plant to his farm dam. After previously doing all the digging and laying of pipe, in this installment, the goal is to build and test the turbine and generator section so that it can be installed.

The turbine section is 3D-printed and slides onto the metal shaft, which then protrudes from the back where it connects to a 230VAC, three-phase generator. This keeps it quite modular and easy to maintain, which, as it turns out, is a very good idea. After a lot of time spent on the lathe, cutting metal, and tapping threads, the assembled bulk of the system is finally installed for its first test run.

After all that work, the good news is that the 3D-printed turbine seems to work fine and holds up, producing a solid 440 RPM. This put it over the predicted 300 RPM, but that’s where the good news ends. Although the generator produces 28 watts, it’s officially rated for 3 kW at 300 RPM. Obviously, with the small size of this AliExpress-special, the expectation was closer to 750 watts, so that required a bit of investigation. As it turns out, at 300 RPM it only produces 9 watts, so obviously the generator was a dud despite cashing out $230 for it.

Hopefully, all it takes to fix this is to order a new generator to get this hydropower setup up and running. Fortunately, it seems that he’ll be getting his money back from the dud generator, so hopefully in the next video we’ll see the system cranking out something closer to a kilowatt of power.

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Turbine Blower 3D Prints Every Part, Including Triple Planetary Gears

June 29, 2025 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

There was a time when print-in-place moving parts were a curiosity, but [Tomek] shows that things are now at a point where a hand-cranked turbine blower with integrated planetary gears can be entirely 3D printed. Some assembly is needed, but there is no added hardware beyond the printed parts. The blower is capable of decent airflow and can probably be optimized even further. Have a look at it work in the video below.

Every piece being 3D printed brings a few advantages. Prefer the hand crank on the other side? Simply mirror everything. Want a bigger version? Just scale everything up. Because all of the fasteners are printed as well as the parts, there’s no worry about external hardware no longer fitting oversized holes after scaling things up (scaling down might run into issues with tolerances, but if you manage an extra-small version, we’d love to hear about it).

There are a few good tips that are worth keeping in mind when it comes to print-in-place assemblies with moving parts. First, changing the seam location for each layer to ‘Random’ helps make moving parts smoother. This helps prevent the formation of a seam line, which can act as a little speed bump that gets in the way of smooth movement.

The other thing that helps is lubrication. A plastic-safe lubricant like PTFE-based Super Lube is a handy thing to have around the workshop and does wonders for smoothing out the action of 3D-printed moving parts. And we can attest that rubbing candle wax on mating surfaces works pretty well in a pinch.

One downside is that the blower is noisy in operation. 3D printed gears (and even printed bearings) can be effective, but do contribute to a distinct lack of silence compared to their purpose-built versions.

Still, a device like this is a sign of how far 3D printing has come, and how it enables projects that would otherwise remain an idea in a notebook. We do love 3D-printed gears.

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Building A Generator That Runs Off Hose Power

November 29, 2024 by Lewin Day 68 Comments

[Paul Junkin] bought a curious product off the Internet. It was supposed to generate electricity when hooked up to a running hose. Only, it didn’t do a very good job. His solution was straightforward—he built his own hose-powered generator that actually worked.

The design uses a turbine hooked up to a small motor acting as a generator. To maximize the transfer of energy from the stream of water to the blades of the turbine, the hose is hooked up to a convergent nozzle. [Paul] does a great job explaining the simple physics at play, as well as the iterative design process he used to get to the final product. He calculates the best-case power coming out of his hose around 50 watts, so for his turbine to collect 22 watts is a win, and it’s good enough to charge a phone or run some LED lighting.

Of course, this isn’t a practical generator if you have to pay for the water, and there are other solutions that will get you less wet. Still, credit where it’s due—this thing does make power when you hook it up to a hose. We’ve seen some slightly less ridiculous concepts in this space before, though.

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Build Your Own Hydroelectric Dam

July 11, 2024 by Al Williams 21 Comments

We have to admit that we often think about building unusual things, but we hadn’t really considered building our own hydroelectric dam before. [Mini Construction] did, apparently, and there’s a timelapse of the build in the video below.

We wished this was more of a how-to video, although if you are handy with brickwork, the mechanical construction seems straightforward. Presumably, you’d need to understand how much force the water had but we don’t know if there was math involved or just seat-of-the-pants design.

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Bringing Modern Technology To A Sled

February 12, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

Street sledding, a popular pastime in Norway, is an activity that is slowly dwindling in popularity, at least as far as [Justin] aka [Garage Avenger] has noticed. It used to be a fun way of getting around frozen lakes and roads during winter, and while some still have their sleds [Justin] wanted to see if there was a way to revitalize one of these sleds for the modern era. He’s equipped this one with powerful electric turbines than can quickly push the sled and a few passengers around the ice.

Since this particular sled is sized for child-sized passengers, fuel-burning jet engines have been omitted and replaced with electric motors that can spin their turbine blades at an impressive 80,000 rpm. The antique sled first needed to be refurbished, including removing the rust from the runners and reconditioning the wood. With a sturdy base ready to go, the sled gets a set of 3D printed cowlings for the turbines, a thumb throttle on the upgraded handlebars, and a big battery with an Arduino to bring it all together.

With everything assembled and a sheet of ice to try it out on, the powerful sled easily gets its passengers up to the 20-30 kph range depending on passenger weight and size. There’s a brake built on an old ice skate for emergency stops, and the sled was a huge hit for everyone at the skating pond. There are plenty of other ways to spruce up old sleds, too, like this one which adds a suspension for rocketing down unplowed roads.

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Kites Fill Electricity Generation Gaps

January 22, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 48 Comments

Looking at a wind turbine from first principles, it’s essentially a set of wings that generate lift in much the same way an airplane wing does. Putting the wings on a rotor and calling them “blades” is not a huge step away from that. But there’s no reason the wing has to rotate, or for that matter be attached to a fixed platform, in order to generate electricity. Anything that generates lift can be used, and this company is demonstrating that with their kite-powered wind generators.

Like other wind energy producers that have used kites to generate electricity, this one is similar in that the kite is flown in a figure-8 pattern downwind where it can harness energy the most efficiently, pulling out a tether which is tied to a generator. When fully extended, it is flown to a position where the wind doesn’t strike the kite as strongly and the tether is reeled in. Unlike other kite generators we’ve seen, though, this one is offered as a turnkey system complete with battery backup and housed in a self-contained shipping unit, allowing it to be deployed quickly to be used in situations where something like a diesel generator would be impossible to get or where the fuel can’t be obtained.

The company, called Kitepower, does note that these aren’t replacements for traditional wind turbines and would be used more for supporting microgrids. There are still some advantages to using kites over fixed turbine blades though: kites can reach higher altitude where the wind is stronger, and they require less materials for a given amount of energy production, often making them even more environmentally friendly and possibly more economical as well. Surprisingly enough, kites can also be used to generate energy even in places where there’s no wind at all.

Supercon 2022: Irak Mayer Builds Self-Sustainable Outdoor IoT Devices

March 13, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 4 Comments

[Irak Mayer] has been exploring IoT applications for use with remote monitoring of irrigation control systems. As you would expect, the biggest challenges for moving data from the middle of a field to the home or office are with connectivity and power. Obviously, the further away from urbanization you get, the sparser both these aspects become, and the greater the challenge.

[Irak] solves his connectivity problem by assuming there is some WiFi network within range, building a system around the Blues Wireless WiFi note card. Substituting their cellular card would be an option for applications out of WiFi range, but presumably without changing too much on the system and software side of things. Leveraging the Adafruit FeatherWing INA219, which is a bidirectional current sensor with an I²C interface, for both the power generation and system consumption measurements. For control, [Irak] is using an Adafruit ESP32 board, but says little more about the hardware. On the software side, [Irak] is using the Blues Wireless NoteHub for the initial connection, which then routes the collected data onto the Adafruit IoT platform for collation purposes. The final part of the hardware is a LiPo battery which is on standby to soak up any excess power available from the energy harvesting. This is monitored by an LC709203f battery fuel gauge.

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