A series of trapezoidal steel "buckets" attached together to form a metal water wheel. They are arranged around a square center frame that attaches to a hub for the wheel to spin about. The wheel is next to a stream and four people of various ages appear to be talking around it. A cinder block building with a metal roof is in the left background, and an older, yellow stone building is far off in the distance on the right of the image. The landscape is lush, green, and mountainous.

Open Source Waterwheel

Here in the West, power going out is an unusual event. But in more remote regions like the Himalayas, reliable electricity isn’t a given. A group of local craftspeople, researchers, and operators in Nepal have worked together to devise a modular waterwheel system.

Based on a 20-30 cm-wide bucket module consisting of only four galvanized steel components, the wheels can be easily built and deployed using resources and tools that are easy to find anywhere in the world. Current test devices generate between 120 and 1,400 Watts of power, depending on the device’s size.

A software tool was also developed that takes the head and flow rate of a location as inputs to calculate the dimensions of the optimal wheel and expected power output for an installation. This lets communities find ideal sites for power generation and calculate the expected costs.

We’ve covered a few other DIY hydropower setups, from repurposed washing machines to custom scratch builds.

Trash-heap Water Wheel Recharges IPhone In The Woods

We’ve all been there – hiking in the woods with a dead phone battery. No GPS, no way to Tweet that selfie from some hill with a great vista. It’s a disaster! But not if you have access to a little trailside junk and have the ingenuity to build this field-expedient water wheel generator to recharge your phone.

OK, it’s a stretch to imagine finding all the things needed for [Thomas Kim]’s hack. We’re only guessing at the BOM – the video below has little commentary, so what you see is what you get – but it looks like a garbage can at the trailhead might at least yield the materials needed to build the turbine. Water bottle bottoms and a couple of plastic picnic plates form the Pelton-like impeller, the frame looks like an old drying rack, and the axle appears to be a campfire skewer. But you might have a hard time finding the electrical side of the build, which consists of a stepper motor, a rectifier, and an electrolytic cap. Then again, you could get lucky and find a cast-off printer by the side of the road. No matter how he got the materials, it’s pretty cool to see an iPhone recharging next to a babbling brook in the woods.

Looking for a little more oomph from your trash-heap hydroelectric turbine? Maybe you need to look at this washing machine power plant build.

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Water-powered Multi-channel Audio

[Niklas Roy] is rolling out some water-powered music for Berlin’s Museum night. It seems that this water-wheel is attached to the side of the Museum. It’s got a stream flowing past it and the wheel is constantly turning. The thing is, that work isn’t being used for anything. Now we’ve already seen [Niklas] making electricity from moving water, but that’s far from what he had in mind this time around. Instead he’s driving a multitude of music boxes with the motion transferred from the water.

He teamed up with another artist named [La belle Imira] to build and connect a series of pulleys to the waterwheel. The video after the break shows the rope system being strung throughout the grounds of the museum. After passing around the output drum of the water wheel, the rope snakes through each pulley. Many of the pulleys have the mechanism from a music box attached to their axles, so whenever the water is flowing, music plays. They don’t all play the same tune, so you get a variety of selections as you walk around. We could swear that one of them is playing ‘My Way’.

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