Hi Bill

I am writing to tell you how the hydro has worked out.

In one word GREAT!!!!!! We are more then pleased with the performance and ease of care the unit takes.

As I told you my wife and I and 5 kids own and operate Quartz Creek Lodge on Kodiak Island in Alaska.We live at this remote site year round as well as operate our lodge business in the summer month. I installed the turbine last spring and was hoping for great results. I have a limited amount of head as I only wanted this on our property and not go on to refuge land. Where I wanted to put the turbine I had 16 psi. When we got the pipe in and the unit installed opened the valve we avg 24 amps at 50 volts doc(at the house) . We have since redone the intake and have an avg of 26 amps. That is between 1300 and 1400 watts. This unit out performs anything In its class. We use to run an LH 1000 and only got 11 amps.

We are huge energy hogs!!! For our summer business we run 3 chest freezers for fish,one refrigerator,dish washer,washer and gas dryer ,I have 2 guest cabins with oil heaters (run by electricity) lights ,10,000 chargers for electronic do dads folks bring. The washer and dyer run non stop through out the summer. (Avg groups of 4,)Plus my son has a 2 bedroom cabin with all the normal items you find in a house. They all run off this single unit. I am down to 16   L16 batteries that are 9 years old and seen their better days. So the hydro runs it all yet there is enough power left to heat hot water through the diversion load on most days.

So after a year in service am I happy with the hydro. Very much so. It is all you said and more. Thanks for the great product and service you have provided.

David Pingree

Quartz Creek Lodge

Kodiak Ak

 

Hey Bill, here are a couple pictures of where I originally had turbine mounted. I decided to move it down stream to get more power. Before I move it we were running 2 refrigerators, 2 chest freezers, all lights and electronics in the house plus power tools in the shop. It ran the window unit air conditioner for about 4 hours each day depending on how hot it was. Weather is good now so we don’t need that. Also runs the well pump. Thank you so much for all your help. Im going to see how it does once I finish moving it. I was thinking about putting another turbine in next to the other, we’ll see how much I get out of the one once it’s moved.

Zak

 

The generator/turbine all looks to be nice quality and installation was very straight forward. I installed it on Friday and finished the wiring today. I have installed two complete sets of wiring and pipework so that hopefully a second unit can be installed shortly. I opened the valve this morning and it burst into life with no problems at all. I have wired the rectifier to a normal solar grid tie inverter which has two possible inputs, one for each turbine. This then cleverly converts the dc input to 50HZ 240V in phase with the mains which is fed straight to my domestic mains electricity supply through a generation meter. In the UK, as an incentive to generate renewable energy, we get paid 0.22 for every KW generated regardless of what we do with it. If it goes back into the grid, a further 0.04 is paid for the energy. As the cost of energy from the grid is 0.14 per KW, it makes sense to use as much as possible instead of gas. Unfortunately we have just had not just the driest September ever, but the driest month ever recorded! This means that my pond only has bout 40 gpm going into it at the moment, so can only run the turbine for about 3 hours per day. Hopefully this will increase rapidly in the next few weeks- we had 600 gpm by mid October last year, enough to run 2 turbines. My turbine is running with a head of 11 meters (36 feet), and so far seems to be consuming 270 gpm. The output is 1.2KW. The pressure by the turbine is 12 psi when running with the valve fully open. It looks like that will be the maximum achievable power for my system. Do you have any information on flow rate versus power –  as I have limited water, am I going to get better efficiency by running at a lower flow rate for a longer time? It is certainly much quieter when run at about 0.7KW when the pressure at the turbine is 9 psi whilst running. Any information would be appreciated and I am certainly happy to share any data that I collect over the coming months and also write an endorsement for your excellent product. Many Thanks,  Best Wishes,  Wags

 

Belize Installation

Northport Installation

 

Bill,

As you requested; here are a few pictures of our finished turbine install.

The inclined plate intake works beautiful. In October millions of alder leaves flow over the intake with no ill affect or plugging. The incline is about 10 degrees. The fish and game recommended this intake, as well, because that fish easily pass over the intake.

We are using a piece of pvc. screen for it rather than the stainless steel screen we started with. We learned that the anchor ice does not affix itself to the slick pvc. as it does to stainless screen during winter.

The turbine is able to run our household of five perfectly. It keeps the battery bank full and two large freezers running. 

Using the Aux.1 port, on the Minight Classic Charge Controller, we divert extra power into potable hot water elements. This works great. We use a solid state DC relay that turns the AC hot water element on as batteries get full. It is a real bonus to have warm water at the tap. If we would have run 6″ pipe we would have “hot water” at all times. 

We are completely satisfied with our turbine. It is obviously well built.

Our site is composed of 700′ of 5″ pipe  with a net of 13 psi. at the turbine. With 1,800′ of 6/3 wire we are making 75 volts AC at 450 watts at the batteries.

Thanks for all the good help along the way. I’ll send more pictures for your use.

Eli Lucas

Kupreanof Island, Alaska

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