Building And Testing A Turbine Driven Hydro Generator
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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hackaday.com/2025/12/18/buildi…
