Microhydro revisited

I was recently surfing my online portfolio from the early 2000's. The site is now sooo year 2000. However, some of the projects are more relevant than ever, like the Energy Alternative interactive Microhydro online course: http://www.energyalternatives.ca/amazing/HydroCourse/default.htm

When Scott Davis decided to share his decades of experience in operating, installing and designing environmentally friendly, miniature hydro power systems for back country homes, he teamed up with Victoria green energy guru and small-business-man extraordinaire, Kevin Pegg of Energy Alternatives.

Scott wrote a how-to book for designing and building your own backyard water power station. Kevin hired me to re-organize and edit the material so it could be presented as an online course. He hired Spry New Media web designers for their slick graphics and sophisticated back-end web power. The result was a beautifully, richly illustrated online course that hundreds of green enthusiasts have taken.

Scott went on to publish a hard copy book with New Society Publishers: Microhydro - Clean Power from Water


The Microhydro Power Calculator
As cool as the microhydro online course is, it turns out that most valuable thing for Kevin turned out to be the Microhydro Power Calculator (available at www.Energyalternatives.ca ) .

The calculator is a little online tool that allows you to change parameters of a power project, such as pipe width, height of the falling water, and legnth of wire, to see how much power you gain or lose.

I came up with the idea for the calculator with my computer programmer husband, Sean Kahil, when I expressed frustration over having to use so many words to describe enough about fluid dynamics and electricity that a lay person could make the necessary calculations to figure out the best design for the site.

Worse, Scott Davies was very proficient at using rules of thumb and dog-eared charts of friction coefficients in order to preform these calculations, but when it came to describing how he did it or why, it was all a little fuzzy.

Usually I take technical information and translate it to the masses. This time I took Scott's practical description of what he was doing, and translated it into math so that Sean could understand it and use it to create a program to do the calculations for us.

The result was a very usable little online tool. Sean and I designed the interface so that you could change all the most important parts of the system and see how the bottom line -- the power output -- changed. These decisions are critical when deciding how much to spend on materials and for choosing where to place the hydro turbine. Should you go a mile away from the house in order to take advantage of a waterfall, for instance? Sometimes, you lose so much power in losses through a long power chord that it is not worth it. I got rid of chapters of words and pages of unwieldy charts, by incorporating this online tool with the course. People don't need to understand why it works or see the calculations to get the most efficient system.

This little application has proven more popular than the course and has been surprisingly accurate. Kevin's staff have used the calculator to estimate power output, and they report it has been bang on, once the project is up and running.