Sqirrel Power

So Jonathan was fixing a furnace. The firebox caved in so that was the end of the furnace. He thought the squirrel cage(the part of the furnace that circulates air) looked alot like a water wheel. So I came home one day and this was in the living room.

His buddy Bill remembered seeing something like that on the internet. So after much searching he found this picture of a squirrel cage gone water wheel that someone did at their house:

You can read about it and other supercool home brewed energy makers here:

http://http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_experiments_waterwheel.html

INTRODUCING JONATHAN'S SQUIRREL CAGE WATER WHEEL

Compared to the picture of when it was in the living room, he modified the opening a bit so the water could flow in and out better. In that picture, he had an alternator off a car attached to the wheel, but it didn't work. Then he then got another motor off an old International Log truck. And he thought he was really onto something when he hit 1.5 volts, but then wired it wrong and burned the motor up. A few more (weeks of) trials and errors and scrapping together some material McGuyver would be proud of, and some help from the chat rooms on the otherpower.com site, some rare earth magnets lathed into the armature, duct tape, a chainsaw to notch a fallen log, and a rectifier, I am happy to report that we are generating our power. The batteries are charging at a range between 11.50 and 15.5 volts enough for some lights and a stereo. We worked on the floor all weekend with lights running and the stereo blaring and never ran out of power, we even played a UB40 cassette tape to really give it a workout. With a few more batteries we'll be able to power the cabin refrigerator, TV, computer (free blogging, yeah) etc. inverted into 120 AC power, the kind you just plug into the wall for. We are now able to flip a switch at the door and the lights and music come on. In the interest of not overloading the system, we plan to have a propane stove and hot water heater. We are also hoping to have some on-demand hot water heated by the wood stove. Other than that our cabin is now powered up.

You can see in this shot that we just used an existing log that fell across the creek a while ago. The water only drops about 3 feet. As it falls it turns the wheel, the wheel turns a belt(that he got from some old snow chains that go on a dump truck), the belt turns the motor (that he found left for junk in a closet somewhere). The motor he modified by taking out the center part that spins inside the coils. He lathed off some of the metal so there was enough room to stick 8 earth magnets(the kind that are inside computers) onto it and it could still spin. He arranged them 2 by 2 in a North South North South pattern around the center of the motor. I guess this is keeps them repelling themselves and makes the motor turn better to increase the RPM. (My high school physics teacher Mr. Zicko would be glad to hear that some of the stuff I learned in his class is still sinning around in my head) So from the motor you can see a green wire, that goes all the way up to the cabin where it charges the four car batteries. This is how the energy will be stored, we would like to upgrade to golf cart batteries (think weddding presents, I'll see if I can register at Allied Battery Co.). After the power goes through the batteries as DC power, it then goes through a 20 amp inverter which changes the power to AC and connects to the house. That is what we love because we can plug anything we want into our many, many outlets and sockets that we so carefully installed with the dream that someday we would actually have power running to them. And now we do!!!