I finally hauled the pipe down to the cabin, have 120 ft of 4" down there now, will go down on spring break with grandsons and see how we can lay the pipe.
Creek was flowing above 1.5 cu ft/sec just judging by wier formula and flow depth over an edge. The previous week had some heavy rain, so the 1.5 cuft/sec probably about the maximum.
120 ft of pipe at 500 GPM has a 15 ft heat loss, so may want to lay 2 pipes in the future.
We will lay the pipe and see what type flow we get and what the static pressure is, will likely neck down to 2" or 3" as have that size valves.
After getting the actual flow and head measured, will design and weld up a turbine and install later this spring. If we get 200 W into late spring will be happy, enough to charge battery and run screens and laptops and a few LEDs. I plan on letting generator (rewound auto generator with rotor replaced with PM) run free, wild frequency and voltage, design a boost converter for 500Vdc output and feed that up the hill to a 120 Vac output inverter. I design motor drives for airplanes, so boost supply will be custom, probably rewire/adapt a commercial 480 Vinput VFD as the 120 Vac inverter.
The turbine will be the most difficult, unless a 1 HP mixed flow centrifugal pump I have can be adapted.
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