Comment on The $50 Water Turbine -Build Tutorial v1.0
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is cool, and really like the idea behind the channel. The concept and design of this particular method of using water as a gravity to spin a turbine via fan seems less efficient than a water wheel though, no? Horizontal spin vs vertical. Maybe I’m missing something.
IonAddis@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The guy’s channel revolves around solutions that are super-cheap so that someone handy in a poor country can easily source the materials to build the thing. So I imagine some of his design decisions are based on his knowledge of what materials are locally available to relatively poor people in various places in Africa, or Panema, or Tibet, or wherever.
I was watching another one of his videos, and he was trying to get a bike chain to act as a belt for his wind turbine, and his rationale was that bike chains are easily accessible in poor countries, but he had to fall back on a car drive belt that was cut down and modified because he couldn’t get his first option to work.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Oh, for sure. I watched quite a few of his videos after seeing this one. They had a lot of problems getting the fan in this type of layout to stay in one piece, so that’s why I thought it was maybe not quite the most efficient way to spin something with water. I guess the vertical shaft and fan design has a faster spin potential than a horizontal force applied.