I especially wait for information from MM as he once mentioned to the members of this board (and if I recall it well!) that their "hameau" (they translate with "hamlet") had electricity from a water wheel...



My question, and again to MM. I know that he, as I, having a chemical background, is perhaps not that knowledgeable about electricity, but I ask nevertheless how do they do that to have alternate current of for instance 50 cycles/ second? Or do they feed the changing cycles first to DC (direct current) and feeding it to an "alternator" which turns on "50 hertz"? Big question for me...and I know that I can find it after some painstaking research on the internet...but if someone more knowledgeable than I would..could...can solve this "enigma" earlier for me...

You are right, I don't know much about electricity generation. However surely as a water wheel (unlike a windmill) can easily be arranged to generate a steady low-voltage DC supply, then all it needs is a DC-to-DC power converter to step up the voltage (while stepping down current); then an inverter to convert this to AC; (or is it more efficient to use an alternator first to generate AC from the wheel, then use a transformer to step up the voltage?); but either way finally a regulator to maintain the required frequency (50 or 60Hz) at the required voltage for domestic usage (120 or 240V). I guess it should also have batteries and a charge controller if the intention is to store electricity when there is no load, which I would assume would take the DC electricty at low voltage direct from the initial DC generator, or just use a standard AC to DC battery charger. I'd imagine all these things can be obtained as fairly standard electronically-controlled units these days, the only thing being to ensure the system is such that the power requirements are balanced by that generated.

The village doesn't generate power this way but one of the neighbours has a microturbine which basically sits in a standard 100mm dia. pipe which takes water from the river with something like a 30m head of water pressure. From this turbine/dynamo I believe he charges a bank of lead-acid batteries, and then converts this to 60Hz AC and steps up to 240V to run a fridge, some lights and a few other things, although he has to be careful not to run too many appliances all at the same time.

I don't understand the technicalities of this method of generating electricity like MM and Paul do but it doesn't surprise me that in France someone uses water to generate his electricity.  After all, France had the first tidal generator on the Rance estuary.

It's also the case that France is quite a big, fairly rural country with (outside of the cities) a lot of widely-separated, small settlements, which has encouraged the construction of a lot of small independent power generating plants serving just a single house, farm or small hamlet. Also, at least where I am, there are plenty of mountains and rivers eminently suitable for small hydroelectric schemes. About 5kms away in the main river valley, just next to the road, there's a small hydroelectric generating station fed by what would appear to be a couple of 1m dia. concrete water pipes running down the steep hillside from above. However I doubt this is an independent system and suspect it feeds into the national electricity grid, despite its contribution being very small on the grand scheme of things.

But away from the main villages and electricity transmission lines there's often no other option than to go independent. I and my immediate neighbour 100m away are the last houses up our little valley with mains electricity. There are four more houses as you go further up but they are not connected to the grid. Accordingly one has built his own turbine system to get power from the river, plus he heats with wood and cooks with bottled gas. The other three also rely entirely on bottled gas, wood, candles, paraffin lamps etc, but they are just holiday homes and so only inhabited for a few weeks a year, mostly in summer. We also, none of us, myself included, have mains water: we all have our own springs which are piped into the houses (I don't have to fetch water in a bucket!) but we are entirely responsible for maintaining our own pipes, collecting tanks, filters and treatment units to maintain the supply. Likewise there's no sewerage so we all have septic tanks. Many of us also now have no fixed telephone connection after the line down the valley was damaged in a storm and Orange refuse to repair it saying its too expensive. I have the telephone connected via my satellite connection to the internet (there's no internet cable connection of course) but the satellite telephone doesn't work very well. As there is very patchy mobile phone coverage here too, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do if I, or a guest, gets ill or has an accident: smoke signals? an aldis lamp? semaphore?

The village (population only about 300 but that figure includes all the outlying houses such as myself) does have mains electricity, telephone and high speed cable internet/TV, but their water supply is from communal springs feeding to a reservoir tank, and their sewerage it to a small treatment plant down the hill. Surprisingly there is an isolated walkers' hostel up on the mountain about 5kms from the village that does have mains electricity and telephone, even though it is closed and uninhabited six months of the year and often cut off by snow in the depths of winter. But I'm guessing that is because the lines were laid when there were working mines up there which only closed in the early 1960s.
Bienvenue à la réalité de la France pittoresque.

Meles meles wrote:

You are right, I don't know much about electricity generation. However surely as a water wheel (unlike a windmill) can easily be arranged to generate a steady low-voltage DC supply, then all it needs is a DC-to-DC power converter to step up the voltage (while stepping down current); then an inverter to convert this to AC; (or is it more efficient to use an alternator first to generate AC from the wheel, then use a transformer to step up the voltage?); but either way finally a regulator to maintain the required frequency (50 or 60Hz) at the required voltage for domestic usage (120 or 240V). I guess it should also have batteries and a charge controller if the intention is to store electricity when there is no load, which I would assume would take the DC electricty at low voltage direct from the initial DC generator, or just use a standard AC to DC battery charger. I'd imagine all these things can be obtained as fairly standard electronically-controlled units these days, the only thing being to ensure the system is such that the power requirements are balanced by that generated.

The village doesn't generate power this way but one of the neighbours has a microturbine which basically sits in a standard 100mm dia. pipe which takes water from the river with something like a 30m head of water pressure. From this turbine/dynamo I believe he charges a bank of lead-acid batteries, and then converts this to 60Hz AC and steps up to 240V to run a fridge, some lights and a few other things, although he has to be careful not to run too many appliances all at the same time.

Thank you MM. It was exactly this what I wanted to hear (hmm read)...
And I wanted to apologize to you in a reply to LiR, but it is better placed here...
Apologies for calling your village a hamlet (hameau/gehucht) ...according to the "Cambridge" it is a small village usually without a church...overhere it is the same (no churches in hamlets) and I suppose the same in France...is there a church in your "village"? 
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hamlet

30 meters water column MM that's an appreciable 3kg/cm2 or nearly 3 bar...with that you can already think to do something with a water wheel I suppose...as the Chinese of my youtube has done also...

I saw once a French series about islands (I think it was on Arte), which were thanks to the local population independent or nearly from mineral oil and gas, with hydro energy, wind mills, sun panels and so on...many times unbelievble how they all did it. And indeed I saw once a large barack with I guess certainly a couple of hundreds normal car batteries, for electricty storage. They stand in rows and were nearly each day checked for their good function. One island had for instance nor to be supplied with oil for their heavy trucks and ground moving machines.

In the rural environment (perhaps it was a "hamlet") there was a small man-made windmill and when we passed by car the partner said, as it was one of the inner circle, that's a bit of a "special" one..."they" say that he has perhaps a bit a "slag van de molen" (a stroke of the mill) (they translate with: has a srew loose). When I later checked it was a completely "normal" person (at least in my view) and he used it only as a "study object"...to be honest as a youngster I made also all kind of constructions (as I explained to you the water mill to sharpen knives) and sometimes some less efficient ones as the turning rings (bicycle wheels where one could attach fish at to dry) on a vertical rod. It worked, but the centrifugal power was too high and the fishes get lost from the wheels and you can imagine...with 100 turns a minute and I couldn't reduce the speed from the electrical motor with my available gear work...at the end it was again drying fish at the line and in the wind...
And later in the factory I became more "uniformized" ( I tried from the French "uniformiser", but no it is "standardize") as in the army...you can try everything as long as it doesn't go bad...in that light I find "uniformiser" better...as with the word "uniform" ...

Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

The village (population only about 300 but that figure includes all the outlying houses such as myself) does have mains electricity, telephone and high speed cable internet/TV, but their water supply is from communal springs feeding to a reservoir tank, and their sewerage it to a small treatment plant down the hill. 

MM, so it was the same way at perhaps only a 6 km from our factory, that I already mentioned to you. At a certain time more than 2,500 working people. And many worked only partly in the factory and partly on their land. And as in your rural France, they had no water supply (we called it "stadswater" (town's water)). And there were specialized firms which did "putboringen" (water well drilling?) to have "putwater" (pit water?). And as I had a connection in the factory, as we had to let analyse our water also "offically", I gave also the farmer's pit water for analyzing if it was "drinkbaar" (drinkable?) (healthy norms) and if it was OK then they could go for an "official" payable analysis from their municipality...

One could also dig the water wells yourself. I have done it one or two times. You had concrete rings of some 1 m diameter and I guess some 80 cm high. One digged first a pit through the soil till one reached the sand (in the Flemish plain along the French- Belgian coast)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_of_Flanders
Then you put the first concrete ring in the sand and in the watery sand the ring sank by its own weight and if you digged again the sand out of this ring, the ring sank again , one put the second ring on the first one, digged further now with small bags taken by a second person to the surface...and you had to do it all fast, because the ground water started to climb in your rings and one had to suck it if too quick...and so if you were fully in the water level after some rings if I recall it well some five? rings...and then if you weren't at depth it was too late...

Kind regards, Paul.

Many yars ago - 20 at least - I recall someone putting an old water wheel back into service. To make matters simple (avoiding rectifyers / imnverters etc)  they had a PLC (programmable logic controller) which ensured the wheel ran at a constant speed, fluctuations in water flow notwithstanding, to run some appliances. It was a matter of balancing the number of sectors on the rotor to a give roughly 50 hertz, iirc. The setup did have a full-bridge rectifier, battery storage (a bank of NiFe cells iirc) and an inverter, with a "last ditch" generator - an ancient "hot bulb" semi-diesel.

That reminds me G of an occasion in the 1980s when visiting Dobson's Mill (wind) at Burgh le Marsh in Lincolnshire. Towards the end of the tour, as we exited the tower to look back up at the still sails, one of the visitors turned to the guide and asked "Well, aren't you going to switch it on?".

Paul, you might also be interested in Cragside, which is credited with being the first house in the world to be completely lit by electricity. Cragside near Rothbury in Northumberland was the country house of Lord William Armstrong, an inventor and industrialist, who made his huge fortune primarily through arms manufacturing. Along the way, in support of his business, he invented the hydraulic crane to move the massive naval guns that he made, as well as the iconic Swing Bridge across the River Tyne at Newcastle, so that warships could pass upstream from the shipyards to be fitted out at his naval works. Both these innovations were powered by hydraulics.

At Cragside, which he bought in the 1860s, he dammed rivers to create reservoirs to feed water to an electric generating station using his own design of enclosed Pelton-type water wheel or proto-turbine, which was capable of lighting the whole house and estate buildings. He also installed innovative electric-powered appliances such as a dishwasher in the kitchen and an internal telephone system.

The following youtube is primarily about the development of the city of Newcastle but inevitably has a section about Armstrong (between 20:30 and 33:00). It also features Armstrong's friend, the physicist Joseph Swan, who invented the incandescent-filament electric light bulb and who obviously supported Armstrong's innovations at Cragside, and also the engineer Charles Parsons, the inventor of the high-pressure steam turbine, who again was also involved in Armstrong's pioneering work.



The original hydroelectric system at Cragside is still there but being about 150 years old no longer works, however the reservoirs and leats all still exist and recently a new generating system has been installed using a large Archemedes screw, to once again power the house using hydroelectricity.

Meles meles,

Great video of Newcastle " How Britain was built".

But then I live just a few south of the city.


Dirk

Meles meles, I join Dirk with his eulogy of Newcastle. I was there once for a week to explore Hadrian Wall. Newcastle the start or was it the end. Great city and great video as Dirk says and if I recall it well it was with the good wishes of Dirk that I started my trip when I was on the BBC history messageboard.

And thank you also very much for the interesting additional history
But there seems to be no end to reinventions of the water wheel to make electricity...
https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/business/business-news/1628890/perth-firm-reinvents-the-wheel-to-help-bring-power-to-developing-nations/
Put it just down the river and it adapts to all speeds and flows...and even for some ten houses of a small hamlet along the river...really solving problems of the third world.
And yes, and I forgot, what would Britain do without Scotland...hein?



Kind regards, Paul.