Austin started a new job, so I packed up the truck on a friday night and we headed up to the dam with the intension to put some electrons onto the grid. Buckle up this will be a long post, as so much is going on
The accomodations at the dam are far from perfect, but we have enough space on the floor for a air matress. Sadly this air matress I brought had a leak, and I ended up sleeping on the hard concrete. Austin pitched a tent, and we went to bed, ready for the next day of getting everything done.
First thing on the list is to pour in the remaining oil until we could see return flow coming back. And as you can see from the picture there was nice perfectly clean oil coming from the return. This told me many things. One that the turbine had potentially little to no moisture inside, or any bad contaminants. The turbine had been partially submerged since we installed it, and water had been splashing over it for a while now, so if there was a water leak we maybe would have seen it now. But the real test would be to see the oil quality once its running as the generator is spinning at 1800 rpm and would really stir up any water that was inside.
After unloading the truck we went over to the previous owners property to get the heap of other Hydrolec parts the the two previous owners ago hoarded. We don't think we will use any of this, but it was part of the deal and the guy wanted it out of his yard. We got a couple bearing sets, and another hydraulic power pack unit, and various bits and bobs, including a very weird set of wires. We concluded that someone at some point on this other hydrolec couldnt seal with wires properly, so there was this wire contraption with polycarbonate and stainless braided strain relief. We took the best one and left the others.
In order to turn things on we really need some position feedback on the butterfly valve. Because of our low flow, we didnt want to just leave it wide open beacuse it would drain the pond too fast. So we hooked up a Toyota ride height sensor, basically a very nice weather proof potentiometer for valve position. With a 3d printed bracket attached with magnets to the box and attached to the shaft we can tell the position of the shaft. Here's Austin hooking all of that up.
Austin wanted some more power, so we installed a couple of good flashboards, although most of the ones we have are rotted out, so we found a couple solid ones and put them in.
It's leaf peeping season, and so the railroad runs seasonal lunch trains. They slow down really slow to see the nice pond and the dam. Also maybe a quarter mile or so is the Ashland train stop, where some people dress up and tell people how it was in the olden days, and about Ashland. My parents took this train for fun and had a good time.
The flexible conduit you see has a cable gland in the end that it shoves into, and the other end of that gland threads into the pipe thread thats coming out of the turbine for the wires. Previously we didnt have a large enough wrench to tighen that gromit into the pipe all the way, so now that we do its all tight and happy and should be water tight. The pipe coming out of the turbine is thouroughly caulked shut and wasnt touched.
Austin and I were hesitant to just throw this puppy on, so what we wanted to do was to trigger the contactor when the turbine was up to speed. Austin was very suspicious of any residual signals that the generator would put out because its a induction motor. Sure enough we tried opening the valve 30% and we saw on the scope the generator frequency. So we kept opening and closing the butterfly to find out when we should close the contactor at the near 0 point or 60 hertz. Click the video for audio!
My good friend Mason and his wife Sofia just happend to be in NH and drove all the way from NYC to see us turn this thing on fir the first time. We progressivly opened the valve more and more, and maxe dout at about 80% as we had so little watter flow. Again click the video for audio. At this moment we thought we were putting out 12Kw, which I was just happy something was coming out. Ive never done something like this before, and while we arent starting from scratch it felt pretty amazing to have it sorta just work. The taper of the penstock had several holes in it and was acting as a pressure washer, but it was working.
We let the turbine run for about an hour or so, and we drained the pond about eight inches or so, enough so nothing was going over the dam. With our spirits mixed we ended up walking down the river while there was no water flowing down it while the pond refilled. It was incredibly majestic walking down the river with all the dark round stones, but there was something bothering us, why are we only getting 12Kw? It should be way more than that, or we have a problem.
We ended up taking the road back to the site and went over the railroad and back to the site to see whats going on. It was dark by then and we turned the facility back on and Instead of looking at austins board for the power calcuation we looked at the Solar edge Revenue grade meter we have installed.
Boom, theres our problem. Austin somewhere was not calculating the power correctly, and he later figured out the problem, but to say we were relieved would be an understatement. 12Kw is nothing, and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do, but FIFTY now thats something we can work with. Some flashboards, a VFD and more water we would be in business.
Spirits were high, and a years worth of work is finally paying off. Everything was working at enough capacity to atleast know that everything works. The turbine was going to work, it sounded healthy and happy, Austins board was doing what it was suppose to do.
A very happy Austin. The Solar Edge screen timed out every 15 seconds or so, and Austin would press the buttons to see the current power we were making, as the number made him happy. By the time the pond drained enough we were getting down to the 40Kw range, from the 55 when it was full.
I setup the gas bbq and grilled up some Keilbasa while the pond refilled, and we toasted to ourselves, a job well done. You may think that we are ready to go at this point but you would be very wrong. Physical things are far easier to deal with than paperwork. At this point we had no deal with the town to sell our power to them, nor the grid, nor the interconnection agreement signed. Its all quite boring but maybe someday I will make a post about how we formed all of this as to help others. Unluckily and luckilay we are hooked up to the town of Ashland which has a municipal power company, they are very easy to work with, but there after more than a year of research we are unable to sell our power to anyone. This isnt only a problem for us, but for all four hydros in town. My hypothesis about hydro is that every single site will atleast go through one lawsuit, whether it be land, water rights, or acsess to the grid. We are considered a "qualified facility" which forces someone to buy our power under federal law, but so far no one is playing ball. We have a strategy for the short term, but in the long term we will likely need to sue Eversource with the help of FERC. These two weekends were very sucsessful and we are hoping to turn on by spring, when theres more water and all our contracts can be signed.