Revised device design

With this new design i have moved the turbine to the exterior of the pipe. This way the will only have to spin the turbine and have nothing else in its path. With the generator on the outside of the pipe it be able to be slightly bigger and produce more energy.

Device on illustartor

Paper prototype

200 word description

Similar devices

After searching through the internet for anything to do with hydro power generation for your home, the only things I i could find were small hydro power dams for your backyard that relyed on streams, I found that people who had these were usually completly off the grid and relyed souly on their hydro dam to power their house. For my device i want to go on a much smaller scale and only power a smaller amount of your house instead of being the soul provider.

Idea development after reasearch

energy storage and hydro plant reasearch

For my device im going to take the technology from the Hydro power plant and combine it with the energy storing technology from a solar power system. This way my device can produce the power and be able to store it for use around the house.

main idea

Ive chosen to go with this idea as i think it is the most innovative and im rather excited to explore it further. From here im going to reasearch into energy storage and how to make my idea actually work.. Im going to look into hydro power plants as my idea is essentially a mini hydro power plant for under your sink or shower

First ideas

Lecture reflections

I found both guest lectures to be very interesting.. The thing I found quite interesting from the first was when he was talking about solar power and how it doesnt actually add up or save you money inn the long run but people will still buy it for the feel good factor they get when they know they are making a difference and that spending more money to save the enviroment is justified. I found the lecture on Tring really cool just to see the development of their idea and how much they had to plan just to get to where they are now. I liked their idea of trying to make monitoring energy less boring and hard to understand, and instead making it easy to monitir in a kind of fun way.

Holiday power usage

My parents have a wireless meter that conects directly into your switch board and transmits how much  money your spending on power per hour. I monitored a few appliances and some bigger things that used a lot more power.. I found it quite hard to get an exact number of how much each thing was costing per hour as the numbers were constantly changing.

Dryer: 40 cents per hour
Washing machine: 10 cents per hour
TV: 10-20 cents per hour
Dishwasher: 45 cents per hour
Toaster: 35 cents per hour
Spa pool: $1.40 per hour
Oven: 50 cents per hour

I also tryed to look at an average number over a small amount of time and found that it usually stayed around $2 a per hour and when i went around and tryed to turn everything off that i could find I still could only get it to around 60 cents per hour. Also found that the device has an alarm on it  that you can set. and when you go over the amount of money per hour the device make s aloud beep noice to alert you that your power usage is very high.