Waterwheel for on the beach

I made this waterwheel micro power system for our children and we tried to do a test run on a makeshift dam made of sand, branches and 4 beach towels.
To get the dam built with flowing water was very difficult but eventually we managed to control and block the flow and get water through the 100 mil Ø pipe.

The beach is Piha Beach where the overflow of the lake flows near Lion Rock.

The gears came out of an old commercial photo copying machine. The stepper motor was the capstan drive from an old Mitsubishi VCR.

The 2.5 Volts output is stepped up vial a small 12 / 240 Volts transformer to give enough voltage to make the 5 led's glow. Output is minimal but it gives the kids an idea that power can be generated from water.

I made an error in the design and had the waterwheel to high and the electrical components too low, hence water shorted out the bridge rectifier. But the basic principles worked.

After that failure we were treated with a nice vortex in the water intake of our hydro system.

I modify the design and a follow up video will be made this summer.

I created this video with the YouTube Video Editor (http://www.youtube.com/editor)