210: Round and Round we go - Small Hydro Power

[Music] on today's episode of still to be determined we're going to talk about smallscale hydroelectricity production hey everybody as usual I'm Sean frell here on still to be determined to talk about Matt frell my brother's most recent episode which was about smallscale electric production using Micro Hydro before we get into that just a reminder of who we are I'm Sean frell I'm a writer I write some sci-fi I write some stuff for kids including this I just received in the mail the other day thi

s is my Advanced copy of my newest book nice the Sinister secrets of the fabulous nothings if anybody is interested in supporting me I believe the pre-orders may actually be available already for this it is a great way to support an author it really does help it's ridiculous how much it helps advance advance orders ahead of Pub this will come out in June if a bunch of you order the book now it will actually the industry looks at that as more sales than if you bought the book after it came out it

's really makes sense it yeah it has to do with uh like market research and what they think it means as far as how big it can scale and blah blah blah and how much they push it and blah blah blah so it's like yeah please buy my book The long and short of it is please buy my book so that's who I am I'm that guy who writes those books and with me as always is my brother who is that mad of undecided with Matt frell which takes a look at emerging Tech and its impact on our lives Matt how are you doi

ng today I'm doing great it's been a a good week I was on vacation a while back and now I feel like I'm back in the swing of things so it's been a pretty good week how about you it feels like spring is like yeah fingernail away which I am very pleased about because the New York Times actually had an article today in their weekend newsletter which was like Springs right here it's around the corner and for those of you who have been through sheer force of will having to struggle to get there it ca

n't come too soon and I found myself nodding along like yes that is exactly where I am I've been fine big picture but there's been this fingernail the chalkboard in the back of my mind which is I just want it to be warmer I don't want to wear this coat anymore why is everybody on the train so crowded like I want us all to be able to have a little bit of room a littleit space and breathe so yeah that's where I am before we talk about Matt's most recent episode we always like to go back to the mai

lbag and see what you all have been leaving in the comments on our previous episodes and from our previous episode 209 which was our discussion about heat pumps that Matt did basically a review of the heat pump technology that he has in his home and talked about it as a technology across the board for homeowners and we've had a number of conversations now a number of episodes of this podcast where For Better or Worse we keep bringing up the Hindenburg yeah here we go which led to this which led

to this comment from Sage t who wrote on the Hindenburg what a wild inside joke for our community to have I will always think of that when the Hindenberg gets brought up now and like Matt every time it was mentioned in this video I will have to stifle laughter yep we are inadvertently creating a pocket community that anytime the disaster of the Hindenburg will be mentioned we will stand in the background and go oh dear also this comment which was more on topic regarding heat pumps this is from j

md and JM wrote in to say I live in Idaho and I have a ream 60 gallon heat pump installed in my garage it works great I only use it in heat pump mode I don't use it on energy saver mode because I am off grid also I do not turn it on during the night and it only runs during sunlight hours which I think is an interesting aspect of this yeah your video if I remember correctly is largely like here's how it would operate in your home and here's how much you could expect to get out of it here's how mu

ch you'd expect to go into it yeah and I don't recall you saying like and there are options like turn it off over night and you really could cut your energy use of that dramatically so you want to talk about that I alluded I alluded to that at the end of the video when I was going through the graphs of like it's actually costing me slightly more to run this thing here in Massachusetts because electricity prices are so high but I said but I expect that to change over time as I continue to experim

ent with the settings and that's exactly what I was getting at um since I made that video I've already been doing experiments like changing the settings every week and then looking at the data to see what's happening and it's been driving my wife Sue nuts because the water's not quite as hot as it was I don't like this I like it hotter it's like okay I'll put it back and I change the setting again likes it set really hot uh but I've been using the scheduling feature which I just started last wee

k where it's like I've put it into heat pump only mode I'm not doing the Eco anymore and then it's got like it C it will get the proper temp by the morning time where we'd be taking a shower and then later in the day it goes back into this kind of lower temp just kind of idle along and I'm G to wait and see how that works so I'm trying to dial this in and experiment over time to see how I can actually manipulate this to get the best Energy Efficiency and cost for myself based on how we use hot w

ater in the house it's just me and my wife so it's like we take showers in the morning it's really it so it's like if she likes a hot shower just make sure it's super hot in the morning and the rest of the day it could be a little lower and doing dishes you don't need scalding hot water burning your hands as you're doing dishes so it's like that's kind of what I alluded to and that comment is spoton it's like I'm expecting to end up with something just like that that basically overnight it's bas

ically do nothing and then it's just kind of like heating up during the day um I'm curious to see if that's actually going to save money and electricity or not I'm reminded as you talked about your wife's experience with like this water isn't hot enough when our water heater in this apartment needed to be replaced and our landlord showed up one weekend and said good news I'm giving you a new water heater the next day I went to take shower and there was no hot water whatsoever so I called the lan

dlord and the landlord was like hm that's weird let me go check it turned out he had forgotten to turn it on so he turned it on he turned it on and then the next time I went to take a shower or wash the dishes I was constantly like this feels like it's on some kind of energy saver mode because this water is barely warm it's not really doing the heating that I would like so I contacted him once again hey is there something that can be done on this because it doesn't seem to be getting as hot as i

t used to oh let me go check it oh it turns out we have it in energy saver mode let me turn that off so it turns off the energy saver mode now we have hot water it still though is not hot hot so it's like you can tell you've got hot water but you could basically turn the shower on to full hot and still be comfortable in it I'm like okay this isn't hot enough and doing dishes things didn't feel like they were getting clean enough call him once again hey is there any way the hot water could be tur

ned up to the temperature it was previously okay let me go check you can now weld with the hot water that comes out of our SPS if you were in an emergency situation where there was a fire and you used our hot water to try and fight the fire you would feed the fire it comes out as hot molten magma and is is steam coming out it is it is intensely hot and washing dishes is an exercise and you can mix cold water into it Sean it is so so hot that it is actually tricky with our faucet to get to dial i

t in to a comfortable level I have just learned not to register the heat so I'm fine but yeah that kind of experience I am on team Sue in this case there was also this comment from seabert who said my heat pump switches between house Heating and water heating so I can pull all the energy from outside I live in a cold climate Austria and the heat pump can heat a above 70° C 158 Fahrenheit with even cop 3 to4 cop is an efficiency rating number so my understanding is that the higher the number the

more efficient so a cop of three or four yeah three or four is probably on the lower end am I correct that's actually really good it's coefficient of performance if it was a coop of one that's one unit of energy in one unit of energy out so if it's a three or four that's three or 400% more efficient and that's really good at that temperature range that's excellent CRA continues to say with us as a family using up to 18 kilowatt hours of warm water per day that is a lot of energy if I pulled it f

rom the house instead of the outside that is the energy consumed my my Tesla to drive 62 miles sure on the electricity side it is way less than the cop but anyway I would pump heat only in a series from one pump to the next if there is no other choice so some positive heat pump experiences not only from you but from a lot of your viewers and listeners there was also add yeah goad do do you have another comment on the heat pumps I have one more comment just a more General comment so okay because

I was going to say on the heat pump note I just visited a company here in Massachusetts that makes a cascading heat pump system that kind of blew my mind with how efficient it is and how wide overrange temperatures it can handle and what it can do um I'm gonna be making a video about it so I would just say to people stay tuned because there's more heat pump goodness coming last I wanted to share this comment from Mike realy who writes in to say sadly here in Central Connecticut if you are on gri

d you are not allowed to go off-grid so there is an aspect of all of these conversations that Matt and I are having regarding power usage what you're allowed to do what you can do there are areas like is living in where you just don't have a choice and that then comes back to advocate for yourself look into options and figure out how to begin the process and we will talk about this again later in this very episode because there's a similar comment I saw later um for our follow-up conversation on

Matt's most recent video in which it does point to the need for people to advocate for themselves and try to get policies and regulations changed for their betterment we'll talk about that in a bit on now to Matt's most recent episode The Genius of small hydr turbines this episode released on March 12 2024 and before we get into the meteor comments let's talk about the puns yes the puns Hi-Fi guy wrote in to say as an old dad I appreciate the puns and Hi-Fi guy with a name like HiFi guy you are

an old dad this from John P and this was a moment in the video that I actually when I was watching on YouTube I marked it in the video and then I sent it to my partner with a comment TLC in Matt's most recent video and after she watched it her immediate response was does Matt even know what he is saying and I said I'm pretty sure Matt is familiar with the work of TLC yes but this was from John P who dropped into the comments to say at 3 minutes and 54 seconds tbos left eye and Chile TLC referen

ce for the younger than 35 crowd it was nice of him to drop in give drop that wisdom for everybody and then there was finally this from and I love this username customer service 292 who jumped into the comments to say I literally spit my Empanada out when you made that in waterfalls joke so I just got to say for the puns in this one it was these videos are team effort it's not just me I have researchers and writers that help me I have science advisers and this one was like a team effort like non

e other this this episode just cried out for there was so many opportunities for just bad puns so some of them were mine some of them were somebody from the science team some of them were the writer that helped pull it together um like the chasing waterfalls that's that's Vincent the writer that worked on this one um hats off to Vincent for the TLC reference um I was dying when he put that one in the script I was just like that's Chef your delivery though is match because you did it without miss

ing a beat and it was just totally flat so somebody sitting at home who is not familiar at all with chasing waterfalls is going to be like the rivers and lakes they're used to hm what a weird way to frame it and everybody else is gonna be going Empanada yes yeah onto the topic of the video itself which is not about pun but about water turbines there was this from Linda Grace so basically anywhere there has been a Waterwheel driven Mill historically we could put in a small eco-friendly Hydro soun

ds like a great idea to me I do not believe that we will ever find a silver bullet that will solve all our energy needs with a single system I think it is much more likely that we continue to expand our options rooftop blades rooftop bladeless wind turbines microh Hydro more efficient solar panels that are manufactured with fewer rare elements Etc Linda it's as if you've been watching Matt's videos and listening to this podcast for a while these are the thing this is the nail you keep hammering

that which is stop looking for one tool to fit every job figure out what is needed figure out what can meet that need and then work to make it achieve the goal it's not one size fits all I mean this this specific topic the reason I went down this specific topic was I whenever I've talked about like Hydro or wind people always like well what about for homes like what about win turbines for homes so I did videos about that and people have been saying well what about Hydro for homes it'd be great i

f there was something out there and I was like well there kind of is like potentially like if you lived on a large river or a stream your house is buted up against to it maybe there's something that you could do and so that's why we went down this topic it's it's always interesting to see like all the different solutions you can do that can tackle different aspects um so the no offense to all people that leave these comments but I'm going to call you out the people are like just go nuclear just

go blank it's like please stop just stop it's not just go nuclear it's let's go nuclear Let's Go Solar let's go let's go all of the above because we're going to need it all and it can fit different needs depending on where you are in your video you talk about the devastating environmental and human rights impact of the dam that was built in South America and I think that the argument of just go blank yeah fits with in that as a good example just go blank can have such large scale ramifications j

ust go nucle nuclear going nuclear in the Amazon basin is not like is that really the best case scenario there when you have technology being developed which is having a far lower environmental impact and footprint that you can drop in where it's needed building a nuclear power plant in some place like Brazil puts into place all sorts of concerns around not only security environmental impact but is it in the right place to reach all the right people it is a enormous environment it is an enormous

country so to say oh we've got the Silver Bullet over here it's not like putting in a single power plant near a city you're talking about these are in some cases massive geography with clusters of people throughout an environment where it would be difficult to have the scale of a new dam or solar panel Farms or what whatever it is a a nuclear power plant or any of these other older examples it's just not that simple and on top of that I imagine and you can talk about this what is the cost effic

iency behind the smaller scale designs versus the large scale oh man Sean that's a can of worms that's okay there's that's to tease that apart at a high level it's hard to say one's better than the other depends on the situation but like if you're talking about smaller like disperate pockets of smaller cities or pockets of towns and stuff like that doing more of a micro grid approach is probably going to be way it's going to be faster and it's probably going to be cheaper um if you're talking ab

out large metropolitan areas then large scale production is probably going to end up being more power for the dollar I guess this is the way you would say it so it really is like that way we just talked about the right tool for the right job so like if you're trying to power New York City you're not going to put tens of thousands of these little Micro Hydro things all over the place over the Hudson River you're going to try to build one thing that can kind of power everybody um so like a nuclear

power plant outside of a New York City area makes a hell of a lot more sense than a thousand little micro hydr turbines right but uh for a place where you're talking about like this town has a few thousand people and then this this city is like you know 50,000 people and then and they're kind of separate it's like you could build out smaller little pockets of these micro grids that can satisfy the needs for that little area and then if there's overages they can share between each other so it's

like that kind of approach could be more faster and cheaper to do so it really depends on the situation which one's more cost- effective I would also say that there are certain uh specific environments where even in a large scale City like New York or any major met metropolitan area having a small scale micro grid as backup for emergency situations at hospitals airports like those could be critical given a moment where the power goes down because of some massive critical failure and you have the

ability for a hospital to still operate semi-norm because of maybe a few turbines that are you mentioned like you're not going to put turbines everywhere in the Hudson River but if there's a hospital that's right next to the river maybe a couple of turbines in the river are a good option so yep exactly again find the right tool for the right job there was also this comment from going to heck the first genius one with the ball she's referring of course to the mini Hydro the mini Hydro uh design

which was the pendulum swinging along the center so that it looks like the uh NeverEnding toilet flush in which the ball just will not go down yeah going to hex says it looks like an incredible fish squisher so I know the environmental impact and that would include life impact on organisms in these environments you talk about that in your video and I'm curious is the the one with the swirling pendulum one that would fall into the category from my mind I thought fish would just kind of like swirl

around that and go down the hole even if that pendulum does kind of hit them it's probably not GNA like crush them but it's not a mortar and pestle in there it's yeah it's it's not like anchovy paste it just like coming out the other end with just like you people with baskets of pasta waiting for it to land in it so here's the thing about that um I brought it up in the video but my friend Ryan who runs the channel zeroth he's an engineer getting a PhD um he did a deep dive on that exact technol

ogy in the video he kind of alluded the fact this would be better for fish but in our research digging into it there is no evidence of that um in fact in the company's own marketing materials and spec sheets and patents and stuff we found almost the exact opposite where they basically said there's no there's been no studies into that this is safer or worse or anything for fish and what they recommend in these systems is that you're putting like not netting but you're putting up like uh you know

metal grids and screens to filter things out yeah right because you don't one you don't want to damage the machine and two you want to keep those things from getting in there in the first place which would be good for fish so they were talking about that you'd want to be doing that with this kind of a system no matter what um so I would say there needs to be studies to really officially say it's better or worse but yeah it seems to me like a small fish would just go who right it doesn't seem be

crush it also seemed like there's the size of the fish and then there's the number of fish and it seemed like the way some of these design work is to you take a river and you divert a portion of the water so that it moves off at a similar slant to that spot and then at a point where the river is now lower you reintroduce that water at that later point so the place to put your barricade to filter out the fish would be at that diversion Point not near the machine wouldn't want there to be any fish

effectively by that point um and I can't help but wonder if it's just human instinct to look at something that is a big rolling ball and say well that's got to be safer than a bunch of rotating blades right is it just us with a knee-jerk response of like I put my hand in a fan but I'd reach in to grab a basketball and a hoop that's no big deal [Laughter] yeah Caitlyn jumped in to say my dad lives near a similar diversion based small Hydro he says that you wouldn't even know it was there unless

you went off the foot path looking for the awning apparently it's amazingly quiet I thought that was a really neat aspect of this as well living near a dam or you know people complain about wind turbines making noise the idea that something as calm as a bubbling brook or a river in the background might not feel all that different from the way it does naturally is a bonus I think to this technology it's a huge bonus yeah definitely finally there's this which goes back to the comment I made earlie

r about if you want to see change in the world figure out how to be the change and advocate for yourself and figure out who to contact regarding policies and regulations that have a negative impact on your life and your choices this comment from the kiat who wrote in to say I remember reading an article about a small town in the eastern US that wanted to convert a tail race from an Old Mill into a small hydroelectric generator capable of supplying all the electricity needs of the town the infras

tructure was all mostly in place and the dam had been there about a century so it should have been an easy job enter the government it took them about a decade to get through all the red tape injunctions and studies to basically drop a turbine into an already existing structure the biggest obstacle of doing anything decentralized is usize is usually the centralized power resisting it this is I think a good case of to you know we talk from a US context I think that the unspoken in most of our con

versations is Matt and I without meaning to infusing a lot of us Centric thinking into how to make change but this is something that across the board globally it is difficult under the best of circumstances to get people with power to listen to you so that you can make the choices you want to but that doesn't mean that if you have the opportunity you shouldn't try and this is the kind of 21st century opportunity to to redirect some old 20th or even 19th century structures that may be in place an

d holding back your options there are going to be forces at work against changes like this centralized utilities centralized governments the idea that a new technology that may have answers will destabilize the Old Guard is going to meet resistance but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try so I encourage people to not only figure out how to advocate for themselves around topics like this that they think will have a positive impact on their lives if you're having that kind of experience let us know

in the comments we would love to hear from you and I think it would be an interesting topic to for Matt and his team to follow up on in looking at what are some of the policy obstacles that stand in the way not just the technological obstacles so we look forward to seeing your comments don't forget one hold on jump off there is one thing I do need to bring up in this video there was a mistake that a lot of people pointed out within hours of this video going live I just have to apologize for the

re was a section where we were talking about the EO Dam and the amount of pressure and we were trying to make it relatable to like wrap your head around and so it's the same amount of pressure as you know this and it's would be like 500,000 or 500 million times more powerful than the average US faucet well our math on that was correct in our script work because my science adviser crunched those numbers for us his calculations perfect nothing wrong with his calculations where the things broke dow

n was when we took that calculation and we wrote it into the script we didn't just like copy and paste the calculation number we translated it into like words so it was oh it's half a million times more power and pressure uh it was actually half a billion and so we switched billion into million in the words and then when we were proof reading all the stuff we just completely slipped over just double-checking to make sure that word matched the actual calculation and it got through and so it was i

n the video and I was like ah face pal like the stupid this the stupidest stupidest thing that should have been caught and so it's like I just wanted to apologize for that we put a correction in the video so the little card slides out and says there's a correction you click it and it tells her what it actually is I just want to apologize for that that should have been caught but wasn't buck stops with me well I don't know if I speak for all of your listeners Matt but I don't think I will ever be

able to forgive you yeah I know so as always I invite people to jump into the comments let us know what you think you can also subscribe leave a review and don't forget to tell your friends those are three easy and free ways for you to support our Channel and if you'd like to more directly support us you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to still TBD FM and click the become a supporter button it allows you to throw some coins at our heads we appreciate the welts and then we get

down to the business of talking about TLC thank you everybody for taking time to visit with us today and we look forward to talking to you next [Music] time