Micro-Hydro Training Course

jimmyendless

Hi All,

I gave a search but couldn't find anything about training courses in Micro-Hydro? Apparently there is an accredited one in Derry with the North West Regional college (http://www.nwrc.ac.uk/) but I don't know of any other. Are there any in Great Britain?

Thanks

quentingargan

I don't know of other courses in the UK, but I have done other City & Guilds courses with this college in Derry (Solar PV and Solar thermal) and they are generally very good courses. Micro Hydro has a very small installer / user base, so I don't imagine there are a lot of courses around.

There is one crowd in Mayo offering hydro courses, but I've heard a lot of complaints about their other courses (basically an expensive sales pitch for their products) and really wouldn't recommend them.

Macha

Found this course offered by Chevron Training. I know they do a lot of the BER training courses:

http://www.chevrontraining.ie/microhydro/

Are you looking to do a course in Ireland or the UK?

boomshackala

I guess it depends on what capacity to you want to get into
Do you want to get into consultancy for small commercial projects or do you just plan to build your own?
A uk consultant who gives courses
http://www.d-henderson.co.uk/trainingcourses.htm
An online course:
http://elearning.ich.no/
Maybe you could connect with Frank Gethings from Ecoevolution.ie, who has done courses by the looks it, from his blog. http://ecoevolution.ie/blog/?cat=1

I'll be producing a report on how to get set up in it soon, if you want to sign up for my newsletter

jimmyendless

They are interesting links. I emailed a company yesterday that specialise in a micro-hydro training course in GB and If I can complete that course and install a working system on my farm, I will think about going commercial. It seems that many systems being implemented at the moment require alot of initial capital and farmers are not in that position even if they could save money over 10yrs or whatever.

quentingargan

jimmyendless wrote: »

They are interesting links. I emailed a company yesterday that specialise in a micro-hydro training course in GB and If I can complete that course and install a working system on my farm, I will think about going commercial. It seems that many systems being implemented at the moment require alot of initial capital and farmers are not in that position even if they could save money over 10yrs or whatever.

Good on ya. I have a small system we installed on our own land here (Canadian turgo wheel running on a 2" pipe with 16m of head), and get quite a few enquiries, but it is a speciality job. Where you have a good flow year round, it is very fast payback - I reckon on good sites with the current feed-in tariff, you could get down to six years.

The only problem is that it is a very limited market, and you may have some bother with fisheries and planning on some sites.

jimmyendless

Nice, what is the final power output of your system?

quentingargan

jimmyendless wrote: »

Nice, what is the final power output of your system?

Because of low flow rate available (only about 1.5L/sec) we get 300 watts. The turbine could go up to 1900 watts, but would drain the pond very quickly at that rate:(

We already have a wind system working batteries off-grid, so on calm spells we can get three days from the pond at 300 watts continuous which keeps us going for that time.