Your Waterwheel Solution
The Pelton Turbine
The Pelton Wheel (Turbine) was developed in California during the gold rush days of the 1850's It is an impulse wheel, taking a jet of water onto it's double spoon shaped blades and turning the water in a direction near 180 degrees from the angle of entry. The jet strikes one or two blades at a time. To overcome this limitation, multijets are sometimes used when there is more water available than one jet can handle. This is a very efficient process of extracting the energy from the flow of water. ( 90% +) It requires very high heads to operate at this efficiency. The Pelton starts to "come into it own" at 60' of head and increases in efficiency as the head increases. The Pelton is limited as to the amount of water flow that it will handle. It is usualy employed on low flow, high head sites.
