I finally broke the system down and added the pressure gauge to the home
bru

(for you new readers the saga is at http://www.jeffersonfreestate.org/hh
but a bit outdated -- gonna work on it soon hopefully)

So i'm sitting at 36 psi using 300 feet of 1.5 inch pipe at maximum flow
going into the turbine.

using the handy microhydrocalc at
http://www.energyalternatives.ca/Downloads/MicroHydroCalc.exe

It tells me I only have 83 feet of head and I should be getting 175 ish
watts. (seemed like a lot higher when you hump your arse up that hill)

Which isn't too bad since as far as I can tell i'm producing around 150
watts using my half baked setup. There are some basic improvements to be
made that should boost that up some.

I put in a bunch more pipe feeding directly from a stream further up the
mountain that should get me another good jag of head in winter so i'm
thinking of maybe pushing 200 watts during the high water times. For now
its just feeding the pond at a pretty low flow keeping the trout happy
with fresh water.

So at least i'm in the ball park it looks like. Given my eyeballing the
jets and some dubious plumbing I'm pretty satisfied with 150 out of 175
for now.

cheers for all the help again

-zachary