http://www.jeffersonfreestate.org/hh/

The beast is on its first real long term test. 4 hours running and
counting.

Mechanically we're good. I came up with a pretty sweet shaft stabalizer
and bearing solution and its running full bore with very little vibration
compared to before.

I drove the 60 miles to pick up those Centennial batteries i ordered and
the guy said they quit selling them and gave me the choice of 'werker'
l16s or trojans. The werkers were like 60 bucks cheaper a pop and
weighed about the same. Needless to say I couldn't afford the good
batteries so i went with them.

so far so good. they 'werk'

You guys know i'm a novice at this stuff and finally figured out I
couldn't ever get the damn altnerator to spin fast enough to produce more
than 12 volts.. so unless the batteries were seriously low I couldn't
charge.

I did some reading and with two six volt batteries hooked together I
wired the hydro into one of the six volters.. sending about 10 volts into
it. Like magic the system started charging.

I've read this is OK but i'd much rather do it right. Today I ran the
hydro at full bore and watched my pond.. it didn't even blink.. still
over flowing, so clearly I can increase the pipe size at least during the
winter. Thats on my list.. take what i've done and dump way more water
and add jets and increase the RPM on that alternator.

For now its good.

I still can't tell exactly how much power is being produced. Like I say
on the web page I ran off the battery bank all last night so I was down
to 11.4 (according to the xantrex c40 monitor) and tonight I'm just
running the hdyro. Its been four hours and now i'm reading 12.4 so its
doing something good. These are 2 six volt l16 equiv batteries.

Also finally you get the drag on the alternator when you hit the 'on'
switch.. it drags down bigtime.

I was such an idiot before thinking that producing 11.5 volts would
charge a 12 volt battery.. DOH!

thats a newbie for ye

Thats all for now. Thanks again for all the advice. I'm sure my system
isn't the best but thanks to you all its much better than it would have
been without you.

-zachary