What this project is about.

The Sternwheeler Ruby is a merging of two fairly different concepts that are extremely important to me. Renewable Energy and Messing about on boats.

We are located in Corvallis, Oregon just a few blocks from the Willamette river which flows south to north through the lush and beautiful Willamette valley.

Ruby is designed to recharge her own battery bank overnight ( winding up the rubber band so to speak) . When end tied at a dock or anchored out in the current the paddlewheel will slowly turn transforming the propulsion motor into a generator. Ruby's system is optimized for propulsion so I don't expect stellar electric generation but it should be something. Obviously a system optimized for electricity generation would perform much better.

In essence Ruby is a proof of concept for a surface mounted water powered generator. Not a new concept, decidedly low tech, but highly practical particularly for the Pacific Northwest. Most importantly it is the most environmentally benign method of hydro electric.

This concept can be designed to supply a couple kilowatts for remote applications, all the way up to a megawatt for municipal applications, and unlike solar or wind this is steady electric power 24/7/365. Rainy days...bring it on!

P.S. Ruby was named after my Grandmother whom I lived with every summer when I was growing up. I helped my Grandfather and Grandmother build a log cabin at their property high up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, CA. They taught me the "no bull shit" way of approaching life.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

First overnight on the river (first re-gen too) 7/30/11

Having gone over the boat from stem to stern after the endurance test on Fern Ridge I felt ready for a two day river trek. My wife Licia agreed to over night with me on the boat if we could find a suitable spot.


The spot.


Well come Sat. morning and everyone bailed out on me, heading off on their own adventures so I decided to launch Ruby on my own. A bit miffed I must admit.

Launching was a piece of cake, although I did lose a bunky board off the trailer. This was inevitable as I had noticed how rotted the lag bolts and holes were when I reconfigured the trailer to hold the pontoons about 6" further apart. I probably should have replaced them then but they seemed like they still had some life in them. Oh well, I retrieved the bunky board and lashed it back on for now.

I decided to power right over to the Amazon, a river siding across the river and behind on of the islands that goes for about a half mile and ends at a mill pond. It has a very slow current and is wildly overgrown with lots of wildlife so we call it the Amazon. I just wanted to tie off somewhere, have a beer and try to over come my anger at the state of irresponsible teens these days.

Later I got a call from Licia saying that she and my son Sasha were down at the Polk street boat launch (I launched about a couple miles further up river at the Crystal Lake launch) so I headed down river to meet up with them.

Re-Generation test

Before picking them up I tied off at the OSU rowing team docks across the river. I backed Ruby down to the furthest point up river on the dock so the paddlewheel would have unobstructed access to the river current for re-generation.

I was just able to get about 1 amp of re-gen sporadically. Disappointing to say the least.

I actually suspected this might be the case as when I tried turning the wheel by hand back at home it had quite a bit of resistance.

Now this spot on the river does not have particularly strong currents however it probably does represent an average for easily accessible end-tie dock space so it is relevant.

We pulled Ruby out into the rapid current at our overnight spot and were able to get 3 to 5 amps which is 200 to 300 watts so.... nothing to sneeze at. Ultimately I am confidant we can get somewhere between 500 to 1000 watts which will re-charge the battery bank over night as planned.

I had already decided to add 2.5" to the width of the buckets (paddles) and have the parts mostly fabricated but I still don't believe that that will make a significant improvement for re-gen.

I believe that what I have done in choosing the motor system and designing the gearbox is create a fantastically efficient POWERING vessel but this efficiency comes at the expense of very poor re-gen performance. Rather than compromising the powering performance for better re-gen I decided that I would redesign the gearbox with parallel sheaves to bring the gear ratio from 75 to 1, as it is now for powering, to just 3 to 1 for re-gen or 1 to three as that is more accurate when in re-gen mode. So for every rotation of the wheel the E-motor will turn about three times. I have the sheaves to play with this a bit to go up to 1 to 15 as long as that doesn't create too much resistance, defeating the purpose.

Obviously with a standalone EverGen unit it would be optimized for GENERATION only with the same fantastic efficiencies Ruby is getting with powering.

Back to the River.


So I picked up the Fam and we headed back up river.

Ruby moves along pretty good as long as we stay on the sides of the river out of the main current. In the main current Ruby only makes a couple knots over the bottom and there are some spots in the narrows where she pretty much sits still or just inches along. I firmly believe that adding to the buckets will improve performance a good bit. We certainly have ample power under the hood.

Ruby's paddlewheel will start "spooling" (digging a hole in the water) at about 3000 rpm which is right about 6 knots speed I believe. Going up river we were burning in the neighborhood of 15 to 30 amps, 30 amps being max in max river current before the wheel spools. Still very good performance and about a third of what I was estimating during design.

Drawing only 10 or 12" allows Ruby to play the slow waters and eddie currents way on the sides of the river. It's a bit spooky powering along at a good clip in such a big boat and being able to see the rocks on the bottom of the river just 16" or so deep.

We played up and down the river for a while then I dropped the Fam off and went to find a spot to tie off and take a nap.

Later on that afternoon Licia came back and I meet her at the dock to load up on all the over night stuff. We powered around a while until we found a perfect spot behind an island on the bank in the lee of a spit of land that deflected the current. It formed an ideal little stillwater cove just deep enough to dive in off the boat.

I tied off the bow to a couple of trees on shore and we went for a dip. If you swim out a little ways you get into the current and swimming as hard as I could freestyle I could just stay in place. It was a good workout. All you had to do is turn a bit to the left and you would drop out of the current and could stand on the bottom just fine.

We had a fantastic steak dinner, drank some wine, and watched the sunset with all the wildlife around us.





After an uneventful night (very comfortable) we had breakfast then headed off to find a nice sunny beach somewhere.

We powered up river another couple miles and nosed in to a slow water spot on a huge sunny gravel beach where we swam, ate, napped, drank, and other things....

That afternoon we powered another couple miles up river then turned around and headed back to the boat launch, hauled out and went back home. Again everything worked well. I'm really anxious to add to the buckets to gain a little more power in the stronger current section of the river but other than that I am very happy with Ruby.


Fern Ridge Lake 7/23/11

Took Ruby and the family down to Fern Ridge for a endurance test run and WoW!!!




We crossed the lake at about 3/4 hull speed or about 4.5 to 5 knots, about the speed of the sailboats all around us. I logged the amp draw as displayed on the spyglass display and it was reading between 9 and 12 amps!?!?!?! Yes thats what I said 3/4 hull speed, boat fully loaded, drawing just around 10 amps.

Thats phenomenally efficient for electric propulsion.

 The solar panels were producing 11 to 12 amps, of course thats only 12v but still...

I simply could not believe this so I later put my clamping amp meter on the battery cable coming off the 72v bank and sure enough the spyglass was right on within a tenth or so.

So we powered all around the lake, anchored and swam several times, over all we were out there for about 6 hours and when we finished we had only used about a quarter of the battery capacity.

Halfway through our day we got pulled over by the water cops and given a full shakedown. They were very impressed and ready to let us take off when on of the guys asked if I had a fire extinguisher which I had forgot to install so we got a nice ticket and fine. Sucks but it didn't put a damper on the day as everything was going so well.

All systems and fittings held up well. The boat was amazingly easy to tow, launch, and retrieve. Over all the test was a ripping success.