Vortical Tech’s Hybrid Tesla Turbine Generates Electricity from Your Home Water Usage

Vortical Tech Hybrid Tesla Turbine

Now here’s a bit of lateral thinking, a new device to generate electricity from your home water supply.

Vortical Tech develops alternative energy devices and they’ve just revealed the first prototype of their Hybrid Tesla Turbine which generates electricity whenever water is used at home.

The system converts the kinetic energy produced by the flow of water into electricity. So every time you wash the dishes, take a shower, wash your car or even flush the loo you’ll be generating some electricity. The makers say the turbine is able to produce 120 watts of electricity from household tap water.

So will this reduce your water pressure? According to Vortical most home owners will see no difference

Most residences and commercial businesses already have pressure regulators that reduce water pressure coming in from the street. Why not have one that also produces electricity?

Vortical Tech say their turbine can be paired with external battery packs to store energy for later use, as well as augment solar photovoltaic systems to provide an alternative source of energy that doesn’t rely on the sun.

There’s no official word on pricing yet other than the companies FAQ which states that they are “…targeting a price of roughly two average solar PV panels.”

vorticaltech.com

9 Comments on "Vortical Tech’s Hybrid Tesla Turbine Generates Electricity from Your Home Water Usage"

  1. In the UK, most water is pumped from a reservoir, not gravity fed. So the water company are using electricity to pump water to drive your Vortical. It’s the most ridiculous way of moving power, and overall it’s a net negative for the environment.

  2. Brian McKenna | March 19, 2018 at 9:51 am |

    So you are stealing energy from the owners of the water distribution system?

  3. There is nu such thing as free energy, exept the energy given by nature. Water is pressurised by the water distribution company using big pumps and lots of electricity. The more resistance there is, how more energy the pumps needs to get the same amount of pressure at the end user’s water tap. so it’s more like a hoax to me.

  4. At least they are thinking of some innovative way to help with the energy crisis. If water companies could do it why don’t they? It’s not net negative for the environment either. Why not get some energy back? I’m sure the company has thought of this also and you are all being pessimistic for the sake of it, not thinking of the bigger picture how to save the environment.

  5. Matthew – as the others have pointed out this can be a case of the home owner just taking energy put into the system by the water companies, unless it’s a gravity fed system.

    I have no idea how common gravity fed mains water systems are though. Anyone know?

    Thanks

  6. Whether it’s gravity fed or pumped, many homes have pressure reducing valves. This could just replace that valve, regulating the pressure and creating electricity at the same time.

  7. we’ve been told our water supply is gravity fed – ie: the reservoir is sufficiently high up to not need pumps … imagine this goes for lots of people, the reservoir being pretty big – ie: Thirlmere … our water pressure is over 8bar, and we reduce it to 3bar, so 5bar could be used for charging a battery etc … a cost equivalent to two solar panels sounds like pay-back time would be long – anyone know how to convert 5bar times however much water we use per annum into kWhr ?

  8. PS: have found how to calculate it, and the answer comes to around 50kWhr per annum (that’s for our two-person household) …

  9. How much power? Well we know power is force times distance moved divided by time
    Say we take a pressure drop of 1 bar (100,000 Newtons/square metre) through a regular 22mm copper pipe. The area is enough to produce a force of about 160 Newtons on the 314mm sq cross section. 1 metre of flow is 314×100 cubic millimetres so for every 100 litres of domestic consumption we would need to flow 3,200 metres down the pipe. So we have a force and a distance; 160 x 3,200 = 512,000 Newton.metres of energy. A Watt is a Newton metre per second so if we flowed that 100 litres in an hour we would develop 142 Watts of power. You might consume 200 litres a day so 280 Watt.hrs might be your expected harvest and at 12p/kW.hr you would knock 3.36p off your bill. So if it all worked out well you could pay back £500? in 40 years. The equivalent 2 PV panels would do better. Please check the maths for yourselves.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.