These people have detailed plans on thier site that show how to build 10' and bigger wind generators. They have gotten away from car alternators and now build thier own low-speed permament-magnet alternators. If you were to build one of these alternators i bet it would work well for water power as well. The wind generator build is very well documented. I've known about the site for some time and had intended to build one soon but then i started pricing components and the magnets are fairly expensive. I found an overseas supplier who has them for $8.60 each...it takes 24 to build an alternator. Otherpower has them on thier website for $11.00 each.
http://www.otherpower.com/turbineplans.shtml The price of the parts won't keep me from building a windgen, just push the job back til i get settled in Arkansas. Reason is, when the wind blows, it generates a ton more electricity than PV solar.
This guy
http://www.redrok.com has a fairly inexpensive PV panel solar tracker for sale. I'm not good enough with a soldering iron to bother building the cheap kit, i'll just buy the assembled unit for $94.00. It takes a bit of fabrication to build tilt-able panels with (probably) windshield-wiper motors or old sattelite dish linear actuators to move the panels...but keeping your panels flat to the sun maximizes thier energy-gathering, giving you alot more power into the battery bank. Dual axis (winter declination), home position so it moves the panel(s) to face east after the sun sets. The guy is an electrical engineer but definately not a webpage designer...the page is SUPER long and might take awhile to fully load. Just to half-load the page with my older 933mhz 256MB ram laptop so i could post this...
LEDDRMPP24Vc3Pack Standard Dual Axis Solar Tracker, http://www.redrok.com/led3xassm.htm took 10 minutes of locked-up computer time. But he has the only DIY solar tracker i know of that works.
DIY solar cells (36+4extra) for $40.00 so you can build your own 70watt panels. (I've lost the link, i've got thousands of links in Firefox, I searched and found this, it looks like the same product). There is a Youtube video showing the process.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/40pcs-3x6Solar- ... 4ab7862a67Searching the internet i found the original seller's website. Looks like a better grade of solar cells.
http://www.quadmodsusa.com/Pro26Tech/solarcells.html
Darrell "Jake" Jacob, Oddmar on all the forums, KC9PZN to all you amateurs.