Light Garden Project
The 'light garden' project is a scheme to power a small set of lights with the kinetic energy of the south fork of Chester Creek, which runs directly through the UAA campus, and past the Engineering building. The public engineering-art project will be powered by very small hydroelectric generator installed in the creek. Care will be taken to ensure that the installed turbine device will be small enough to not impact fish and other animals. Hopefully, the light garden project will be finished by SES by the end of 2005.
When the Light Garden project was first proposed, the device used was expected to be a DC trolling motor (made for boats), run backwards as a generator. After a series of tests in Chester Creek, it was determined that the performance of the MinnKota trolling motor run in reverse was not satifactory. Now, SES is investigating using a small generator made for powering bicycle lights.
Examples of bicycle "dynamo" light systems:
