As part of efforts to raise climate change awareness as the intergovernmental COP27 meeting starts in Egypt this week, a leading environmental charity has recognised Reading Hydro as an ‘outstanding example’ of how community action can help combat the challenges of the climate crisis. Carbon Copy, the organisation behind the Running Out of Time Relay […]

Great news – today (23rd October) the Environment Agency gave us permission to generate again, and both turbines were re-started just after noon!The river flow at Thames Bridge had continued to run at about 5 cumecs (cubic meters per second) overnight, but surged above 10 cumecs by noon because of the heavy rain.River conditions are

You will have noticed if you regularly walk past our turbines that they haven’t been turning for quite some time If you look at the power generation page on our website you will see that Reading Hydro hasn’t generated any electricity since 1st July.  You can also see from the river conditions data on our

You may have noticed if you have walked past our turbines or looked at the live data feed on our website that we have only been running one of the two turbines for half of May.  This is because we have had a bearing failure on Turbine 2 (Sophie), the one furthest away from the

This aerial photo was taken in August 1928 and shows Caversham Weir and View Island towards the bottom of the image. A large house can be seen on View Island along with gardens and another smaller property. On the Reading side of the Thames, what is now Thames Lido is visible in Kings Meadow. This

Great news! Reading Hydro’s turbines have both been running full-time since 22nd November (apart from short periods of scheduled maintenance on Saturday mornings). You can see this for yourself on the Performance data pages of our website. The main page gives a snapshot of all the data – the current power generation of each turbine/generator,

Why do we need an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) in the turbine house? Don’t we have enough electricity there? The reason is to make sure that our monitoring systems keep working, even if something happens to shut down the turbines. In fact, that’s when the monitoring is most important, so that we can see what

We finally had all permissions and procedures in place to start generating on September 1st. But once again the weather was not on our side. It stayed stubbornly warm and dry for over three weeks, and the river flow was too low to start. At last it rained, and the Environment Agency gave us the go-ahead