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The best way to capture a small stream with height is a water wheel. If you have 20 feet to work with you put the water in a series of buckets and just let their weight turn the wheel. If you have say 10 full 1 gallon buckets on a 10' arm that's 800 ft lbs of torque. If your stream flows 20 gallons per minute you could turn it at 2 rpm. That's .3hp or 224 watts. Not great but 24 hrs 365 days that's 2 megawatts of otherwise unused energy. I suppose that torque is why it was used for grinding things for thousands of years. No reduction gears needed.
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