It's static because it can't be turned on and off (for free).

I was thinking of glass tubes, because I've worked with those before. But the only important factor is adhesion of water to the capillary wall. That's how capillary action works.

"Generating electricity" is an engineering issue. I'm only interested in showing a situation where endless amounts of work could theoretically be generated.

A capillary tube is open at the top. Check out the wikipedia article on capillary action.

You just drop it from the height of the top of the tube.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean, SWIMfriend.
Could you perhaps draw a diagram of this system in paint and post it here as a visual aid?

I find ideas much easier to grasp when they are visually displayed than when they are just verbally explained.

Yes! Some belgian guy beat us to this;
http://wesseldiwesseli.blogspot.com/

A briljant contraption. You can understand how it works by watching the 4 Youtube movies you can find in the bottom right corner of the page.
I don't see how this wouldn't work. I find this a worthy concept to try and build on a small scale. Whataya folks think?

^^ I don't think it will work (I REALLY don't think so). Youtube has lots of such "perpetual motion animations." They're never convincing.

Maybe you could explain just why it wouldn't work?

As you can see, the harmonica-like airbags inflate and deflate by the distance between the 2 rails changing from narrow to wide.
So pulling air into the bags and blowing it back out would require no extra energy. If deflated, heavier than water bags travel down
and inflated, lighter than water bags float up I don't see what could possibly stop the device from moving endlessly.

It uses both weight (of closed bags) and buoyancy (of opened bags) so there seems to be enough power to overcome any friction/resistance.
The only problem I ran into is from where to pull air into the bags once they're at the bottom, but this doesn't seem like a problem that
cannot be overcome.

Such configurations ALWAYS ignore necessary forces--which are the undoing of the devices.

"Perpetual motion," i.e., machines that just keep running themselves are an EXTENSION of the idea of scenarios where you might potentially get more work from one part of the cycle than another part requires: so it's easier and more direct just to see if you can imagine such a scenario directly--instead of putting it all together into "perpetual motion."

That was the idea with my original buoyancy setup: it seemed like putting the object into one potential energy slide (allowing it to go up the tube from buoyancy) only placed it in ANOTHER potential energy slide (allowing it to fall from gravity). But calculating the energy requirements AT EACH END was, of course, the key factor.

In this case the "changing from narrow to wide" would require more work than can be achieved by the buoyancy harvested, IMO.

Check this out:

Check this page: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/annex.htm and scroll down to "The ICW Generator" to read about it and see an animated gif of it in motion.
Pretty clever yet simple. Seems this is a nice way to eliminate the whole valve system.
According to the site it's unworkable. Not sure why exactly.