best low wind performing turbines

[(unknown)]

have plenty of wind at 1 site (farm) but not where I need it (home)any idea of what type of turbine is ok for 10-15 mph at 48 volts?

[DanB]

I think that most wind turbines are pretty efficient in that 10-15mph range you mention, including Hugh Piggotts designs and ours (which are based on his).  I think the axial flux designs lots of folks are building here are actually superior in low winds, to many of the commercial machines. If you need lots of energy in lower winds, you need a big machine pure and simple.

That said - 10-15mph is a pretty wide range.  If you have 15mph winds average, that's quite good-  you have a good resource -  and most machines will do nicely.  10mph average is a bit on the low side and you may have to consider if wind energy is worth the expense/trouble.  You'll get more than 3x the energy at 15mph than you will at 10 so ....

[bzrqmy]

It's fun to watch the watt meter when the wind gusts from 10 to 15 MPH.  And it can happen so fast.  The little yellow Ghurd Beacon starts to glow  And the batteries start to Burp.

[Flux]

You don't give much indication of your wind area.

An average wind speed of 10mph is rather high, 10mph average is way worse but still not bad compared with what we have here.

If you mean instantaneous speed of 10 to 15mph that is a different issue.

Most modern permanent magnet machines will perform well in a 15mph wind. not all commercial iron cored machines will perform that well at 10 mph ( some I won't mention won't do anything at 10 mph).

A well designed axial with no iron should be able to cover the 7 to 15mph wind speed with good efficiency but outside that speed range you start to have to trade off high wind or low wind on a simple single design. If you go to low cut in you will start to loose out in the 18 mph plus region.

Probably with home build and direct connection to a battery you can achieve a Cp of about 0.3 in the 10 - 12 mph region and it will fall on either side. Few commercial machines will exceed this even if they claim to do so. Most will probably exceed the performance of a home build in the higher wind speed region as the makers need impressive high wind figures to sell the machine and they don't concentrate too much on the few watts at 7 mph that doesn't sell machines.

As Dan said, you need big machines to get power in low wind and if your low wind is caused by turbulence then wind may not even be worth trying.

Flux