| Click Here to see a somewhat detailed page about the construction of this wind turbine on otherpower.com.
The last couple days have been gusty and it's been fun to watch the wind turbine. I got my anemometer fixed this morning and spent a while watching things.. trying to get an idea. It's tricky, especially on gusty days like today. My 'data aquisition' methods are very primitive... the anemometer jumps up and down rapidly - one moment is says 8 the next it says 20 (within 1 second) and the ammeter jumps around too - but more slowly because there's a lot of momentum in the rotor, it takes time to speed up or slow down, and lots of these gusts that show up are 'momentary'. So, I believe this 'skews' the readings in lower windspeeds to be optimistic, and higher windspeeds to be pessimistic. I took a few hundred 'samples' (Dont laugh) by closing my eyes, and then opening them and instantly reading both current and windspeed and writing it down. Most of these readings were at windspeeds between 9 and 20 mph. I took about two hundred readings this way - and then averaged the numbers at all winspeeds between 5 and 20 (anything above that was pretty rare and I only got a couple samples, most of it wasnt realistic at all). Average windspeed (According to the anemometer) during the period of my sampling was 14.2mph.
Itll be fun to get better data on less gusty days.
Here's what i came up with though. Obviously the lower windspeeds are very optimistic, and the higher ones I believe are skewed in the other direction.
- mph - 125 watts
- mph - 175 watts
- mph 140 watts
- mph 225 watts
- mph 285 watts
- mph 515watts
- mph 558 watts
- mph 765 watts
- mph 680 watts
- mph 825 watts
- mph 1180 watts
- mph 865 watts
- mph 500 watts
- mph 1527 watts
- mph 1430 watts
The peak windspeed I recorded today was 43 mph and I saw about 3000 watts, although I have seen a bit more in a bit less wind before. The machine seems to start furling right around 1500 Watts. Last night (no anemometer) I saw over 3000 watts several times and right at 4KW once, but I was only watching for about half an hour. I do believe it's stalling a bit - but not too badly. I think it's doing quite well in low winds though - I think Ill know more after watching things on calmer days, but I have a feeling it's good for around 400 watts in 10mph winds which is what I was hoping for - to be honest, if it 'furled' at 10 mph and never made more than 400 - 500 watts I'd be quite happy and have more power than I need. Over the course of the week, I've been working over the rest of my system, removing old - and installing new solar panels. I'm getting about 600 watts of solar into the batteries now. Between that.. and this new turbine - I'm having trouble dumping enough power! Lots of fun... |
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