| the new (old lol) 16' machine whizzing away.
the pic is a little blurry because i snapped these basically in the dark a while ago. ive been too busy to make a posting (shame on me, i know ive been slacking). almost have the new house/ barn done and had other pics but lost a hard drive the other day and my pics went bye bye :-/ oh well. i have to take more.
Anyway, this machine is very similar to the 15' machine DanB built for Matt except im running it with a larger diameter prop. It sits on an eighty foot commercial communications tower that some one had given me and it took a while to get it up because the tower needed some work done to it to allow for it to hold this beast up comfortably. The tower is 2' across each leg (3 leg tower). Its a guyed tower. Im using 2 sets of 3/8"-7 strand to hold it up (heavy stuff). One at 40' and the other at 68'.
these pics show the top section that i more or less built from scratch. the triangular plates are .5" steel and the mast section is made from 3.5" steel box stock. there are also pieces of 4" box that the mast slides into with gussets on the top plate. this allows me to set the height of the mast and secure it with locking pins (3/4" bolts)
The turbine sits 12' above the top of the lattice tower, so i had to weld nuts to the mast to allow me to screw in rungs to climb up and service it. when im done, the rungs are removed to make sure the prop will never hit the mast. it seems to work great. :-)
Here is my cutler hammer kill switch. :-)
works like a champ. its not an outdoor enclosure, but its what i had laying around, so i built a little hut for it and u-bolted it to the tower. The power cable you see coming out the bottom is 10AWG extention cord (the heavy black stuff you use for 220 single phase). i had some of that laying around. works great. its about 90' of that stuff and then i have it spiced into 3 runs of 2AWG that runs to the house (about 100' away).
As it turns out, this is too little of a resistance to allow the prop to speed up past 100RPM. It stalls. Cut in is at 60 rpm, and it makes 10 - 12A almost all the time. In 30mph gusts ive seen it make 40A, 1kW (24v system). I think its capable of more, but i have to agree with Dan that things seem peaceful and safe, when your making plenty of power, and the machine runs quiet and slow. :-)
I might try to fool around with it to squeeze out some more juice, but for now, its fine.
This is the battery bank this machine feeds. 1680Ah @ 24v. these are 2v lead acid cells. the price was right (free), and they seem to have a bunch of life left in them. its actually 2 parallel strings of 24v. so there is 24 cells. they weigh over 2 tons. very big. They drive a trace sw plus 4024, and will eventually move into their own insulated room, as soon as its finished (it was really cold this past winter).
here is my panel. I also use an ALM off the inverter to control my dump loads. NOT THE BEST WAY OF DOING IT!! if the inverter fails, so does your load. I just havent come across the right stuff yet to do it with DC, which is where im headed. The 24v relay panel is under the ALM, and this is what will eventually switch (primary relays) different DC resistive loads.
Im having way too much fun. Just wish the house was done so i could get settled and build more turbines :-P
RoyR |
|
|
Total Views
|
|
224 Scoop users have viewed this posting.
|
|
