It's been a fun week and a half since my last posting. Rich and I went out to tour Scott and Becca's system. This is a 10' wind turbine we built for them - it's been up and running since Sept. This is out on the plains in Colorado - a very windy place, the machine has so far held up well to high sustained winds. The tower is built from old light posts, it's about 50' high. It's totally flat here - there are no obstructions as far as the eye can see. I worry a bit that they only have 1 set of guy wires. They need to add at least one more set up right beneath the blades.
... and this is in the middle of one of the guy wires.
This is their power panel - very nice.
This is their battery room - also, very nice. 4 HUP1 Solar 12V battery banks wired in series for 48V. I worry a bit about them though- they are 'floating' these batteries around 58V. This doesn't seem right to me - although I cannot find details online about this particular battery. To me it seems this would be appropriate for occasional equalizing and that they should be floating more around 54 V.
This is part of a fairly large VAWT that they have sitting out in their yard. It's a grid tie machine and he's got all the parts. Interesting...
They have about 3.5KW of PV feeding this system. Lots of power... theirs is the only off grid home I've seen yet that uses and electric cloths drier!
This is an old Wincharger they gave me. I dont have any other parts for it... and there's no information on it. I'm guessing it's supposed to be a 1000 Watt, 11' diameter machine, probably for 32V but I'm not sure. Might be a fun project some day... it weighs a ton.
These are some of the parts for a new 16' wind turbine. We're actually building two of these, one is for our neighbor Tom who lives near George, the other for Shawn who lives in a neighboring canyon. Shawn built a beautiful straw bale home last year which I should show off here some day.
This machine will be very much like my 17' machine with some small changes. We're using a bigger spindle/hub setup - this is identical to the one we used for my 20' machine. The rotors are 18" in diameter cut from 1/2" thick steel (my 17' machine has 16" rotors) and the stator is 22" in diameter.
This is Shawns stator. It's wound just like the 17' machine, but the coils are slightly larger (Because the space between the magnets is greater). This stator is 11/16" thick (1/16" thicker than my 17' machine which is 5/8") and it's more rigid. I expect the reduced output from the slightly thicker stator will be somewhat offset by the fact that we have better spacing between the magnets (larger rotors) and we're using higher grade (N40) magnets. We'll also be fitting a slightly smaller (16') rotor to it. The goal is to beef up the 17' design in every respect and put a smaller blade on it (we may wind up opening the airgap up a bit to get the speed up) in hopes of having a safer, more reliable machine.
This is the frame for the alternator welded up. The stator bracket is 22" in diameter, cut from 1/4" steel - notice the gussets behind it. It's very rigid... we wound up doing this to my 17' machine after it's first burnout when it munched the stator and twisted all the arms in the stator bracket.
The back rotor exactly fits over the back of the hub. So - unlike my 20' machine where the whole alternator fits in front of the hub, we'll have the hub in between the rotors which I prefer. This just makes things seem stronger and keeps the hardware to the stator shorter which is good. All of the hardware on this machine will be 5/8" - 11 like my 20' machine.
Other fun stuff this week - it's been very windy up here a few times (gusts 60 - 75 mph on a few different days). When it's like that I shut down the 17' machine because I don't trust the tower and I'd like to avoid another burnout - but, lately I've been leaving the 20' machine on and it's been very well behaved in that stuff. Only time will tell, but so far it seems like that machine will take about anything the weather up here can throw at it. Peak output I've seen from teh 20' machine so far is about 6.5KW, but not sustained. The maximum sustained output I've seen from it is around 4KW.
