Hugh gives suggestions on fitting the blades to the hubs for the 6' machine.
These strange people are hooking a 24V battery up to some box full of electronic wizardry that will hopefully allow the 10' diameter 48V wind turbine to charge a 24 V battery more efficiently than it could ever do otherwise. Some might call this 'MPPT'. All I know is there must be a lot of highly pressurized magic smoke in that box and I hope it doesn't come out.
Raising the 10' wind turbine on a short test tower. Did anyone here see 'Flags of our Fathers'?
The 10' machine finished on the test tower. Not much wind - and a very short tower and very tall trees. The best we saw was a bit over 100 watts from it.
Friday night may have been the highlight of the music. We had great music every night - but Friday was a bit stunning I thought. Checkout the cool bass that Rich is playing in the back near the stove. It's a standup bass made from a washtub (the wash tub is behind the sound board). We may have to take a week off of making wind turbines and build one of these. The line up of this band:
Ian W: Guitar, lead vocals
Nora W: backup harmony vocals
Mandolin Mike: mandolin, guitar, vocals
Banjo Eddy: banjo, lead vocals
Andy: Guitar, vocals, percussion
Rich: Bass, Guitar, Vocals
DanF: Dobro, Banjo,Vocals
DanB: Guitar, Mandolin
Kelly: Harmonica
Mathias: percussion
Banjo Eddy... a true character and a brilliant musician from Guemes Island.
Due to lack of wind we put the 10' machine on top of the dump truck along with the 24V battery bank and the experimental controller. We drove it around a bit and the results seemed fairly impressive - about 730 Watts @17mph (measuring wind speed with an anemometer held as far away from the truck as possible). After that we took another run and the controller didn't kick in quite fast enough - the wind turbine voltage went too high and damaged the controller, so thats the only real testing we got done with that setup. Very interesting and great fun though.
There's the 12' machine finished up on a test tower. Again - very low wind and a short tower but it definitely was working well considering.
We took the 10' machine off the dump truck and tested the 6 footer with a 12V battery. Pretty impressive output I thought - he was getting about 450 Watts at fairly low speeds.
We tried lowering the 12' machine with a truck at the end of the day on Saturday. I won't go into detail except to say that certain things needed to be done differently. The tower crashed - nobody got hurt (nobody was in the fall zone) but one blade got smashed and the tail broke. Another good lesson for everyone at the end of the workshop.
Waiting in line for the ferry on our way out Sunday morning. This is Andersons general store. It's the only store on Guemes Island -they have a great deli, good beer, a small bar and most everything else you might need including animal feed/gasoline. We ate most of our lunches here.
On the last day of the workshop they got the car ferry working again, so we were able to bring our Volvo across and pick up all our stuff.
On Sunday we drove to Portland to visit some old freinds/rest up (actually.. there was very little resting). My friend Dave gave me his old volvo - he said he was gonna scrap it if I didn't take it and I cannot refuse a stray. So I drove this home from Portland. It's a 1964 Volvo 122S - one of my all time favorite cars. Volvo hasn't done anything this good since in my opinion. Dave used to drive this about 15 years ago when we both worked together in Colorado delivering pizza. At that time I was driving a 62 Volvo P1800 in similar condition.
Shes a little rusty and the upholstry is a little worn but short of that she's cherry....
A gas stop someplace in Wyoming. The 122 ran perfectly (the seat was a little hard on my back). She got right at 30 miles to the gallon at about 85mph average speed. She used 0 oil and had no problems at all.
So a good time was had by all - we had a lot of fun, learned a lot, burned our wicks at both ends and now were mostly recovered. I may be ready for another one of these in a year or two. A big thanks to everyone behind this and all the folks to attended. I failed to get pictures of many. Below is a list of links to some of the websites run by folks who were involved with this. I know I must be missing some. They're all good sites - great companies and worth checking out.
Bill Beatty's website - you could spend days here: http://amasci.com/
Abundant Renewable Energy: http://www.abundantre.com/
Of course, Hugh Piggott's website: http://www.scoraigwind.com/
Solar Energy Internation does lots of good workshops: http://www.solarenergy.org/
Home Power Magazine: http://www.homepower.com/
Outback Power is on the cutting edge of power electronics for all this stuff: http://www.outbackpower.com/
Our own site: http://www.otherpower.com/
The Guemes Island resort, where we stayed - they were kind enough not to kick us out: http://www.guemesislandresort.com/
Kelly's site, whidbey sun and wind: http://www.whidbeysunwind.com/
