While I await delivery of my wind generator kit, I'm pondering what's going to happen to it when I leave it alone to generate mostly dump load power all winter long. I'm new to alternative power and to complicate things, I'm quite electronics-challenged too.
I think how nice it would be if you could just turn these things off when you're not using them but I don't think that's feasible. I've thought about shunt braking but I don't understand how this could possibly work for long periods of time. Doesn't the shunt require the batteries to be connected and if so, once the generator no longer produces power, the batteries go dead and then various very bad things happen. It will also not be feasible to physically take down or tie-up the generator as climbing my tower is best done once a lifetime.
The wind generator produces 3-phase AC output to a bridge rectifier. Real world output should be about 500 watts. I'll have a 12V battery bank with about 500 amp hours capacity and using a Xantrex C-series diversion capable load controller (not certain yet on the particular C model). The type and size of the dump load I am going to need concerns me greatly. I've read a fair bit about possible DC dump loads but I don't know how practical they would be for a period of perhaps 3 months without real battery usage. Water heaters using low voltage 12v elements are popular but what happens when a water heater heats all it can heat? What happens if it doesn't heat sufficiently and the water freezes (well ok I can envision using anti-freeze instead of water over winter). I certainly don't want to use anything that could start a fire. Lots of 12V automotive lights perhaps? But then I've read that lights and motors are not good diversion loads for the Xantrex controllers because they pulse DC at a high frequency.
Maybe it would help if I left my inverter hooked up to the battery bank over winter and powering some modest AC load so the batteries will require charging? I don't know, maybe I just worry too much...
