| I've been working on this project for about 10 months. We started constructing the actual generator back in July and I worked on the tower, logistics, and everything else throughout the year. I attended high school in Northern Maine (Limestone) and wanted to see if I could put up a wind generator. I planned to put it up on school grounds and we talked to the appropriate people, the subject became a bunch of political crap that ended up delaying me 3 weeks and resulted in having the wind turbine installed at my teacher's house. It has been quite an experience trying to do all this while I was away from home and was one of the biggest hurdles of it all. In the end, it has been worth it and I was very excited to see it on the tower three days before graduation. I even got on the local news for my project (which was not for school, I just did it while I was at school).
Anyways here are a few photos of the day we put it up. I don't have any of the tower being raised, or assembled on the group (I was too busy helping).
Here is a picture of the whole machine put together in the garage before we raised the tower. It was actually the first time all the parts had been together. It was hard to work on some parts of it at home and bring some to school. This was really exciting for me to put it all together and see it up close. It also allowed me to iron out anything that might look messed up.
We used a bucket truck to lift the tower up and we guyed it off. The man running the bucket truck let me put it all together up at the top, it was quite a thrill. The tower is 36 feet high (sure feels a lot higher when you're in a field). We had a beautiful day that was dead calm to put it up, couldn't have asked for better weather. Pictured is the newly installed turbine and one very excited boy.
I was hard pressed for time at the end of the year and as a result we only finished half the wiring, here is a picture of the box we installed. I'm using two Xantrex C40's to regulate the charge on an Optima battery that is hooked up to a light (mounted on the tower) that connects through the inverter. I also need to make some serious adjustments to the guy wires and re-balance the blades I think (it vibrates a lot when it reaches charging voltage). Here is a picture of the nice box we got, they even let us pay half price for it since they liked the project so much.
Finally here is a picture of my teacher's son who took an interest to my project and figured he could build himself a small model wind generator too. We did a size comparison after mine was up... it was close but I think I beat him.
Also, for a video of the turbine spinning check out this link:
Student Builds Windmill Project It's actually the link to the news bit, but it does have some good footage of the turbine (it's the only footage I've got). Also, it was spinning slowly because the brake was on and I need to adjust the air gap.
Thanks to everyone on the Otherpower boards who helped make this possible. There were multiple times when I didn't know if all of my effort would even result in anything. I would like to thanks Flux, who is a continued help for me and others here. Thanks to Mr. Piggot and the Dans for some fine reading material. I've learned so much from this project that I can't wait to build another, so many I can get it right this time! |
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