I thought I would try out the diary section with part of my newsletter from Wednesday minus the enviro-political rants, if you are into that sort of thing you can read it here:
http://outfitnm.com/2010/05/12/bmn-deluge-of-green-nonsense... I felt well enough thanks to the chiropractor and physical therapy to enter the Tusas RE workshop for the first time in a month, with an eye to clean and sort it so I could do some work. Brittany and her friends have it setup to do glass work, so I had to put some of that stuff up. I had already put all my tools away before they setup, so it wasn't too bad out there. Last week I bought two new gauges for our wind turbine power system. These are the simplest systems money can buy. Normally people with PV (solar) and wind turbines have expensive devices to regulate the charging power going into their expensive battery banks. Of course more people than not have spent thousands of dollars on photovoltaic panels and thousands more on batteries so spending a couple thousand more for a charge controller with remote monitoring makes sense.
Then there's us. I guess we are considered the lower class of renewable energy advocates. We try to make and store as much energy as a typical "no budget" family can. We didn't spend $20,000 on PV, nor on our batteries, so in this same light we won't be spending a lot on power control. The down side, if it is, is that I need to go out to the shop when the wind is blowing all mad-crazy like today and make sure everything is running properly, often by simply feeling components for excessive heat or a whiff of burning electronics. As of day before yesterday I had my expensive Fluke Multimeter sitting in the steel box which was to become our main control panel for the wind turbine.
There is also a 60 amp meter to show how much energy the wind turbine is generating at any given time, mind you it isn't watt-hours like the electric meter on our house. The amp gauge only shows the power generated at any moment, which is nearly useless, but it is is what we have, and can afford. I bought another amp gauge for the output to the inverter for comparisons of input amperage to amperage used. The second new gauge is a voltmeter so I can quickly read the system voltage which optimally should be 24 volts DC, but if the wind isn't blowing and we are still watching television burning through stored energy we'll see that voltage drop to as low as 20 volts before the inverter shuts down from lack of power. In lieu of proper data acquisition equipment and software to analyze battery conditions such as energy in, out and charge state, we are left to do a hell of a lot of speculating based on readings from a couple of meters and a lot of seat of the pants sense.
Above is the way the control box looked after I flipped the rectifier heat-sink around so that the wires were inside the box and the fins were outside. The black and white panel meter is the ammeter from the turbine. The plan is to custom build a front panel for this recycled electrical box which we never had the front for, then drill out hole for the three meters.
Yep, that's an old computer case I cut to fit around the rectifier heat sink. Someone drew a spider coming down the side of their PC, maybe they'll come forward when they see it and tell me, "Hey where's the rest of my computer, man?"
That will be the least of my problems, as it turns out the old meter has a different size cutout than the new meters, neither of which are the same size as the two metal cutting hole saws I already own.
It seems like every stage of forward progress has obstacles.
We'll see if I find a oil filter so I can change the oil in the Trooper before the problem I didn't know about two weeks ago can ruin the engine
Yeah, going truly green really is a lot of work, and can't be bought.
So there ya go
I see ya, wouldn't want to be ya.
