I finally got my homemade windgen up a couple days ago, but winds have been light to nothing, till today.
I have a ametek 30 with Terry Gallions blades on there, (the 4 blade aluminum set)
I cut my tail out of 16 guage sheetmetal and primed it white then topcoated it with white rustoleum. the yawl was painted blue and the blades "safety red" the ametek was painted red too, but i think it would look better the same color as the yawl unit.(blue)
The gen was then run to 12 guage wire and run about 18 feet or so to my makeshift control panel inside the shop , then i hooked it to ampmeter and a volts meter.
The Amp meter was got for about 5 dollars and goes 1-10. The voltmeter is for ac but still seems to work , but maybe is a volt or 2 off what my digital multitester reads.
then the wires were sent outside into a old oil drum where my 12 volt deep cycle battery is. a 6 amp diode was run to the positive to prevent current reversing when the wind stops.
I mounted a remote secirty cam outside and aimed it at the windgen on the roof so i could see if the blades were turning from inside at my control panel so i could get a idea of what was happening to it, (this worked good cause i could see better how loads breaked it moreso then on the voltage meters. The cam has 6 infrared leds on it so i can see the windgen in total darkness as well, and that worked great at night.
Now inside from inside the shop , I played around and tryed different things.
First i noticed that when a good steady wind came, it would send the volt meter up fast, to about 13.33 and then it seamed to level off and start charging the battery and the amp meter would jump up to 1 or 2 , it didnt move at all till it hit the charge level. A lot of the times the4 load seamed to knock it back down and the winds werent quiet steady enuff to keep a steady charge,
I then hooked a 12 volt bulb up to it as wella s the battery and it would start getting bright from 4 volts to about 11 or 12, but the load of the bulb itself would seem to brake the gen a lot and it would go back down to dim to nothing. I think with the steady 9 mile a hour winds we were having it would have been hard to blow out the 12 volt bulb, but perhaps this was because the battery was keeping the voltage down to nearly its on level, if the bulb had been hooked staight to the gen it would have easily blown out i think.
I then hooked a small mini frige up to it, thru the 12 volt, I hooked the amp meter up before that so i could see the load. it would start working (lighht came on and fan turned) from 4 volts , and would get a amp or 2 load on it and never made it up to 12 volts very steady , it seemed to brake it right much, but worked pretty good, i suspect that it could have been left on there all day, and not blown it up, perhaps the battery at the other end was keeping the voltage down as well though above 12 volts. when it was taking a charge.
My impressions of the day were, that I think if i was charging a 6 volt battery , i would have got a lot more energy from these light winds around here (virginia)
Cause it would go above 6 a lot more then above 12
The battery voltage was 12.44 when i first hooked the battery up to the wingen, and last i read about sunset, it was 12.53, so its devinatly taking a charge i think.
I had a great time playing around with it today, and theres lots of areas to be looked into, such as voltage boosting and making use of the low voltages by other things, like the mini fridge and lights.
I will include some schematics of the hookups i tried, especially i learned that if you want to measure your load amps, you have to put that meter inline and after your load
