G'day Guy's,
A couple of weeks ago we had a gale come thru and hit the farm taking several trees down and my wife said my wind gennie was going faster than she had ever seen it go before. With reported winds of 120K an hour in the area I do seem to think my wind gennie must of seen the best winds to date.
When I got home the blades were gone and were found the next day about 50 metres away on the hill behind my shed. Now what has me stumped is the blades had snapped about 12" down from the tip and with no signs of paint or anything on the tower I'm damm sure they never hit the tower as there was a good 14"'s of clearance from the tower to the tip of the blades and the blades were tilted up about 15 degrees to ensure there was plenty of clearance.
I do know the gennie was pumping out the amps as my shed battery ( 24 volt 735AH forklift Traction ) was close to fully charged. Also my 20 amp analogue gauge looks like it has seen better days as it won't zero out anymore suggesting a heap more amps went thru.
Now the blades were 2 metres diameter and made from pine fully painted with 2 pak paint to seal the wood and they did last a couple of years.
The gennie is my old original setup before I did the motor conversions which is a stock 1mm F&P with no wiring mod's wired in Delta and has 400 volt 460uf of caps in series with each phase. I soldered back to back each pair of caps to make them non polarized and put another pair in to keep the 460uf as that match's the best for this gennie.
I'm on making a new set of blades which will be 2.4 metres diameter which I think will load up much better. I will seal them with 2 pak paint and like the last set put some gorilla tape on the leading edge to protect the leading edge. It seemed to do a good job on the last set so it is worth doing it again.
Now the question with high winds and pine blades would high speeds and loading of caused the breakage of the blades or did something hit the blades in the high wind. One will never know but with this new set if it happens again hopefully I'm around to see it happen.
Cheers Bryan
Addicted to a hobby of making my own power since '03 and have forgotten what a power bill looks like.
