Though my wind turbine's construction is stalled while I continue to acquire solar panels locally for a great price, with whatever money I can pull together, it's given me time to run calculations and work on blade design. (free to do that stuff!)
Beyond thanking those who have answered my (perhaps sometimes stupid) questions along the way, there was some other valuable information I was able to gain here. One thing that I was never certain of was if I had my alternator matched correctly to the rotor diameter. To tell you the truth, I pretty much took a shot in the dark at it. When first coming into this build, I found the math quite intimidating, some I still don't have a total handle on.
Fortunately, I just recently found the Alternator_windturbine_outuput_prediction.xls file in Windstuff Ed's files. That, combined with Warlock Engineering's Blade Calculator, I was able to do a good comparison of the blades power against alternator power. To my amazement, I am extremely close to a dead match. The only part thats got me worried, (should I be worried?) was the wattage losses (heat) at higher speeds. I thought my two-in-hand 14ga. coils would keep the heat down on my 14ft. machine, but the calculator says, for example, at 19.9 mph, I got 1090 watts of loss. Above that, the numbers really get frightening, like 2720 watts of loss at 25.1 mph! Sounds like a lot of heat to disipate to me.
In delta, the losses are much, much lower, but if I do that, I imagine my cut-in speed will go up quite a bit. I'd consider building a star/delta switch, but worry about it being just one more component to go wrong. I think I'll just furl a bit early, and not get greedy.
Oh, one last note. Probably obvious to most folks here, maybe not to everyone though, is the "Wind speed" column should be noted as "wind speed above cut-in speed."
