African Windpower.. A tale of woe

[oztules]

Well after my internet went from a dribble to a stagnation, i have spent a long while in the wilderness without my link to fieldlines. I am now in posession of a wonder of modern technology called a ..... come to think of it I don't know what it's called, but it has lifted me from the depths of 600bps to 256000 bytes per second.... It looks bigger if you write it like that:)

So I feel terribly for those still on dial up, and have constructed this story of the African Windpower on Flinders Island with lots of small (30-40k) pictures, and more commentary than necessary, so you can read some dribble while the pictures load.

It shows all the parts of the turbine in detail, and displays some useful food for thought for those who wish to make a drum type mill. It is a very well designed machine, but the one we recieved shows a marked lack of quality control.

straight to part1 of the story.

http://www.otherpower.com/images/scimages/5171/awp_1.html

or: more waffle and background:

This is sad for if they had built it as it was designed to be built, it is in my mind a world beater. It is robust, quiet, slow revving, and should be a thing of beauty for years to come. It pumps out over 1kw with no fuss, little sound, and mild winds.... we have lots of wind here so it delivers more power each day than the average house uses. Most days it produces over 20kwh, and lots of days over 28kwh. Some days not much at all, but these are rare over here. It drives a house with electric hot water, a washing machine that the boss requires to heat it's own water to near boiling point, and all the mod cons available.

It's backed up by a 1kw solar panel and a twin cylinder diesel genny. In winter the solar input is about 5amps/48v for 8hrsmax... so contributes little to the household. Summer is a different story. Even in winter, the mill spends a fair time in dump mode (electric element 1kw). In summer it spends most of the time in dump during the day, and part of the night. It's a damn good machine.....in spite of the builders.

It drives a 24kwh 48v battery bank, and a massive inverter I think 8kwpeak 30seconds 5kw continuous pure sine with data logger and all the flash dodads. It sports a massive toroid to bring it's weight up to over 50kgs... must be good I guess.

Well I've waffled on long enough to give you an idea of it so hope you enjoy the saga... well part one anyway. If there's any interest, I'll write part two... fixin it up

.....oztules

[electrondady1]

a great post oztules,

thanks for showing us the guts of the thing .

looking forward to the next stage were you tune it up.

[vawtman]

Welcome back Oz

I was worried one those big birds you have there carried you away.

Will follow your progress.

 Im working on a alt simular but the mags on the inside.

Have fun(i know thats not hard for you)

[oztules]

Hi vawtman, i'm going back through the stories and posts at the moment to see what you've been up to. Will follow your trials and tribulations with interest. Thanks for the welcome.

........oztules

[12AX7]

Hey Oztules!

Good to see your still out there!    always a good read.

Hope the turbine failure didn't inhibit your "boss's" use of her big screen tv..

keep it up!

(the turbine I mean....)

ax7

[luv2weld]

Hi Oz,

We can only hope that with all the manufacturing screw-ups, that they gave you

a heck of a good price on the thing. Please tell me they paid you to take it!!!

Judging from your comments and the pictures, it looks solidly built. Just

seems to have been built in somebodies back shed without power tools!!

Thanks for letting us see the insides. Waiting for Part 2.

Ralph

[Stonebrain]

good story,

conforting to see others make all the mistakes I could make.

don't make us wait for part2

cheers,

stonebrain

[Flux]

I am not entirely surprised at the lack of quality control, life in that part of Africa is not easy for anyone to continue manufacturing at present. Problems with shaft tolerance and bearing fit are not new. I hadn't realised they had introduced slip rings, that seems a backward move for any intelligent user but I suppose not all users are intelligent and they are in competition with others that use slip rings as a selling feature. Would have been better to have offered it as an option for difficult sites and at a price that would have let them do it properly.

Such a shame, that machine has so much potential and it looked originally as though the teething troubles were being sorted out.

After you have rebuilt it you should have a fine machine.

flux

[richhagen]

Your posting wasn't dull, even without Captain Turbine.  It is the first look I've had at the guts of the African Wind Power machine.  Very interesting construction.  Rich

[oztules]

hi Richhagen,

I'm glad your curiosity was satisfied. I will come as no surprise to you that I blatantly stole your idea of using onsite html format to post this story. I think you had a capitol idea there. It allows one to put the story together at leisure, and control the picture size etc.

For those as computer illiterate as me, just use openoffice writer, put all your piks on the desktop and insert them from there, then save as html on the desktop. upload the piks to fieldlines, upload the html file and it works.

There are probably better ways to do it, but that is what worked for me.

Your Fiji post inspired me to post this story in this way...many thanks.

........oztules

[oztules]

Hi twin triode

I have been perusing your files, and for the life of me I can't see a water wheel any where

This is Jamie's mill, so the boss's telly wasn't threatened.....I've put it on a ups in case of outages on a kind of pain of death arrangement. So if it fails, ond you don't hear from me you'll know whats happened.

Good to hear from you again.

........oztules

[oztules]

Nice to hear from you Ralph,

Part two is in the works.

Jamie was and is still happy to pay the money, coz it's a good machine.

It is solidly built, and Jamie wouldn't buy a different turbine. It has it's faults for sure, but it is a winning design, and weve gotten around the problems, and we'll get around any others that crop up...( although I cant see any part of it left to fail )

If i were going to buy a turbine it would be the AWP... but i'd pull it apart and rebuild before it went up. Still think it's the best design out there.

.........oztules

[domwild]

Oztules,

Thanks for that tale of woe. Luckily us Aussies always use only the best fencing wire for our repairs!

[oztules]

Hi Flux, youll find the new brush set-up in the part two blurb. It was fast and convenient with what was on hand.

I left a bit of clearance on the carbon/copper brush to holder interface to try and prevent bursh stick on the metal holders(from the elements), but really hoping the warmth from the turbing will keep moisture at a minimum inside the brush box.

We'll check it in a few months to see. In the interim, we'll explore a better system for this part... as you infer, this bit is a failure waiting to happen, and not really necessary.... Jamie is not yet of that opinion.

It is a well designed mill, implementation is a bit average though.

......oztules