New 10' Homebrew Turbine Flying!

[plainsman]

Off-grid living for me has been a long series of slow, expensive steps. My home is atop a 140' mesa in the far western Oklahoma Panhandle. I have electric service in the valley below, but balked at the cost of bringing it up the rocky cliff. I started with a snall solar battery maintainer just to charge the cell phone.  Kerosene lamps, hauled water, and  a wood stove rounded out my meager utilities systrms. In 2007, I added  500 watts solar. An Air-X was erected on a 50' tower in January of 2008.  The  winds I endure in this location quickly took on a new value as the noisy little turbine proved to far exceed  Southwest Windpower's monthly estimates. It is producing an astounding 49 KWH/mo average.  A well was drilled in the valley and I put a grundfos pump in it' powered by 4 40 watt kyrocera panels, pumping the water up on the mesa. Disaster struck in July, 08. My brother and I were out building a small dam when it started hailing. The first stones were baseball size, then quickly grew to softball  sized bombs! He shouted, "We're dead!"' (We were a good 1/4 mi from any kind of solid cover). I blurted out  to the negative but secretly feared he was right! The aftermath left us both bruised, but very much alive. The solar panels did not fare so well. One of the Kyroceras at the well was beat to a pulp and one of the 120 watt Mitsubishis at the house had a fatal blow. How the rest survived is amazing. The Air-X survived unscathed. My renewable energy system was now aprox 100 KWH/mo.

     After a year and a half of thinking about it and half a year of gathering parts, I built my first 10' turbine, using Otherpower's plans, and flat metal parts. It is on a 80' tower, about 120' from the  24v battery bank.  I used 1x2x1/2 magnets.Prelininary results show it producing 2 A mps before the Air-X even starts turning. It starts to furl at around 28 Amps with a measured peak of 35 amps. It has produced around 4 KWH several days and near 10 yesterday. It will be intetesting to see how it performs in the windy months.

[TomW]

Downright satisfying, ain't it!

Just the results we are here for.

Thanks for sharing.

Tom

[tecker]

Trials and tribulations from the re frontier .I love it hang in there . Killer hail I've never seen and hope to never experience that. Hang in there keep posting.

[TomW]

Oh, sorry bout your loss in panels that musta sucked.

Got all excited about the turbine going up I kinda forgot the loss of panels part.

Tom

[BruceDownunder]

Good read ,, sorry about your panels..

Any Pic's of your hut and re stuff,? sounds like a nice hilltop retreat.

PS,,, One day coming home up our mountain ,tree's all over the road , said to the financial controller,"hang on ,this may hurt"

Drove in the driveway ,,Hail ,golfball size was covering my property..

End result, $65,000 damage to stainless steel gutters and downpipes .Ouch..

Insurance is good ...

Bruce

[RogerAS]

Hey,

I cannot imagine hail of the size you cite, and I feel you are both extremely lucky to have survived! I have seen that part of the world get a storm which would deposit 3 or 4 inches of hail in short order, but in a much smaller size. I took refuge under a roadside picnic table south of Clayton, NM back in my biker days from just such a storm.

One thing I would think about for future protection of these valuable PV panels would be a tracking system. With a good deep angle pivot one could manually, or with a remote, send a PV array into protection mode. If the PV array had a thick angle iron edge which could be turned to near vertical the damage from a repeat storm might be limited. Think of turning a book spine toward the sky with the angle iron along the back. If the angle iron were affixed with the apex of the outside 90° set to serve as a wedge it would break the hail stones. Even if the array could not reach true plumb the acute angle would surely help save those expensive panels. Maybe some extensions to the flat plane surfaces of the angle iron could completely protect your panels. The angle iron would also protect the PV frame(s).

Tracking, to some, seems like a waste, but a good system can return the power of an extra panel in a moderate array. I made one from junk C-band satellite dish stand, a simple driver, and a little trial and error. See my files for a PDF of the circuit I designed. My circuit doesn't have allowance for a remote parking function, but that could be done with a simple addition or two. The same function can now be reached via action of the switches. I may make similar alterations to my array/tracker, as Arkansas has a history of such storms. Just last week in an area south of us many farmers lost their crops to a severe hail storm.

Good luck with your efforts and thanks for posting your experiences. I also have undergone a steep learning curve associated with living free of the grid.

[wpowokal]

Always sad to here of good equipment being damaged, can you insure them? I list my panels separately on my policy. Thankfully I have never known hail like that here, and my panels are insured. It never fails to amaze me the diverse situations we all live under.

allan down under

[hvirtane]

The hailstorm sounds really hard. If things like that happen often even your wind machine might get broken. I would put there some kind of plastic cover made of buckets around the alternator. The performance of the 10' feet wind machine sounds awesome. You got any idea of the wind speeds there?

It is not easy to protect solar panels from storms.

- hv

[plainsman]

Thanks Roger, for the input. I downloaded that pdf. looks interesting. The place you took cover from the hail on the trip is not all that far from me.

[plainsman]

Yes, I am worried about the stator and hail. Thanks for the I dea of covering it. That was a rare, freak storm. I posted a number of pics in my files yesterday.  The yearly average wind speeds on the plains here are said to be around 13.4 mph... 6 m/s. The boost being on top of a 140' mesa is probably about 1 mph more, making this potentially a low class 5 wind site. The mesa is small on top,about 15 acres.  Visitors to the sight are startled at the fierce winds coming up over the cliff edges. It is truly a "You actually LIVE here ?" location: but I call it home

[TomW]

plainsman;

Ever considered grabbing the updraft off the face of said cliff?

Recall someone trying this a few years ago but don't recall the results[if any]. Cantilevered over the edge might snag higher winds?

I suspect furling would be "interesting" to figure out.

Just an idea that is probably worth what it cost.

Tom

[ghurd]

Might be good for a HVAWT?  (Horizontal Vertical Axis Wind Turbine)

I know a guy who intended to put one right on the peak of his large shop.

His situation changed before the project was completed.

It sounded like a good idea at the time.  His wind always came from the right direction.  Structure was strong enough to hold it (steel I-Beam construction).  No tower involved.  

Cheap?  Easy?  Workable?  I don't know.  Sounded good the way he explained it!

Would have looked like this from the end.

S

^

G-

[plainsman]

Now that sounds like a challenge! Can you imagine the rigging for that kind of tower?  lol

[plainsman]

I can just see it now... a double egg beater contraption with two tails and a whirly bird on top... Move over  Dan, Dan, and Hugh, the new generation of home-brewed wind turbines has arrived!