Hi there,
For the dark days in winter I brewed the following hydro system;
The penstock consists of 300 meter 2 inch semi flexible pipe, with a total head of about 10 meters. A self made wheel (looks a little like a Turgo wheel)is connected to a Ford Sierra car alternator. A 12 Volt car battery is buffering the energy for a 12 -> 230 Volt modified sine wave inverter.
The hydro site is about 300 meters away from my house where I have the main 48 Volt battery system. For this reason I used the inverter to transport the energy whit out a lot of waist.
Near the 48 Volt main batteries I transform the 230 Volts down to about 70 Volts, and with a voltage regulator 7805 and some resistors I have made a fixed current regulator.
It gives a constant current of 65 mAmps. (50x0,065) That's about 32 Watt into my batteries.
Who can help me with the following questions?
- The car alternator has 4 connections, ground, main power and 2 little blue wires. One of them I connect 2 seconds to the 12V of the battery when I start the hydro system.
When the system is running I disconnect it. Is that the right way and where is the other wire for?
- When I connect a car light directly to the alternator (without battery) , its giving 13,5V and the light takes 5,3Amp. That's about 71 Watt.
The input of the 48V batteries is about 32 watt. I think very bat efficiency. Is there a more economic way to get the power into my 48V batteries?
Thanks,
Michel,
Portugal, Europe
