24 Volt Stator on 12 Volt Battery String

[oak leaf]

Hello Board,

As stated before I have built the home brew 10' turbine. I had set my batteries up 24v and bought a 24 volt inverter that when I when it came in I hooked it up and it did not work. I was sent another and it worked for two days.

I restrung the batteries for 12 volts and picked up a 12v inverter. I have still been running the 24v stator I built, what problems will I have doing this?

I tried to build a 12v stator but must have a short in it, it acts like I have shorted two of the leads?  I wanted to purchase the heavy duty 12 volt stator from other power but in the description it said to use 2" round magnets? Why?

Thanks,

Harlon

     

[Flux]

Changing to 12v just because someone sold you a crap 24v inverter seems illogical. You have now caused a whole series of unnecessary problems for yourself.

The 24v stator will work at 12v but performance will be dreadful and you will be stalled all the time. It will possibly be marginally better in light winds and instead of 1W you may get 2W but up in the sensible wind region it will level off at a small current and you won't get it to do much more no matter what the wind is.

The Otherpower 10ft turbine as originally designed was a bit marginal on magnet and I think the stator they sell is based on the later version with bigger magnets. For 24 or 48v the rectangular magnets are adequate except in very windy areas with furling not set right.

The 12v case is more critical on magnets as the diode drop is high relatively to the others and also any line resistance is going to be very more significant.

It will still work perfectly well with the rectangular magnets and will be far better than attempting to use the 24v stator. The only thing is that you will need to watch the furling very carefully indeed and from recent discussions I suspect that if you are in a good wind area you may need to increase the offset to get it to furl safely with that stator.

Flux

[electronbaby]

Yes, I agree with Flux. Seems silly to me to go back to 12v. Buy a well known brand of inverter (one with a good warranty) and you should be set.

Operating at 12v nominal with a 24v stator will put you in stall roughly 98% of the time. The remaining 2% will occur during times of VERY low wind and low RPM. These wind contain almost zero usable energy so you dont stand to gain a lot.

The only thing going for you is now you have made your feed line lossier by going to a lower voltage, and this will widen your operating window slightly, but still its next to nothing.

I would go back to 24v (or better, 48v).

[tecker]

Yep 24 volts is in line with a lot of devices and you can configure a two parallel strings for your 12 volt equipment.