I was lucky enough to get the tower for ~$500 a moto cross club nearby. They had planned it for speaker tower but never completed it..good for me
I'm following your plans with great interest and I'm more and more tempted to try something similar to what you do. I'm not as skilled though as you are on the theory but willing to learn..
..some sites with standard motor conversions
http://www.prairieturbines.com/
http://www.flowtrack.com.au/
http://www.byggvindkraft.se/
$500 ? That is such a steal... poor moto\enduro club..
I would probably trade my annoying sister for such a tower.
The sites you linked to were interesting, but most of them were grid connected, so that is out of our leauge :/
However, one of the controllers are very similar in function compared to our home built one
...Back to our ongoing project!
I was in my cottage the other day and searched for usable items when it comes to transmission\gears, and I found a 40cm diametre thin ribbed 3cm thick disk (currently used as a gear for an old grinding stone), that might come in handy, else we will try to use a couple of bicycle rims (28", not actually inches, but close to) to supply the 8-10x gear ratio, however, this might prove totally FUBAR since they are subject to a lot of slipping.., awell, time will tell.
To Ghurd: People might or might not have fancy measurement equipment, but nevertheless have to use a wee bit of common sense. And as a future physicist, I will try to learn people to think about what they are measuring, how it is connected to other input data, and estimate\calculate how large the error might be.
As an example, I just read a thread on a swedish green-energy-forum about a 6,4m turbine which delivered 2,4kW according to the included LCD-display, in a 4 m\s wind, and the owner (and manufacturer) actually believed on the LCD-display, rather than on the 10 people spamming him in the forums with different theory graphs and calculation examples. The facepalms where everywhere! Iiih!
Pretty nice output on a 6.4m diametre turbine indeed!Ghurd, I would like to see the measurement setup of "your" fancy wind turbine
Offtopic:
I´ve just recieved two 1\2 hp 170V, 2,4A 1500rpm electric DC-motors and wanted to build a very small simple turbine of that, is it possible to connect the output to a computer PSU to get stable 12V as long as the generator voltage is high enough to trigger the PSU (i.e in the 80-250 V range) ?
Then I would connect it´s 12V-leads to a solar cell charge controller for car battery chargeing purposes... or something like that..
Is it plausible?
Edit: Ah, so it is possible to edit, but only the latest post..
That's so sad, since one of the links in the first post is wrong, is there now way to change it without contacting admins?