I'm posting on behalf of Ghurd because he's too modest to make a big a fuss about this project, but he deserves it. Right off the bat I want to thank him for coming up with the circuit designs, and helping me and several other lucky beta-testers get it running to test it out.
After using and working with DIY wind for a while, I can't help notice that the heat from the dump load doesn't really do much. The turbine is busy pumping energy into a system that can't accept it. Most of us who use batteries need to have charge controllers to prevent the batts from being overcharged. They also help with the regulation of the voltage and the nice ones will even do an equalization cycle for you from time to time.
Beyond that, I find the turbine putting most of its energy into heat. After the initial top-up of the batteries, the charge controller activates the diversion load. When I'm around, I can turn on lights and heaters and other things that may make the energy useful, but that requires a lot of babysitting. When we have a system that produces a limited amount of energy, wouldn't it be nice to not waste the power? Why not have it put to use automatically?
Ghurd has obviously been thinking along those lines for a while, and after several prototypes he's come up with a circuit that does this for us automatically.
The beauty of the circuit is 3-fold:
a) It runs off your batteries (taking less than 20 milliAmps)
b) It does not affect the diversion load (you still use one for safety)
c) It can control just about any other device you want (with your selection of relay)
I guess another feature is that the circuit is almost as easy to build as Ghurd's diversion controller circuit, so if you've built one of those you may want to build one of these. We're in the early stages, so Ghurd has not had a chance to design and make custom boards. That may come if this proves to be popular. I've tested it on my own system, so I can attest that it is compatible with a Tristar TS-60 in diversion mode, and have no doubt that it would do just as well with a Xantrex C40/C60 hooked up the same way. Obviously, it's compatible with Ghurd's diversion controller, too, by design.
Here are 2 pictures of circuit boards, one built by Ghurd, and the one built by me:
Most of the components on the boards are identical, just organized differently. The capacitor was over-sized in the first prototypes so it's much smaller now. My variation was to put several connectors on the board, making it easier to pack up into the box I wanted to use. Here you see me testing it with a car headlight. The power supply for the board is completely separate from the power supply for the headlight. The timer has energized the relay coil, the headlight's 12v power supply is only across the relay's contacts.
I don't do much with my batteries' DC, so I wanted this timer to control AC circuits. This is possible by using the Timer's FET gate output to flip the coil of a relay. The contacts of the relay can then do whatever I want. I came up with this box, into which I packed the timer, the relay, the duplex plug, and an input AC receptacle. All wired up, the duplex plug doesn't get AC until the input cord is plugged in and the timer has clicked the relay contacts. Then whatever load is plugged into the duplex plug will come on.
Ghurd predicts this will be just as popular, or more so, controlling DC circuits. There are probably uses for this that go beyond RE.
The timer knows when to turn on by running out one trigger wire. It senses when the diversion load is on when there is a positive voltage on it. I calculate that the trigger wire can take more than 60 Volts without trouble, but is sensitive to voltages as low as 5 Volts, so you don't need special configurations for 12v/14v/48v battery systems. Here is Ghurd's diagram of how to use it with my TS-60:
Since Ghurd is already well equipped with parts and a nice website describing his controller, I think everyone who is interested should go check it out. He doesn't have a page dedicated to the Timer yet. I am finishing up a couple of schematic drawings and will post them shortly.
www.ghurd.infoA few other lucky souls have been testing this out over the past few weeks/months and maybe they can share their experiences and ideas here, too.