SW 403 mods

[Jerry]

I've owned my 403 for 10 years now. I would have to say its given me lots of noise and very littel power. Its a 48 volt. Recently I've been compairing other small wind generators to the Wind Blue. The 540 to be exact. I've got a small out building that had enough room for 4 small wind generators on the roof. From east to west they are the Wind Blue 540, A Wind Blue 540 with alt mods and my Jerry blades, a home built car alt genny, the GE ECM, my small 8" (littel yellow) dual rotor and the 403. Inside my shop I have 4 seperate amp meters, one volt meter and an analog anamometer.
I only test 4 at a time. The 4th unit is the one I change out. The first 3 stay. The load is to old very tiered L-16 wiered 12 volts. Today is a very low wind day, gust to 10 but mostly 5 to 8 mph. It apears the Garbogen and the 403 are cuting in around 6 mph. The Blues don't do anything till close to 10 mph. Befor the mods the 403 did nothing till 14 mph. ITs because I'm useing a 48 volt stator at 12v and I'm using blades that actuly work at low wind speeds. I Know I may burn the 403 stator in high winds. I'm hoping the 12v load will just act as a brake? I also know the 403 may  only do 5 to 10 amp max in this configuration. Thats OK. That all the Wind Blue does and now the 403 is cutting in way earlyer then the Wind Blue.

I'll try to post a picture of the 403 mods and the meter readings.
Jerry

[Jerry]

I forgot to mention I've also increased the tail wing size. The 403 actuly stays true to the wind now instead of hunting in all directions.

Hear is the small wind farm on the small out building.

Jerry

[artv]

Hi Jerry ,...Thats amazing, ... all those turbines in one spot like that......I,m curious ,..in the picture of all the meters the one on the far right is the volt meter ,right?...is that open AC, or is it rectified DC reading ? ....and is there a decimal place in there??
Also I'm not sure for the reason of the post ,I'm sure it has to do with your projects ...I'm just not up to speed......sorry for my ignorance ......but I'll get there someday .....waiting for more.........artv

[TomW]

Hi Jerry ,...Thats amazing, ... all those turbines in one spot like that......I,m curious ,..in the picture of all the meters the one on the far right is the volt meter ,right?...is that open AC, or is it rectified DC reading ? ....and is there a decimal place in there??
Also I'm not sure for the reason of the post ,I'm sure it has to do with your projects ...I'm just not up to speed......sorry for my ignorance ......but I'll get there someday .....waiting for more.........artv

You should have seen the ones on the roof of his stereo store. That was literally covered in turbines and was a larger building.

Jerry, hows the electric pickup project?

Tom

[Jerry]

Hi artv.

The far right meter reads DC volts. This is battery voltage. All the wind generators are feeding the same battery bank. Each through there own and seperate amp meter. The voltage reading is 11.65 volts. This makes it posable to compair these diferant machines at a glance with the exact same load.

Last week during strong winds the battery voltage was up around 16 volts. These batteries are junk but good for this type tesing. At one point I saw the Garbogen doing 17 amps, at that same instant the Wind Blue was doing 10 amps (I have video) I think the ECM was flying then and I think it was around 13 amps at that same instant. I think this was around 20 mph?

Jerry

[Jerry]

Hi Tom.

Since we closed the store a couple years ago I hav't been driving it much. I think the batteries have 7 years or so on them. They still work but not quite as good as when they where young.

I'm that way myself. I may remove all 20 of those Golf Cart batteries and use the in my RE system? They still read good SG and we use the truck around the farm.

There might be a picture some were of all 14 wind generetors on the store? That realy made the store rumble during those 60 to 80 MPH storms.

I'm flying that littel dual rotor 400 watt now. Its the one the hit 1200 watts without furling and it didn't burn up. I was told the wind kept it cool. I wonder why the wind dosn't have the same cooling effect on star wired wind generators?   HMMMMM!
Jerry

[Jerry]

OH. The reson for the post. Well some folks may have a 403 and might find it intresting? DANO.

It just shows there is a way to get a littel bit of power out of the mouse size wind generator. At a lower wind speed and without noise.

Jerry

[richhagen]

Hi Jerry, I have an old 48V 403 currently sitting that I might put up as part of a lighting project.  I don't have that much hope of it doing too much.  Not sure what I will wind up doing yet, but I think I will add some tail to it.  Rich

[artv]

Jerry,...."the load is 2 old very tired L-16's wired 12V ".....that means their connected parallel right?....and the ammeters are connected in series with their out put,...neg of meter to neg on battery,... pos of meter to positive on battery??.....Shows how much I know, I'm not even sure how to check for amps properly.

In searching I seen a pic of under the hood of that S-10....It looked like a bunch of big caps in there.....I'm doing experiments with caps,wish I could find some big ones like that.......sorry for the diversion.....

I assume your turbines are wired your way (Jerry Rigged)...I've a couple different drawings of how this is done, but they vary in cap placement......Would like to see how you actually do it.....I've tried several different arrangements ,...the one that gives me the best out-put isn't wired like the drawings I've seen .....could be I'm not taking the proper readings though .....
I think that's enough for now.......artv

[jlt]

Looking forward to your new posts. I know that you did many before on the old fieldlines board.

But they seem to have vanished.

With the price of rare earth magnets going out of sight, there is allot of intrust in doing small wing gen's

I am working with a ecm 1/2 hp to use for 12 volts . have cut all the coil leads so i have 18 single coils.

I will try  putting all the starts of all coils  together and then  bring 18 wires out. And then use 9 rectifiers.
 Will That work . I did a Hugh Piggot design  A few years ago that had 12 magnet poles with 10 coils and 5 rectifiers.
  It is still working  very well.  The coils are  black from over loading. but it still puts out 50 amps at times.

[Jerry]

artv. My DIY Delco alt in this test has a 24 volt factory produced stator. The objective in this unit was to get cutin around 5 mph. This required several things. Wind Blues aproach is to wind the stator with many, many , many turns of very small wire and wire there stator star. They say cutin on the 540 is at 150 rpm. I have confirmed this in my own bench test. My DIY aproach was to seperate the 3 phases. Then use a fullwave bridge on each phase plus a large value electrolytic cap. This basical makes the alt into 3 seperate single phase DC power supplies. Then I simply wired these 3 seperate power supplies in sires. The same way you would wire three 4 volt batteries in sires. The end result is much earlyer cutin and higher amperage. The factory 24 volt stator is good for at least 30 amps. The very fine wire used in the 540 is pushing things at 10 amps. I used a home built rotor with 14 NEO bar magnets not scewed. The cogging is real bad. To concure the cogging and have low MPH startup was acomplished by using a 5 ft 7 blade prop. I used my Jerry Blades with excelent startup and much better higher rpm then the small 2 blade snow plow blades that Wind Blues uses.
The big caps are not used on the AC side of the alt. As far as I'm concerned these car alternator wind generators are very pore preformers. Most Co. building them lye about there preformance. Wind Blue however is very honest as far as I can tell. But other CO.s selling very simular gennys call these 150 watt machines 1000 watt machines. People could build these things for a $100 instead of the $800 the factories are selling them for. A dumpster dived ECM will get you even better prefomance.
Jerry

[Jerry]

jlt. There are 2 ways to wire the ECM for 12 volt. It depends on the TSR of your blade and the wind quality at your location. The ECM is 3 phase and has 18 coils. Thats 6 coils per phase. The best procidure is to first identify the phases. I do this by finding the star tie point. Thats were 3 wires come together. Follow one of the wires to its coil, use a red marker pen on the coil (best on the whight plastic part). Then count 3 more coils over and mark that one red also. Do this all the way around the stator. Go back to the first red mark and mark the next group black. Don't mark the last group just leave them wight (plastic coil form).Now you have identified the 3 peperate phases. 1 phase red, 2 phase black and 3 phase wight. Each phase has 6 coils. For large prop (5ft) low wind just wire each phase to its own and sperate fullwave bridge then peralell the DC outputs. For high wind (4ft prop) seperate or make a brake between coil 3 and 4 in each phase. Take the start of coil 1 and conect it to the start of coil 4 ( the start of 4 is the wire you just cut between 3 and 4). Take the end of 3 ( thats the wire you just cut between 3 and 4) and conect it to the end of 6. You have now double the amperage of each phase, cut the voltage in half in each phase, increased the rpm requirement (not a problem because you have a smaller blade and higher wind speed), cut the resistance in half of each phase. Now wire these modifided phases as in the low wind speed unit.


Jerry

[artv]

Hey Jerry,....I had to read that a few times ,......still hasn't sunk in ....
"3 seperate power supplies wired in series gives higher amperage"........I thought series only boosted voltage,...parallel boostes amps???
Volts are easy to increase,.......amps are what counts and harder to increase ...........still trying to figure it out........artv

[jlt]

I separated the star point and used 3 rectifiers I was getting 37volts at 250 rpm.  In stock form I could use it for 48 volt.

[Jerry]

Hey Jerry,....I had to read that a few times ,......still hasn't sunk in ....
"3 seperate power supplies wired in series gives higher amperage"........I thought series only boosted voltage,...parallel boostes amps???
Volts are easy to increase,.......amps are what counts and harder to increase ...........still trying to figure it out........artv

Hi artv. The higher amperage comes from a much larger gage wire. If each of the 3 power supplies are producing 5 amps and they are wired in sires then the total amperage is 5 amps. However if each power supply is producing 4 volts and they are wired in sires then the total voltage is 12 volts. The problem in this case is the WindBlues wire is a fraction of the gage of the factory 24 volt stator so its amperage is smaller also. Only 2 phase in star are produing amps/volts at any given instant. Even if the Wind Blue makes about 6 volts per phase you don't get 12 volts you get about 10v with very littel amperage. Thats the 1.7 star lose thing. With star put a $20 in your piggy bank today tommorow you'll have $17 in your piggy bank. OK don't get me started LOL.
Jerry

[ghurd]

I separated the star point and used 3 rectifiers I was getting 37volts at 250 rpm.  In stock form I could use it for 48 volt.

That's about what I usually get like that from a 1/2HP.
After spliting and paralleling the phases, still has cut in a bit below 200RPM (pretty darn low).

And a pic of what Jerry said about marking the plastic, etc.
Make sure to route the wires so the bolts have room, and the wires don't rub on the threads.
G-