Question remote generating/pumping.

[Gary]

I've bought locally from installers 800 miles away from each other.  The small guys are happy with single panel sales to get rid of a odd panel left over from a pallet.  280W for less than $170 out the door.  I just needed to know your design criteria.  My understanding is 50W is a lot of wind.  You ought to try the two motor idea.  It can always be converter later.

Thanks for the tip on locating.  I thought when rebates stopped in Missouri there wouldn't be any installers in business any more.  But I found panels on craigslist at reasonable prices.  If I want to start pumping water with solar looks like I can quickly and easily.  May do. 

Still want to experiment with the F&P style Whirlpool 0.6 mm wire wound motors I bought.  One lesson learned the hard way, need a splined shaft from the washing machine to mount the rotor on.  Another $34.00 for each and a few days delay.  Wish I knew of an appliance boneyard around here.  Hate to drive 60 miles for a $50 used washing machine and try to figure out if it has the motor I want.

Have spent hours researching F&P generator conversion and use.  Site after site almost have complete information but falls down when the last details are needed.

Are users really rewiring stators Unsymmetrically with different coils around the 360 degrees  wired differently?  Some offer "do this this way" but electrically I cant see if its 3 identical phases with a group of three coils in parallel in series with another three coils in parallel and so on.  Or what and what the result is.  The back shed has a lot of information but not complete enough for me to invest a great deal of work in copying something with unknown results.

[joestue]

Are users really rewiring stators Unsymmetrically with different coils around the 360 degrees  wired differently?  Some offer "do this this way" but electrically I cant see if its 3 identical phases with a group of three coils in parallel in series with another three coils in parallel and so on.  Or what and what the result is.  The back shed has a lot of information but not complete enough for me to invest a great deal of work in copying something with unknown results.

i thought those things had 7 phases. if someone is rewiring them for 3 phases then yes you would loose symmetry if the number of slots is not a multiple of 3 and 7.

anyhow the only problem with non symetrical windings is they don't cancel out the magnetic forces, so you end up with a net thrust in one direction, where as most motors cancel out the thrust equally when looking down the motor shaft, so you end up with resonance problems. this is probably not a problem at all for direct drive wind turbines which are by nature rather slow speed, high inertia devices.


i seem to recall someone mixing high voltage and low voltage windings in the same machine, separately rectified but connected in parallel at the battery. such a thing could be done symmetrically if you get lucky with a winding that can be divided into a lot of integers. 

[Mary B]

Looked online and your average wind speed is about 12mph http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps/chap2/2-01m.html that is where you start your design. Because there is only so much power in the available wind.

Without knowing what part of the USA you are in it is impossible to give real advice on anything wind related... because a design for my 18mph average wind will not work in states with an average 12mph!

Mary,
Thank you for your interest.  The location is just outside of Saint Joseph Missouri USA.  Our "Area"  is certainly viable because the big boys have installed hundreds if not thousands of turbines near here. A specific location on our place is a crap shoot.  Hill, pond, forest nearby...  Fortunately I don't need to put up a hundred, only one or two, and I don't need continuous power.  As I wrote earlier, if the wind blows, it pumps, if the wind blows hard it pumps a lot. In either case its more than now.  I don't need an average of 18 or even 12.  Any over a threshold (to be determined) will pump something. 

The forecast for today by hour starting at 8:00 am is 11,11,15,18,20,22,23,25,26,25,26,23,23 mph. Which seems better than average but it is windy around here.  I'm reminded every time I want to spray weeds!

Could you point me to a description of your installation?  To me information works like dynamite, if more is better, too much is just right.

[Adriaan Kragten]

General information about four main ways how water can be pumped with a windmill is given in my free public report KD 490: "Water pumping with a windmill". In the reference of KD 490 you find other KD-reports in which every option is described in detail. All public KD-reports can be copied for free from my website: www.kdwindturbines.nl at the menu "KD-reports".

[Gary]

General information about four main ways how water can be pumped with a windmill is given in my free public report KD 490: "Water pumping with a windmill". In the reference of KD 490 you find other KD-reports in which every option is described in detail. All public KD-reports can be copied for free from my website: www.kdwindturbines.nl at the menu "KD-reports".

In some old western movies gold in diluted quantities was found and miners tried to trace it to the source.  The source of gold was called the "Mother Load".  Your research that you developed and share on your website is the Mother Load of wind pumping information.  I recently watched a youtube video of some enormous and totally useless prototype of a wind powered generator.   Someone commented that it showed that a year of work will save an hour learning in a library.  Thank you very much for helping me save that year.

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

Am pumping water from a stream up into a pond.

Just out of curiosity:  Why a windmill, rather than a hydraulic ram?  Too little head in the stream?  Need too much water pumped?  Enough lift that a ram would deliver only a trickle unless it diverted the buik of the stream to power itself?  Stream is intermittent so you'd have to restart it a lot?

Not to put down the work on the mills, and this sounds like a great site for wind power.  But if the particular site is suitable for a ram, they're cheap, can last decades without maintenance, and run 24/7 if the stream does.

[Gary]

Believe it or not I have two pumping right now. They are powered by a 7' head through 1" galvanized steel pipes where the stream is dammed. They have to lift that 7' plus the 12' talked about above. When the drive pipes have just been cleaned and a syphon is working over the dam they each pump a gallon/minute. Doesn't sound like much, but they never rest 24 7 except for winter weather when freezing could damage them. That's over 300,000 gal/yr. For those not familiar with them they use the energy of about 7 gallons of water going through them 1 where I want it and 6 on down stream where it was going anyway.

The reason for 2 is that it was a very dry year when I installed the first one and Only had about 2 gpm in the stream.  While I was installing it I also buried a second pipe through the dam thinking of using a second during wet years.  Fortunately there is almost always enough water to run both.