So, as I said in my other thread, I picked up a little $100 turbine off ebay (be here Monday) because it was cheaper to get a turbine than a hub, blades, and a slip ring for another project. Obviously, though, I'm going to tinker with the thing before I take it part. I literally bought the cheapest one I could get and I got the best price by just spamming all the sellers' accounts and asking if they'd just give me one for testing. Obviously, no one wants to just give one away, but they usually come back with "not free, but $XXX is best price".
Well, almost all the seller accounts are based out of China and they ship out of warehouses in the United States. This means that communication is delayed 24 hours or more sometimes. After I spammed everyone, I took the best price out of the people who responded by Monday. Thing is, though, that more people responded since Monday...some with way better offers (like "we'll sell just one to you at our cost" and "just pay for pay for shipping" and "we'll just mail you one please tell us how it goes". Long and short of it is that I now have four generators coming. I picked four that "look" slightly different and two of them are coming directly from China so they'll be a while getting here, but they're on their way.
Now, what I want to do a technical review of each turbine. My plan is to arrange a series of tests that can give an idea of what the generators are capable of in a controlled environment. The idea sounds fun to me and I think it'll provide good information to people out there buying or avoiding based on published reviews. Something that I've found lacking is the "reviews" I see on youtube and the like is someone will buy a cheap turbine, put it on the pole in an 8mph wind, and then complain in their video that it's not performing as described...or they'll have an expensive generator 50ft up in a hard straight line 30mph wind and marvel in how well it's performing.
What I want to do is develop a series of tests that I can apply to ANY generator. I want the tests to be very visual...I want anyone who sees to be able to see everything that's going on. I want to come up with a way to load the turbines without batteries if possible (I always wonder when the tests are going poorly just how good their battery was). I want to do controlled RPM tests...I have a large drill press that will accommodate this and will let me control speed in 54 variables from 84~22,000rpm. Primarily, all the tests have to be simple, direct, and easily reproduced. I also plan to pull rotors and look at stators and so forth and get their general construction all out there for comparison. I'm looking for maybe 10 repeatable tests that can give good data about a generator's capability.
I'm going to be doing these four generic turbines, and I've got a few homebrew setups I've made I'll run through the same routine. I imagine that after I've run through these cheap turbines I'll keep one or two of them to play with and sell the other two...if they're worth selling. I can't promise that taking the generators apart won't be destructive. At that point, I'll probably buy more and do it again
So that's where the question lies: what kinds of tests would YOU want to see performed?