Most Do or Don’t

[Yianie123.]

I am just curious as to what those who build windmills, do with their power?  I’m planning on using the power to heat water.  What are you doing?

[bigrockcandymountain]

My house is off grid so everything.  I get pretty nerdy about pointing out how my toast was toasted by wind and my movies are powered by wind.  When the batteries are charged, the excess goes to heating water.  That is a nice useful, flexible load. 

[WindyOne]

Go one step further ... your wind energy is actually Solar Energy

[Yianie123.]

I’m glad I received responses, but I hope more respond.  I am really interested.

[makenzie71]

It's not a super busy forum so sometimes it takes a while to cultivate responses.

Personally I'm running all my power back to a grid tie inverter and dropping it into the grid.  My plan this summer is to wire my shop lights off my battery bank.

[clockmanFRA]

My 3off are 12 footers, (3.7m diameter), they are connected and directly clamped to my 48v 1300ah battery bank, so they are always charging the batteries.



I am in a military low fly zone so my max height is only 12 meters, (40ft).

The battery bank is connected to my 6kW-15kW Ozinverter that converts 48vdc to pure sine wave 240vac to run my main house and 3 cottages and out buildings.

I also have 5kw of PV panels that are direct charging DC to the batteries.

On the roof of our cottages and outbuildings there is 12kW of PV panels that operate normal second hand GTI's that back feed to our Mini Grid created by the OzInverer so we can directly use the GTI created power in our Mini Grid in our buildings.

If the batteries are low then the GTI back feeding into our Mini Grid can also back charge through the OzInverter (its a simple H Bridge design).

To protect the batteries from being over charged I have 8kW of dump loads these are air heater resistors at the main house.

I also have underfloor electric heating in all our buildings and this turns on when required. 

It sounds complicated, but its really simple, with minimal control equipment and minimal cost.

[SparWeb]

I store my wind and solar energy as a backup power supply.  The batteries are always nearly full and ready to keep my house heat and lights on if the grid goes down.  Which it does.  Often.  Even in 2020.
The energy is also used daily as the power supply to the horse barn and other smaller barns.  They don't usually need much and they are quite far from the house.  Running a long trench to power those buildings from the house would be more expensive than powering from the turbine's system.  Also, the circuit breaker panel in the house is 100% full.  So I couldn't add circuits from the house to power the barns if I wanted to.