Wind Turbine Day 12
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Day 12
The varnish dried fairly quickly & I assembled everything together, taking care to wipe out any swarf that was stuck to the magnets & generally gave the whole housing a good clean.
I used a bit of 13A extension cable & trailed it back to the workshop which was 14 meters away, I cut the end off & attached a volt meter set to DC. I’m using this just for testing as I believe I will need a much bigger cable later to handle the current. Just a quick note here, the smaller the voltage the higher the current so if I could mount the battery & inverter nearer the turbine then I can convert the low voltage DC to 230v AC which would have a lower current & my little extension cable would be ok, well if it was weather resistant cable it would.
Well, I’m sure you all want to know what happened, & so did I but there wasn’t any wind. What a disappointment.
Out came the battery drill, I wish I had charged it up but here goes, now the chuck is too small to hold a 19mm socket to turn the blades. OK, I’ve cobbled something up & it looks bad but the drill is now connected to a 19mm socket, it made 2 turns of the turbine & the battery ran out. The anticipation is killing me, the drill is on charge & I’ve resorted to spinning the turbine by hand, it puts out between 2 & 30v depending on how fast I spin it, not so easy to hook up the meters how I want so I’m leaving the current to later. I crudely connected a car bulb & it glows which at least is something to show my wife which is better than a meter. I’ll carry out some proper testing when the battery or the wind is more powerful.
Here are some initial results at very low RPM:
At 37 RPM it produced 3.5v & 1A shorted out. So now I wait for the wind, actually I may need to move it to be able to get any decent wind but that can be done later.
Well I guess that is success, I made power & it took a couple of days less than my goal of 2 weeks which wasn’t too bad seeing as I’m not spending whole days on this but it's not over yet.
I still have to sort out a better mounting position, but what I want to make next is the charging controller.
I picked up all the parts I needed relatively painlessly, or used alternative parts that I already had, but for the most part I used the info from this link to build it: http://www.mdpub.com/555Controller/
Actually this web site was what first captured my interest in the whole idea so thank you Mike Davis for your inspiration & great ability to convey some of that information to the rest of us. It’s only a coincidence but my father is also called Mike Davis & he taught me most of the skills I have now, thanks dad.
Anyway, enough of all that sentimental rubbish, let’s build a charge controller, I’m going to follow Mikes info tomorrow & see how I go.
The varnish dried fairly quickly & I assembled everything together, taking care to wipe out any swarf that was stuck to the magnets & generally gave the whole housing a good clean.
I used a bit of 13A extension cable & trailed it back to the workshop which was 14 meters away, I cut the end off & attached a volt meter set to DC. I’m using this just for testing as I believe I will need a much bigger cable later to handle the current. Just a quick note here, the smaller the voltage the higher the current so if I could mount the battery & inverter nearer the turbine then I can convert the low voltage DC to 230v AC which would have a lower current & my little extension cable would be ok, well if it was weather resistant cable it would.
Well, I’m sure you all want to know what happened, & so did I but there wasn’t any wind. What a disappointment.
Out came the battery drill, I wish I had charged it up but here goes, now the chuck is too small to hold a 19mm socket to turn the blades. OK, I’ve cobbled something up & it looks bad but the drill is now connected to a 19mm socket, it made 2 turns of the turbine & the battery ran out. The anticipation is killing me, the drill is on charge & I’ve resorted to spinning the turbine by hand, it puts out between 2 & 30v depending on how fast I spin it, not so easy to hook up the meters how I want so I’m leaving the current to later. I crudely connected a car bulb & it glows which at least is something to show my wife which is better than a meter. I’ll carry out some proper testing when the battery or the wind is more powerful.
Here are some initial results at very low RPM:
At 37 RPM it produced 3.5v & 1A shorted out. So now I wait for the wind, actually I may need to move it to be able to get any decent wind but that can be done later.
Well I guess that is success, I made power & it took a couple of days less than my goal of 2 weeks which wasn’t too bad seeing as I’m not spending whole days on this but it's not over yet.
I still have to sort out a better mounting position, but what I want to make next is the charging controller.
I picked up all the parts I needed relatively painlessly, or used alternative parts that I already had, but for the most part I used the info from this link to build it: http://www.mdpub.com/555Controller/
Actually this web site was what first captured my interest in the whole idea so thank you Mike Davis for your inspiration & great ability to convey some of that information to the rest of us. It’s only a coincidence but my father is also called Mike Davis & he taught me most of the skills I have now, thanks dad.
Anyway, enough of all that sentimental rubbish, let’s build a charge controller, I’m going to follow Mikes info tomorrow & see how I go.
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