Monday, August 09, 2010

Wind Generator - It's Spinning!!



Believe IT OR NOT!! IT WORKS!! I think I still have some "tweaking" to do, but it does work! She's about 25 or so feet in the air.  I have it "strapped" to my old CB antennae pushup pole. Of course we are still in the "getting to know" stage, and we are starting out with just 1 battery.  The windmill has a built-in diode, so the power can only come down from the windmill and not back up.  If it went back up, the battery would power the windmill and eventually would drain the battery.  Batteries are the "bunk" of the setup, it's where the "meat" is.  I just went down to Rural King and picked out one, it's a Marine Deep Cycle battery.  You need something that can take a charge and discharge and a recharge several times.  It's not a starting battery, they have hight cranking amps and then they drop off..you need a battery that has high amp hours.  These are SUPER expensive!! Well at least they are when considering STU's pocket! Eventually, I think I would like a total of 10 batteries in the battery bank? I would like to purchase a kilowatt device to determine how much wattage is needed. With the Killowatt, I can see how much the whole house will need OR at least find out what the "survival essentials" will be, in order to out last the next extended power outage. The ultimate goal (probably not achievable on my cash flow) is to get off the grid and stay off the grid.  See that wire that's kind of hanging there, I'm going to have to ask some folks how they routed theirs down the pipe?  My neighbors think it would "do" better if I had that cord came down the pipe..so that's what we're going to try and do.  Also, I think it's NOT in the ideal spot for our location, we have a "mole windmill" (it's supposed to run off moles, I got it to look at, observe, and study how a windmill works) now of course the mole windmill doesn't have any load on it, but it spins 90 to 95% of the time, so I may take the windmill down and move it to the spot where the mole windmill is.  The 1" conduit is 10 feet long, so I would still be up off of the ground abit, but to move into this spot will require me to learn how and to build a stand for it.  I've seen some pictures see below...
That doesn't look too difficult, maybe!   But I was wondering if I could put a 90 degree angle on the end with another 4" to 6" pipe going down, so I guess then each end would look like a 7, and the long part of the 7 would be in the ground.  I need something super strong, and super steady, because I don't have room to put up guide wires... For now, I am still in the "thinking" stage, it takes me a while to move from the "thinking" stage to the design stage.  I think this design will work, I'm sure I will have to alter it somewhat to "fit" my application.  But for the most part, I think it's coming together...For the next couple of weekends, I am going to try and complete my 200 can solar heat collector   STAY TUNED...
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