Wind turbine brake control

[Gareth J]

Can confirm that the brake will fire if 9v batteries are getting tired. As you mention, I suspect it's a failsafe. A cheap test will be to probe the board to check there is strong (18+??) voltage where it should be. Or, as it's currently vertical, the output of the battery box.

I may possibly need to lower ours again this year to alter something so let us know if you want any pictures/measurements and I'll factor that in. Though it's currently running nicely at full chat 5kW so hopefully not.

Regarding tweaking potentiometers, this ought to be done on the bench, or at least with the turbine lowered, as it's impossible to do running. So work out what voltage should be seen at the inputs and replicate that on the bench. Ideally via something variable, so you can dial in the cut out voltage.

As your three phase wiring will be going all the way into the rectifier before your inverters, you can simply measure the voltage between phases there to get an idea of where the cut out should be.

Say it's 150VAC, an AC generator + variac around that voltage will help a lot. Maybe. Again, pushing the limit of my electrics knowledge but should be doable.

But yes, change te 9Vs as a matter of course. If they've been at all busy firing relays, they tire pretty quickly.

The tape will not go round compound curves.
Never tried cutting as all our use is strait runs and wrap round leading edge
The 500 blades are running at high fps

Yeah, makes sense. Given the length of heli blades, the tips must be moving some. I'd estimate the turbine spins at roughly 3Hz, so at 2.5m radius, that would make the tips going at maybe approaching 50m/s which is a fair lick too and explains the wear.

If the tape is the same as the 3M stuff I've seen sold online at £25/m it would definitely need to be cut down as it's 100mm wide! And not unreasonable at that price really, if it did the job. A 3cm strip of 30cm X3 would be ample and it would need to taper to just a couple cm at the thin end, to give any chance of success going around the tip it seems.

If you can find out if it cuts ok with scissors or a Stanley blade, that would be interesting. Does it have a backing sheet, like aluminium foil tape does? What about removal? It wouldn't be a great expense to get a roll in for next year to try. Anything to minimise downtime as when it's down, it's very vulnerable to rain pooling and running into the main bearing.

 

[Brad93]

5kw seems fairly good from a wind turbine, any pictures/ideas of size.

Do you need planning?

Looking at solar for workshop to do what @pressbrake has done

 

[Islander71]

5kw seems fairly good from a wind turbine, any pictures/ideas of size.

Do you need planning?

Looking at solar for workshop to do what @pressbrake has done

Yes its a useful amount of power. And yes you do need planning. You also need a windy site preferably without obstructions to give a steady wind. The turbine has 3 blades 8ft long and is on top of a 10m steel pipe guyed tower.
This Iskra turbine is no longer made, but his is the current descendent of it - https://www.britwind.co.uk/products/

 

[Gareth J]

5kw seems fairly good from a wind turbine, any pictures/ideas of size.

Do you need planning?

Looking at solar for workshop to do what @pressbrake has done

Both @Islander71 and I have earlier versions of this;

H5 (R9000) 5kW horizontal axis wind turbine | Britwind

H1 Horizontal axis 1kW wind turbine

www.britwind.co.uk

A competitor of its era was/is the "Proven" 6kW. Both have pros-cons.

There were plenty of both still spinning in the Outer Hebrides when I went a few years ago but unfortunately, planning moratorium on onshore wind and scrapping of the feed in tarriffs killed the industry just about overnight.

I've no idea about planning now, a couple years ago the English restrictions were such that no viable sites could be used. Labour were supposed to have eased things a bit but I don't know if that's worked in practice. Don't even consider permitted development, the proximity to house and height restrictions will leave you with a very expensive garden ornament.

I think the sad truth is that now, it's more cost effective to generate with solar and invest in batteries to time shift usage to off peak than generate with small scale wind. Maybe some very specific sites could make sense.

 

[gaz1]

planning permission might be different on other turbines compared to the windmill style

or on a spinning pole turbine

theres now these

 

[500e]

Sorry @Brad should have been in the levels thread

https://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/the-levels.133254/page-6#post-2497608

 

[Gareth J]

planning permission might be different on other turbines compared to the windmill style

or on a spinning pole turbine

theres now these

View attachment 467837View attachment 467838View attachment 467839

Vertical axis turbines are, as I understand it, fundamentally rubbish.

If anyone is considering buying any generation bit of kit, it's probably sensible to stick to ones that provide real world experimental test data. In terms of wind turbines, that'll include a windspeed Vs power chart. You see plenty advertised with none.

 

[Brad93]

I've always fancied having a go at making something to be honest.

 

[julianthegypsy]

I've always fancied having a go at making something to be honest.

There's a great organisation called V3 who have a ton of information. I've watched them build a self governing 400 watt turbine out of basically old pallets, including doing all the windings and setting them in resin. Their name comes from the formula for working out power to winds peed, which I forget, but includes V³, which explains why wind turbines work much better when it's very windy, a point they stress very heavily!

 

[Erie Fred]

planning permission might be different on other turbines compared to the windmill style

or on a spinning pole turbine

theres now these

View attachment 467839

mechanix illustrated 1975-80 ish.
Whole top of the house, was hidden and could take wind at any direction.

 

[gaz1]

i like the edge of buildings turbines and for many of us our own way to produce electricity not just solar
now i know this has been tested already

https://26011849.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/26011849/Aeromine%20Website/downloads/Aeromine%20cut%20sheet%20231004.pdf

 

[Gareth J]

I've always fancied having a go at making something to be honest.

Hugh Piggot is a bit of a DIY turbine guru. By accounts, his designs work well, which is more than can be said for a lot of offtge shelf stuff.

Hugh Piggott's blog | Scoraig Wind Electric News

I don't know if you could mount it on a trailer with a load of ballast for stability that you could then move periodically, to get around planning? If you were cunning, could even make it a tipping mechanism to allow for raising/lowering. You'd need some very heavy plant kit to achieve that with a ~5kW unit though.

I wouldn't even consider bolting anything with rotating parts onto a dwelling.

 

[Brad93]

Hugh Piggot is a bit of a DIY turbine guru. By accounts, his designs work well, which is more than can be said for a lot of offtge shelf stuff.

Hugh Piggott's blog | Scoraig Wind Electric News

I don't know if you could mount it on a trailer with a load of ballast for stability that you could then move periodically, to get around planning? If you were cunning, could even make it a tipping mechanism to allow for raising/lowering. You'd need some very heavy plant kit to achieve that with a ~5kW unit though.

I wouldn't even consider bolting anything with rotating parts onto a dwelling.

Wouldn't be bolting it to any buildings.

Space isnt an issue there's 3 acres with only fields surrounding and road frontage where i'm thinking a test unit could be situated.

5kw does seem to take a very large blade diameter to achieve. Maybe i'll aim for 1kw and see what happens.

 

[minimutly]

Hugh Piggot is a bit of a DIY turbine guru. By accounts, his designs work well, which is more than can be said for a lot of offtge shelf stuff.

Hugh Piggott's blog | Scoraig Wind Electric News

I don't know if you could mount it on a trailer with a load of ballast for stability that you could then move periodically, to get around planning? If you were cunning, could even make it a tipping mechanism to allow for raising/lowering. You'd need some very heavy plant kit to achieve that with a ~5kW unit though.

I wouldn't even consider bolting anything with rotating parts onto a dwelling.

An old lighting plant is perfect - it even has a kubota engine and 240V generator for emergencies. I scrapped a few a couple of years ago, kept the tower part of it for a 1kW wind project. It will need guys that tension correctly as it gets to the top, but I fully expect it will be fine.

 

[brightspark]

anyone remember the crap b and q were selling to put on your house . was more like a kids windmill they stopped selling them as the quoted saving a 3d on your leccy bill need a bit one to do that

 

[Gareth J]

Maybe i'll aim for 1kw and see what happens.

Is it very exposed there?
There are better resources but as a rough guide,

Where are the windiest parts of the UK?

The windest places in the UK have been recorded at the top of mountains, usually in the west of the country.

www.metoffice.gov.uk

With a low mean annual average average theres just not a lot of wind to collect.

As a sensible proxy, if you can see loads of commercial turbines from there, you're probably in a decent site.

 

[Gareth J]

Apologies for derailing this thread @Islander71 fingers crossed that a new set of 9vs make a difference....

 

[gaz1]

with me id be trying the old windmill water pump its tried and tested for years much better than the wind turbines and still working to this day
heres a 1910 one

 

[Gareth J]

with me id be trying the old windmill water pump its tried and tested for years much better than the wind turbines and still working to this day
heres a 1910 one

I think most people put more value on kWh of electricity than a cattle trough of water drawn out from underground. Well designed wind turbines are optimised to do this. Well designed wind pumps are optimised to do that.

 

[Islander71]

The ultimate for having your own energy source in my view is hydro power. I have both a 3.8Kw solar array plus the 5Kw wind turbine which combined produce a very useful amount of electricity, but the output of both is very variable. The pv panels can produce nothing on a cloudy overcast mid-winters day to 25 Kwhr mid summer on a sunny day, and obviously produce max around midday and nothing at night. The wind turbine is in theory able to produce 120 KwHr/day, and on 1 occasion it has produced 90KwHr, but it can also go for days producing nothing. Over a year it averages out at about 18KwHr/day here on a fairly windy Scottish island a mile from the coast and near the top of a rise. Having said that it is not ideally sited, being too close to a cliff edge and having a growing wood not far away, which both disrupt wind flow. The pv panels average about 9KwHr/day over a year. Again not perfectly sited, the direction is good at SSW, but they are on the workshop roof which is at a 22* pitch, I think ideally here they should be at about 55* pitch - or better still the angle changed through winter to summer. In mid-winter here probably close to vertical - an easy test for perfect alignment is on a sunny day to stand a beer can on the panel - it should cast no shadow.
I knew a farmer here who put in a 1Kw water turbine, the turbine itself was about the size of a smallish bucket, it did have a long pipe run to get sufficient head, but it just outputted an almost constant 1Kw, so nearly 24KwHr/day, every day. If you had a 3 or 4 Kw one you could probably go completely off-grid.